Mexicans and Mexican Americans contributed in many ways to the United States’ war effort during World War II. About 19% of all Mexican Americans signed up for the armed forces; nearly 17,000 Mexican Americans in Los Angeles worked in the area’s shipyards, airfields, and armaments factories. So many Mexican American women helped build ships that people coined the local nickname “Rosita the Riveter.” The bracero program arranged for thousands of agricultural workers to come to the United States. To encourage participation and cooperation, the Office of War Information issued this poster in 1943. Despite the government’s message of unity, this was around the time of the infamous zoot suit riots, when white workers and sailors in Los Angeles roamed the city attacking Mexican American and African American youths wearing distinctive pachuco clothing.

Alvaro Hernández, the son of an agricultural labor and teacher from Chihuahua, Mexico, first came to the United States as an undocumented worker at age 14.  His first job was picking cotton in New Mexico.  Though the work was hard, he loved earning dollars to bring back to Mexico.  After several turns as an undocumented worker, he decided to enter the bracero program in 1946.

Mr. Hernández’s story was recorded in an oral history interview for the Bracero Archive in 2003.  He recalls reporting to the central Trocadero in Chihuahua where his and other potential braceros’ hands were checked for callouses to ensure that they were familiar with manual labor.  Before entering the United States, he was stripped naked and doused with powder to prevent the spread of lice.

We recently used Mr. Hernández’s and other bracero oral histories to teach a group of ESL/ELL teachers the history of bracero labor on the United States homefront during World War II.  Though the bracero program lasted until 1964, the day focused on the causes and effects of new groups of workers entering the labor force in the war years.  As with all of our Teaching American History seminars, we presented background information and primary documents, then modeled a classroom activity that engages learners with the sources and content.  On this day teachers worked in groups to write a corrido based on oral histories from the Bracero Archive.  Teachers used one of six translated and excerpted oral histories and followed the basic formulas and rhyme schemes outlined in María Herrera-Sobek’s Northward Bound: The Mexican Immigrant Experience in Ballad and Song (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993).  We challenged our teachers to write their corridos in English and at least one other language.

read more…

A recent New York Times article profiled a handful of notable African-American men and women who had grown up on a particular Harlem block, Edgecombe Avenue at 155^th Street in the area of the neighborhood once known as “Sugar Hill.” During the 1920s and 1930s, the logic of racial segregation insured that black luminaries (such as Duke Ellington, W.E.B. DuBois, Lena Horne, Aaron Douglas) occupied the same blocks as working- and middle-class families, and this article details the impact that such an environment had on some of the community’s young people. One of them was musician Roy Eaton, who became a child piano prodigy despite suffering a finger accident as a toddler. It was how he injured his finger that caught my attention, though. According to the Times, “He was slipping a piece of paper under the bathroom door, imitating the men evicting his neighbors in 1933, when it suddenly opened and mangled a finger.” Maybe it’s because I have two young children who engage in such pretend play on a daily basis, but this brief detail struck me as a particularly evocative snapshot of how children experienced the Great Depression. It reminded me of how much of human experience eludes historians, and made me wonder about how children today are experiencing and processing the crises afflicting the adults in their worlds.

The last few weeks here at ASHP we’ve been reading Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Drivin‘ Man John Henry: The Untold Story of an American Legend. The book does a fine job using John Henry’s life story as a background to discuss injustice in the South during reconstruction, but I’ll leave that to my colleagues to talk about. I’m going to briefly talk about the other narrative within the story, and that is the narrative of folk music.

Dr. Nelson makes liberal use of lyric to tell parts of the story, by telling variation after variation on the John Henry song:

“Like the rocks these little songs were chipped down by regular use, repeated with tiny variations, until they took the shape of black America’s folk poetry.” -p. 76

John Henry’s ballad was not set in stone, but free to evolve; free to tell the tales of poor whites in Kentucky as well as poor rail workers in Virginia. Some variations of Steel Workin’ Man took on the ballad form, a staple of Anglo-American song which dates back to the 16th century whereas others had more in common with spirituals or even as organizational songs to coordinate the stroke of a hammer on the line.

Perhaps the tragedy of folk music was the notion of copyright and ownership which befell many of these classic songs. Whereas old American folk music staples like “House of the Rising Sun” or “Wayfaring Stranger” had meandered from person to person through oral tradition through practically limitless variations, music is unable to follow this same path anymore. For example The Animal’s version of “House of the Rising Sun” has become the de-facto standard, though many variations exist from with the song told from the perspective of a woman.

Modern music rarely is given the same flexibility. A child today can listen to the same recording and same Beatles song that his mother and father listened to forty years ago. Covers are uncommon, due to royalty payments and many coffee shops will go so far as implore budding singer-songwriters to not play any covers on their stage. Writers are not re-interpreting Britney Spears to make her more valid to their own lives. J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye has had its relevance questioned due to the fact the narrative adolescents are reading has not changed in fifty years.

I’m not proposing that all copyright law be turned on its head; however, I think that Dr. Nelson’s book draws attention to our modern folk culture and draws awe by showing how one song could endure over so many groups and people over so many years and have its relevance to their lives go unquestioned.

Sit-in at Woolworth lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi, May 28, 1963

Fifty years ago today, four African-American college students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University walked into the Woolworth’s department store in downtown Greensboro, sat at the lunch counter, and asked to be served. It was a powerful new milestone in the black freedom struggle, another signpost along a road littered with them, that pointed toward the dismantling of the legal basis for racial segregation in the U.S. The sit-in movement spread rapidly across the South, and during the winter and spring of 1960 at least 70,000 people, most of them African Americans, participated in sit-ins in more than one hundred cities.

Media accounts, and many histories, attribute the speed with which the lunch counter sit-ins caught on to the moral authority of the calm, well-dressed, polite students and the power of the mass media that spread their image far and wide, shocking the nation and the world. True enough. But there is a compelling case to be made that the sit-ins also spread like wildfire because the embers of the tactic had already been burning among black college students for nearly two decades.

According to a 1944 article in The Crisis by activist and attorney Pauli Murray, starting in the winter of 1943, students at Howard University staged their own sit-ins. It began with a handful of students acting independently. Three young women who, when finally served the hot chocolates they had ordered at a segregated lunch counter, refused to pay the 25 cents they were charged for drinks that ordinarily cost a dime, and were hauled off to prison as a result. Ruth Powell, who would sit for hours, unserved, at local lunch counters, staring at the waitresses who denied her service just to unnerve the restaurant’s management. And then there was William Raines, who urged whoever would listen to apply the logic of the “don’t buy where you can’t work” boycotts of the 1930s to lunch counters: “Let’s go downtown some lunch hour when they’re crowded. They’re open to the public. We’ll take a seat on a lunch stool, and if they don’t serve us, we’ll just sit there and read our books. They lose trade while that seat is out of circulation. If enough people occupy seats they’ll lose so much trade they’ll start thinking.”

Such scattered impulses coalesced into an organized campus movement, a Civil Rights Committee with subcommittees for publicity, legislative action, correspondence, finance, and direct action. The direct action subcommittee quickly identified stores and restaurants near the university that catered to whites only and selected their first target: the Little Palace Cafeteria. Murray describes what happened next:

The direct action sub-committee spent a week studying the disorderly conduct and picketing laws of D.C. They spent hours threshing out the pros and cons of public conduct, anticipating and preparing for the reactions of the white public, the Negro public, white customers and the management. They pledged themselves to exemplary behavior  no matter what the provocation. And one rainy Saturday afternoon in April, they started out. In groups of four, with one student acting as an ‘observer’ on the outside, they approached the cafe. Three went inside and requested service. Upon refusal they took their seats and pulled out magazines, books of poetry, or pencils and pads. They sat quietly. Neither the manager’s panicky efforts to dismiss them nor the presence of a half dozen policemen outside could dislodge them.

More groups of students entered the cafeteria at five minute intervals until the management closed it forty-five minutes later. The students responded by picketing on the sidewalk outside, carrying signs asking “We die together–Why Can’t We Eat Together?” After two days of pickets, the Little Palace Cafeteria changed its policy.

A year later, Howard students staged a similar protest at a Thompson’s cafeteria in downtown Washington, initially with similar results: “When 55 of them, including 6 Negro members of the Armed Forces, had taken seats at the tables, and the Thompson’s trade had dropped 50 percent in four hours, the management, after frantic calls to its main office in Chicago, was ordered to serve them.” Before the students could negotiate with Thompson’s management, however, nervous university administrators—knowing the havoc an irate congressman could wreak upon their funding—intervened and requested the students to “cease all activities designed to accomplish social reform affecting institutions other than Howard University itself.”

What the Howard University students began, their elders in Washington’s African-American community continued. In 1950, local activists formed the Coordinating Committee for the Enforcement of the D. C. Anti-Discrimination Laws (CCEAD), with Mary Church Terrell as chairperson. Even though the city did not have official segregation laws on the books, it took concerted pressure on local businesses to provide equal access to customers of all races. Where direct action failed, a lawsuit (District of Columbia v. John Thompson) against the Thompson’s cafeteria finally succeeded, in 1953. (For more on the CCEAD, see  Beverly W. Jones, “Before Montgomery and Greensboro: The Desegregation Movement in the District of Columbia, 1950-1953,” Phylon, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1982), pp. 144-154.)

Let us pause this morning to tip our hats to two writers who died yesterday. Their books couldn’t have been further apart from each other in style and subject matter: one scrutinized society at the top, the other championed the stories of those on the bottom.

Tales of Manhattan, a short story collection by Louis Auchincloss, published in 1967.

Louis Auchincloss was born in 1917 into the ranks of New York’s highest society and went on to both fulfill and unveil its norms and expectations. Alongside a long career as a trusts and estates lawyer, he also wrote numerous novels and short stories, the best of which left readers with memorable characters and a clear-eyed accounting of the manners and morals of the WASP axis that stretched from the Upper East Side through New England. Auchincloss embodied old New York, with a regal bearing and distinctive accent; to hear him speak (as I did at a Gotham Center event years ago) was to be transported to an earlier time.

The most recent edition of Howard Zinn's influential book.

The career of Howard Zinn, born five years later across the East River in Brooklyn, took him first to a PhD in History from Columbia and then to the faculties of Spelman College and Boston University, where he urged his students to social activism and mightily irritated university administrators. He published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, a single volume that told a radically different story of U.S. history than traditional textbooks did at the time. If the broad strokes and unabashed romanticization of working-class struggle that characterize A People’s History make many historians wince (ASHP’s own Who Built America? textbook, for example, deliberately offers a more warts-and-all telling of similar stories), the book has been hugely influential in bringing social history to people who tuned out of boring high school history classes. Over and over again, when I tell someone what I do for a living, their eyes light up and they tell me about reading A People’s History.

The recently launched Zinn Education Project website is a useful companion site for the book, with materials and teaching suggestions.

Among the projects of the education team at ASHP/CML is the development of an online database of history resources for educators.  Although the launch of the database is several months off, we recently conducted a survey of educators to find out more about how they use the web to find resources for their classrooms.  We were curious to know about what kinds of web-based technology teachers had access to, what sorts of materials they look for online, and what they generally do with what they find online.  We collected 228 responses from 38 states and the District of Columbia.  (By the way, thank  you to those of you on our mailing lists who took the time to complete the survey or to pass it along to colleagues.)

Our educators came from a variety of educational settings: traditional middle school and high school US history teachers, elementary (and even one pre-K!) teachers, college and university educators, administrators, museum educators, and academic support staff within school districts or buildings.  About a quarter of our teachers self-identified as teachers of special education and/or ESL/ELL (English-as-a-Second Language/English-Language-Learners).  Most of our respondents teach in urban or suburban public schools.

Broadly speaking, our first few questions asked teachers what they look for on the web.  The vast majority are looking for primary sources and background information (67% and 65% respectively).  Access to LCD projectors for displaying presentations, images, or video is almost universal (only 4% reported not having access), and there were no glaring disparities among teachers who teach at urban, suburban, or rural schools, or those who teach in public versus private schools.  We found that while many teachers do not have access to Smartboards (39%), those who do have Smartboards use them at least once a week (31%).  We were pleasantly surprised to learn that many educators look for streaming audio and video materials, and that most teachers have some sort of access for presenting such materials to their students.  Perhaps not surprisingly, ESL/ELL and special education teachers were most likely to use streaming audio and video, suggesting that they try to deliver content in different media to reach different types of learners.

We were gratified to learn that a whopping 61% of our educators use arts and/or literature resources in their history classrooms daily or at least once a week!  Rates among ESL and elementary teachers were even higher (71% and 76%).  Both our Making Connections seminars and the PUSH forum focus on the importance of using interdisciplinary resources and methods to understand and teach the past, and we will continue to feature our arts and literature resources in our workshops, online forums, and in the forthcoming resource database.

Here are a few of our other findings:

• How teachers search for history materials differs by the level they teach.  High school teachers prefer to search by historical era (Antebellum America, The Progressive Era), middle school teachers tend to search by keyword (Dorothea Dix, Boston Massacre), and elementary teachers primarily search by theme (women, African Americans)
• Middle school teachers are most likely to shorten a document; to me this indicates that they are committed to using primary sources, but have difficulty finding items that work for their students’ reading levels and attention spans.
• Educators were largely uninterested in social networking features such as rating resources, leaving comments, or viewing how others have modified resources.  Special education teachers were somewhat more interested in sharing how they adapt materials and seeing how others use a resource, which makes sense given that many history education resources probably do not work “as is” in their classrooms.
• Teachers prefer materials that they can modify to meet their needs.  This finding backs up what teachers told us in a focus group: they tend to skim lesson plans and activity instructions for ideas rather than use them wholesale, they like to add their own questions to primary sources.
• Teachers did not report much use of games with their students.  I’d like to know more.  Do teachers not see the value in games?  Do they regard games as play, rather than learning?  Or are they simply unable to find pedagogically and academically sound games to help their students learn history?

Gosh, I could go on about survey data forever (just ask my colleagues)…  If you want to know more or if this data could help you or your organization better plan for the needs of history educators, don’t hesitate to contact me.

I know, it’s a bit belated to be posting a New Year’s post in mid-January, but given the hectic beginning of the year it’s been I thought today would be a good time to mention a few exciting things going on at ASHP.

Work begins in earnest on the “Resource Database” (title TBD). We’ve surveyed a range of college professors, community college instructors, elementary, middle and high school teachers as well as support staff. We’ve held some discussions with our Teacher American History teachers and we’ve received some  incredible feedback. We think we’re on the right track for building a pretty incredible tool that will use CHNM’s OMEKA as the backend framework.  We’ll be occasionally posting updates from the development process as it progresses.

A small group of us have been working in collaboration with a group in North Carolina on how to use mobile technologies to present engaging history content to young people at small museums in rural North Carolina. The meetings have been speculative and bold addressing issues ranging from accessibility to mobile technology and class and new technologies like “Augmented Reality.”

The staff at ASHP is reading Scott Reynolds Nelson’s Steel Driving Man: John Henry for our bimonthly staff reading, and we’ve just finished watching some compelling documentaries as well such as Food Inc., where we discussed to under-discussed role of labor in the nation’s food system and Banished: American Ethnic Cleansings, where we discussed the role of monument and memory in affected towns.

I can hardly hope to elucidate in full all of the exciting things that we’re currently working on staff wide for the new year, but I hope that everyone has a wonderful 2010, and we hope you’ll stay tuned to ASHP this year as we work on some more exciting projects.

Via the usual tortuous, hyperlinked route, I came across this creation by the right-wing parodist who goes by the mono-moniker Dale. Dale’s work, at least stylistically speaking, suggests a wedding of the late, maniacal Mad pioneer Will Elder with the only slightly more sedate contemporary caricaturist Drew Friedman—but with none of the inventiveness or originality that characterize their work.

In Dale’s vision, former Republican Alaska governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is the latter-day embodiment of “Rosie the Riveter,” the generic name for the millions of women who entered war production during the Second World War, which was most popularly portrayed in the iconic Norman Rockwell painting that first appeared on the May 24, 1943 cover of the Saturday Evening Post.

Although Rockwell based his Rosie on a real person, a nineteen-year-old Arlington, Vermont, telephone operator named Mary Doyle (to whom he later apologized for adding heft to her apparently slender figure), Rockwell’s Rosie was clearly an archetype. Dale situates his Sarah in an America “arguably in peril from forces potentially as destructive as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,” but—putting aside the sloppiness of the historical comparison—despite the title (evoking the Latin phrase Si vis pacem, parati para bellum: “If you wish for peace, prepare for war,” or more concisely “Peace through Strength”), that analogy is not apparent without explanation.  And Dale’s attempt to associate a historically-specific symbol with a fuzzily-defined current political figure only makes the meaning of this new version more obscure.

Dale seems to have understood this problem, at least in so far as he’s poured on the symbolism. Indeed, to compensate, his Sarah is what you might call symbolicallly overdetermined.  She’s laden with enough right-wing tchotchkes to, well, sink a battleship: death panel beer (or is it soda—some particularly virulent form of diet soda?), a crucifix, right to life and Reagan buttons, a shotgun, ammo, a bible, and a rattlesnake that mimics the original composition but is really the straw that breaks the symbol’s back.  Finally, Dale provides two phallic images (shotgun and snake) for Rockwell’s one (rivet gun)—and replaces Rosie’s coveralls, which might incriminate Sarah as a feminist or worse.

Whatever you think about this “homage,” Dale’s dedication to asserting the backward nature of his political perspective is most evident in his exact duplication of the American flag as it appeared in Norman Rockwell’s painting: one that in 1943, displaying 48 stars for 48 states, did not include Alaska.

Fela! on Broadway

Despite a babysitter snafu, I managed to attend Fela!, playing at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, on Saturday night. And boy am I glad I did. Directed by the choreographer Bill T. Jones, the show, about the life of Afrobeat pioneer Fela Anikulapo–Kuti, features the tightest band this side of James Brown and an ensemble of dancers whose performances defy all notions of anatomy and gravity. The magnetic Sahr Ngaujah, who barely leaves the stage, performed the role of Fela (he alternates the role with Kevin Mambo). The scenic design and projections are fantastically layered and effective, and together with the ensemble members’ frequent sojourns into the aisles, break down the proscenium and draw the audience into the action. But what is most remarkable about Fela! is that this superb showmanship is deployed in the service of a story that encompasses anti-colonial politics, the corrupting influences of international corporations, black nationalism, the brutality of repressive Nigerian dictatorships, and African spirit worship. The Lion King it ain’t.

Kuti, the son of an Anglican minister father and anti-colonial activist mother, melded African rhythms with the western pop and jazz music he encountered as a medical student in London in the late 1950s to create Afrobeat, an infectious world music style that gave him international recognition. He was also an outspoken critic of several repressive Nigerian governments, which landed him in jail on more than 200 occasions. If the idea of a sequence describing and re-enacting a stay in a Nigerian prison seems like a cruel joke of an idea in a Broadway musical, rest assured that in Fela! it is not.

Fela was a talented, brave, and complicated man, and in the service of narrative drive the show inevitably flattens out his story in places and suggests but does not dwell on some of his less heroic characteristics. But it conveys so much that will be new to most American audiences, in such a compelling theatrical experience, that I am both dazed at the thought that it made it to Broadway at all and optimistic that it will settle in for a successful run there.

For those of you familiar with our work, you probably know about our K-12 education programs and our professional development work. We’re now working on bringing that work into a publicly accessible resource database. I won’t ramble on about all of the technical details (which I could), but thought it might be an interesting platform to talk about where we are.

Currently we’re interviewing teachers to see how they use primary documents, worksheets, focus questions and the like to see if we can use our database to perhaps fulfill a niche. It seems to use that there’s a lot of great resources out there that accomplish parts of the goal, but not the whole thing. For example, the National Parks site, courtesy of PBS allows teachers to make a page highlighting passages from primary documents and images creating a “scrapbook” page. Kind of fun, and an interesting application, but hardly provides a full educational framework.  The Monticello classroom allows teachers to create a webpage which amalgamates resources and activities in a centralized place, allowing students to go through and perform activities in a certain order or view documents. Though its important to emphasize the way teachers can make content their own, we have to figure out how people find the resources we have, and Calisphere’s search features provide alternatives for “search based” users and “theme based” users: truly the best of both worlds.

Right now, we’re collecting some data and trying to combine two things we do well: professional development and web implementations of history, and try to make the “killer app.” I know, a lofty goal, but we think we can pull it off.

If you’re a teacher, or just interested in history on the web, we invite you to fill out our survey, and stay tuned to Now and Then and our site for future updates on the Resource Database.