Public Programs

January 29, 2021

We are pleased to announce that Humanities New York has awarded ASHP/CML a grant of $5,000 for Spaces, Places, and Faces: Exploring Queer Public History. The grant will be used to research and develop a podcast series that looks at how the work of historians, activists, educators, and archivists have preserved and reclaimed the telling of LGBTQ+ history. ASHP/CML will produce two episodes to air in fall 2021 and script four additional episodes in the series.

Spaces, Places, and Faces builds on ASHP/CML’s recent work with the New York City Depatment of Education developing LGBTQ+ curriculum for grades 4-12. The podcasts are designed for a broad public audience of classroom educators, school administrators, parents, humanities scholars, activists, archivists, and public historians. It will also be of interest to LGBTQ+ people looking to understand the public history happening in their communities as well as to those seeking to understand and integrate the work of Queer public historians into their own practice.

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Alice Austen House Museum, Staten Island, New York. Photographer: Blindowlphotography via Wikimedia Commons

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Did you know that American Social History Project Podcast (ASHP Podcast) has published over eighty episodes? With topics ranging from slavery and anti-slavery imagery to women’s history and women’s activism, and to border, immigration and citizenship, ASHP Podcast has presented subjects of interest to teachers and the public.

Our podcast is drawn from ASHP’s public seminars and professional development programs with scholars, activists, and educators working in social and public history. In the latest podcast, humanities scholar Maryanne Trasciatti (Hofstra University) shares the work of the Remembering the Triangle Fire Coalition, which is leading the effort to build a public art memorial to the 146 victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911. The episode was recorded at ASHP’s public seminar, “Who Decides? The History and Future of Monument Creation in New York City,” held at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Subscribe and download episodes of ASHP Podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leave a review of the podcast, and subscribe to our biannual newsletter.

In partnership with The Gotham Center for New York City History and the CUNY Public History Collective, ASHP is hosting a series of public programs titled Difficult Histories/Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in New York City and the Nation. The series brings together historians, art historians, community activists, and artists to discuss the ongoing reevaluation of public monuments and memorials and to engage with audiences about the often controversial histories represented.

ASHP held the first event, Monuments as: History / Art / Power on June 13, 2018. The panel presented a case study of the former J. Marion Sims monument on Fifth Avenue and 104th Street, and examined the historical context of Sims’s medical research and experimentation on enslaved women, the modern East Harlem community response to his current memorialization, and future possibilities for remembering this difficult history.

The second event, Who Decides? The History and Future of Monument Creation in New York City will be held on October 9, 2018 and will discuss the history of monument creation, visions for new projects, and the current pressures on New York City agencies to respond to public opinion. Participants will include Michele Bogart, author of the new Sculpture in Gotham: Art and Urban Renewal In New York City; Mary Anne Trasciatti, President, “Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition;” Jack Tchen, Professor of Public History and the Humanities, Rutgers University; and will be moderated by Todd Fine, History Doctoral Candidate, CUNY Graduate Center, and advocate of the monument for “Little Syria.”

A third and final event, focused on alternative approaches to confronting and constructively addressing how difficult histories are memorialized in New York City and throughout the country, will be held on February 6, 2019. Further information will be posted closer to the date of the program.

All events are held in the Segal Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center and are free and open to the public. The series is made possible with funding from Humanities New York and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Visit https://ashp.cuny.edu/difficult-histories-public-spaces-series-public-programs to learn more about the upcoming programs.

Bridging Historias: Latino/a History and Culture in the Community College Classroom will culminate its two-year National Endowment for the Humanities-funded program with a one-day conference featuring top scholars and innovative pedagogy. This event, sponsored by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, comes at an opportune moment when much-needed attention is being given to the importance of community colleges and to the Latino community. In addition to a keynote address by Vicki Ruiz (Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine) on relevant recent scholarship, conference presenters will address institutional policies and pedagogical approaches that support Latino Studies curricula. We hope you can attend and join in this important conversation!

For the full program and registration see below or go to: Bridging Historias. Register today and arrive early.

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Historian Martha Biondi of Northwestern University will discuss her work on the Black Power movements on campuses across the country and the rise of African-American Studies programs. Her research includes case studies of several universities, including CUNY’s Brooklyn College. Thursday, April 30, 2015 6 – 8 pm, Skylight Room, 9th Floor of The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY.

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Bridging Historias: Latino/a History and Culture in the Community College Classroom
Friday, May 8, 2015 9:30 am – 5:00 pm
Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center, CUNY 365 Fifth Avenue, NYC

Since fall 2013, ASHP-CML has been working with thirty-eight community college faculty and administrators to assist them in incorporating material on Latino history and culture into their community college curricula. This project has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Join us for an exciting culminating full-day conference, in which we will hear from top scholars in the field, further our learning, and share classroom approaches and activities on this important topic. The keynote speaker will be Vicki Ruiz, Dean, School of Humanities, University of California, Irvine. Faculty participants will offer panels, roundtable discussions, workshops, and poster sessions. Bring your lessons, your curiosity, your creativity and join in this conversation.
Click here for full program and registration.

The history of the City University of New York and the championing of public higher education are the focus of a new initiative involving present and past CUNY faculty, staff, and students along with libraries, archives, and collections in and outside of the university. Coordinated by ASHP/CML, the CUNY Digital History Archive will collect the stories in text, sound, and image of the many events, people, and communities that have been critical to the university’s democratic mission. These materials will be made available to the public as an open access repository and also will direct users to valuable records and resources located at CUNY campuses.

A public program on Wednesday, April 9th, at 6:30 pm in the Martin Segal Theatre at the Graduate Center will mark the launch of the CUNY Digital History Archive. Featuring two roundtable discussions−”The Fight for Open Admissions and Its Early Implementation across CUNY, 1968-1976″ and “Student Activism and the Fight against State and City Cutbacks and Attacks, 1985-2014″−the event will involve activists in the struggle for and defense of Open Admissions from the late-1960s to the present, who will describe their experiences and offer insights about the past and its implications for the future. Please mark your calendars and check the ASHP/CML homepage in late February for details about this event.

Carlos Hernandez (Borough of Manhattan Community College) giving opening remarks at the CUNY Games Festival, held at the CUNY Graduate Center, January 17, 2014.

The first annual CUNY Games Festival, January 17-18, 2014, was a terrific success. One of the first academic conferences to explore game-based learning (GBL) in higher education, the two-day event attracted almost 200 registrants. Participants included faculty and students from 10 CUNY schools and dozens of universities and colleges across the country, along with game developers and other representatives from non-profit and for-profit technology sectors.

The first day of the conference, held at the CUNY Graduate Center, featured a full slate of presentations, “shorts,” posters, a game demo arcade, and a plenary session with John Black (Teachers College, Columbia University), Joey Lee (Teachers College, Columbia University), Anastasia Salter (University of Baltimore), and Eric Zimmerman (New York University). ASHP/CML’s Leah Potter presented “Truth is Where You Make It: Designing Historical Games” with co-presenter Carlos Hernandez (Borough of Manhattan Community College). Her presentation drew on experiences with the ongoing Channel 13 Mission US series for which ASHP/CML is the lead content developer. The second conference day, held at Borough of Manhattan Community College, was a game day during which participants playtested both commercial and educational tabletop/board games with guidance from game designers.

Game-based learning (GBL) refers to instructional practices that incorporate games with defined learning outcomes, or that adopt game learning principles over conventional pedagogies. Research shows the potential of GBL to foster student engagement and problem-solving, and to improve student performance across disciplines. While GBL is gradually gaining a foothold in colleges and universities, and attracting the attention of administrators, most of the public discourse and media spotlight on GBL is directed at the k-12 level, and much less so at higher education. The CUNY Games Festival fills this gap by focusing attention on the possibilities and challenges of integrating GBL in college classrooms, as well as the emerging field of game studies.

ASHP/CML was the primary sponsor of the event, which also received generous support from the CUNY Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative. The New Media Lab, Center for the Humanities, and Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program were also co-sponsors.

To learn more about the CUNY Games Festival, visit the conference website, or search Twitter for the hashtag #cgf2014.

Yankee Notions No. 2 The National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded a grant to ASHP/CML to host a two-week institute in July 2014 on the visual media of the American Civil War. Following on the heels of our successful summer 2012 institute, this second institute on “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War” will study the ways the war was recorded, reported, represented, and remembered via an unprecedented array of visual media that included the fine arts, photography, cartoons, and a range of “ephemeral”pictorial items and publications. Institute participants will work with a roster of leading scholars in the field and take part in hands-on sessions in local museums and archives as well as in new media lab workshops. Including sessions on photography of the war front and home front; painting the war; illustrated journalism; political cartoons; the image of slavery, antislavery, and emancipation; the cloth and clothing of war; women on the home front; ruined bodies and landscapes; and monuments and memory, institute activities will introduce the rich body of scholarship that addresses or incorporates Civil War era visual culture, encourage exploration for further research in the field, and assist participants in developing approaches that use visual evidence to enhance teaching and researching the history of the war.

Click here for further information about the Institute—and check back later this fall to apply!