Revolution and New Nation (1751-1815)

October 15, 2020

Every election is consequential and determining who has the right to vote has been a struggle since the founding of the nation. Over the course of U.S. history, the stakes of some elections have been higher than others, especially in times of a national political, social, economic, or health crisis. Elections can also indicate the vitality of democracy itself, testing the structures of government as well as the public’s embrace of democratic principles. For those wanting to better understand this history, the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning has gathered a number of documents and teaching resources related to elections in the United States.

Some of the collected materials describe the efforts of men and women to expand voting rights in order to realize the nation’s ideals of freedom and democracy, for example, the campaign to win women’s suffrage. The movement to secure voting rights for African American and Mexican American residents showed the bravery, tenacity and patriotism of activists. All of these voting rights campaigns also reveal persistent efforts to constrict the electorate in order to maintain white supremacy and keep political power in the hands of those with race and economic privilege.

Other materials focus specifically on past elections, highlighting moments when the media and political campaigns developed new ways to persuade voters or to forecast election outcomes.

Finally, given the contentious 2020 Supreme Court confirmation process, a section addresses the issue of Supreme Court nominations and how the composition of the Court became politicized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in an attempt to advance the New Deal. At the bottom of the page, we share links to other digital archives and resources that examine these, and many other issues, in more depth.

Click here to explore Understanding Elections in U.S. History.

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.

We are very excited to announce the launch of Who Built America Badges for History Education. The site is a free online professional learning community where teachers can work with ASHP/CML history educators to teach and create document-based, Common Core aligned units. While doing so, they earn digital badges that demonstrate their professional learning and help to advance their careers. This project grows out of our decades of work providing professional development to history teachers in New York City and elsewhere and features the engaging social history content ASHP/CML is known for. Please help us to get the word out about WBA Badges to both in-service and pre-service teachers by sharing this announcement with colleagues.

We’ve been hard at work on our latest website, Who Built America Badges for History Education. It’s free, online professional development designed to help middle and high school social studies teachers integrate the Common Core Standards into their teaching—and it’s launching in October at badges.ashp.cuny.edu. Our new professional development program, Bridging Historias through Latino History: An NEH Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges Project, is underway. Thirty-eight faculty and administrators from colleges in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania have been active in online reading discussions and will meet at the Graduate Center in October for the first full-day seminar on “Conceptualizing Latino/a History and the Colonial Era.”

The National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges initiative has awarded a $359,659 cooperative contract to the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning in partnership with Queensborough Community College for Bridging Historias through Latino History and Culture, a professional development program for community college faculty.

The goal of Bridging Historias is to develop curricular materials that will deepen and expand the teaching and understanding of Latino history and culture across the humanities disciplines. The program will run from Fall 2013 through Spring 2015 and involves faculty members and administrators from 36 community colleges in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania.

The project’s activities include a seminar series run by Professor María Montoya (NYU) and Professor Lisandro Pérez (John Jay College, CUNY), online reading discussions, curricular development mentoring, and a program aimed at academic administrators. A culminating conference will feature the award-winning Latino studies scholar Vicki Ruiz, dean of the School of Humanities, University of California–Irvine.

ASHP/CML staff members Pennee Bender, Donna Thompson Ray, and Andrea Ades Vásquez will work with QCC Associate Dean Michelle Cuomo, who will lead the administrators’ program, and QCC history professor Megan Elias, who will guide the faculty mentors. Also among the project personnel are sixteen U.S. humanities and Latino studies scholars.

The application for community college faculty and administrators is available online now. The submission deadline is April 30, 2013, but we would appreciate the cover sheet indicating intent to apply by March 19, 2013.

ASHP/CML is pleased to announce its role as a subgrantee on Zoom In, a new online professional development project being undertaken by our longtime evaluation partner Education Development Center (EDC) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We will work with EDC to create, test, and disseminate a suite of digital tools and resources for middle-school history education. Drawing on the professional development materials and approaches ASHP/CML has developed over the past two decades, the project will help teachers create document-rich inquiries in U.S. history, with explicit supports for building both historical content understanding and Common Core literacy skills among students. Zoom In will also include model historical inquiries that make innovative use of digital tools to help students read, write, and talk about compelling historical questions, grounded in evidence from textual and visual primary source materials.

HERB: Social History for Every Classroom won a 2012 “Best of the Web” award from the Center for Digital Education. Named after our co-founder, the late distinguished historian Herbert Gutman, HERB is a free website that pulls together ASHP/CML’s most effective teaching activities, primary documents, and special collections into an accessible site for teachers and students. The award recognizes the site’s contribution to the benefit and quality of online education for students, teachers, and the community.

Our most recent interactive game for middle school students produced in collaboration with New York public television station Thirteen/WNET, Mission US 2: Flight to Freedom won a 2012 International Serious Play Gold Medal Award in the education division. Flight to Freedom, which tells the story of an enslaved teenager in the 1850s as she escapes north and confronts challenges presented by the Fugitive Slave Act, also has been receiving rave reviews from the press (such as this article in USA Today) as well as from teachers, and students.

We’re pleased to announce that ASHP/CML is one of the winners of the 4th Digital Media and Learning Competition, held in collaboration with Mozilla, supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and administered by HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory). This year’s competition focused on Badges for Lifelong Learning, and it awarded grants of up to $175,000 to projects designed to build digital badge systems that can help people learn new skills and demonstrate them to unlock job, educational, and civic opportunities.

Our project, Who Built America? Badges for Teaching Disciplinary Literacy in History, beat out 14 other finalists in the Teacher Mastery & Feedback division, which was supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Working with Electric Funstuff (developer of the Mission US online game—see below) and the Education Development Center (our longtime evaluation partners), the project takes ASHP/CML’s proven professional development methods and uses an online badge-earning system to build professional learning communities and promote social history and inquiry-based teaching methods. It also helps history teachers design instructional materials that will help their students meet the demands of the Common Core Standards.

Adopted by 40 states, including New York, the Common Core Standards for education are designed to insure that students master the high level reading, writing, and thinking skills they need for college and career readiness. ASHP/CML has been asked by the New York City Department of Education to develop and test classroom materials that will help social studies teachers integrate the Common Core Standards into their teaching. Using materials from our HERB: Social History for Every Classroom, we have developed two units that contain a sequence of lessons and a final performance task that aligns with selected Common Core Standards. Teachers in our Teaching American History professional development programs are testing these units in their classrooms this month and will collect samples of the resulting student work, which we will analyze in order to refine the lessons.