News

Epidemics in U.S. History

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States and around the world leaves many of us seeking ways to place the pandemic in historical context. The American Social History Project has compiled a list of resources to assist students, teachers, and the general public in understanding past epidemics and connect this knowledge to the present situation. We have also generated discussion questions. Please share this site widely, and check back as we plan to update and expand the collection.

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Anne Valk | Executive Director

avalk@gc.cuny.edu
212.817.1969

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Monuments of the Future, with Kubi Ackerman

Published January 22, 2020

This episode features Kubi Ackerman, then-Director of the Future City Lab at the Museum of the City of New York. Ackerman is not interested in monuments for the past, but instead asks how we might memorialize the present and the future, as well as send warnings or messages to future generations. Encompassing topics like socio-economic inequality and the climate crisis, Ackerman and the Future City Lab help us challenge conventional notions of monuments and develop participatory exhibitions about urban futures.

This episode features audio from the program “Monuments of the Future: Alternative Approaches," held on February 6, 2019, in...Read full description

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Augmented Reality As Memorialization, with Marisa Williamson

Published December 11, 2019

This episode features Marisa Williamson, a multimedia artist based in Newark, New Jersey whose site-specific works, videos, and performances focus on the body, authority, freedom, and memory. Speaking during the third and final event in our public seminar series, “Difficult Histories/Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in New York City and the Nation,” Williamson details her work on “Sweet Chariot,” a smartphone-based, augmented-reality tour of Philadelphia’s spaces of black freedom struggle. By inviting the viewer to interact and engage with this history, Williamson opens new doors for alternative approaches to monuments and memorialization.

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July 2020—NEH Summer Institute on the Visual Culture of the Civil War and Its Aftermath

Published December 9, 2019

This July, the American Social History Project will once again host a two-week NEH Summer Institute for college and university faculty on the Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath.

The fifth iteration of our institute will focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction era's array of visual media--including prints, photographs, cartoons, illustrated newspapers and magazines, maps, ephemera, and the fine arts. The institute will examine how information and opinion about the war and its aftermath was recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans' understanding, North and South, free and enslaved. Guided by a team...Read more

Institute Faculty 2023

Principal Faculty

Joshua Brown is professor of history emeritus and former executive director of the American Social History Project at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a noted scholar of visual culture in U.S.

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2021 Schedule and Syllabus

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Announcing ASHP/CML’s New Executive Director

Published October 2, 2019

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Anne Valk has been named to succeed Dr. Joshua Brown as ASHP/CML’s new executive director and as a professor of history with a focus on public history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Valk brings to her new position extensive expertise in oral history and digital media projects as well as years of public humanities administrative experience, most recently at Williams College. Altogether they reflect her innovative ideas, commitment to public history, and ability to incorporate public history into graduate education. Her published works have focused on U.S. women's and social history, including...Read more