About ASHP: Recognition

September 3, 2019

We are pleased to announce that the office of the President of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice has awarded ASHP a grant of $150,000 for Who Built America? The Open Educational Resource (WBA? OER). The grant will be used to clear rights for twentieth- and twenty-first century visual, audio, and text primary sources; develop interactive maps and charts; and supplement the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities grant we received for the project in January 2019.

The Ford Foundation supported the Who Built America? project at its origin, and this grant will allow the textbook and rich teaching materials to reach a broad international public including trade unions, community-based activists, museums, and other organizations that have used ASHP’s educational materials for the past 38 years.

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.

Bridging Historias masthead

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.

Since launching last year, Mission US: Flight to Freedom continues to win accolades from the education, media, and gaming worlds. Flight to Freedom, the second of the Mission US series of adventure games on which ASHP/CML has collaborated with public television station WNET/Thirteen and other partners, features the journey of Lucy King, a (fictional) 14-year-old girl enslaved on a Kentucky Plantation. The game and curriculum immerse players in the history of slave communities and resistance, and the wider anti-slavery struggles that led up to the Civil War. Flight to Freedom has been praised for it’s “intelligent” and “thought-provoking” approach to history. Recent awards and acknowledgements include:

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 are pleased to announce that the Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), in partnership with the American Social History Project, a National Leadership Planning Grant for Contextualizing the Visual Archive for Teaching. This project is designed to research and prototype an interactive online interface for archives and libraries that will help teachers use historical American images by linking them to rich contextual information as well as to full catalog records. During the planning phase of the grant, we will conduct research among potential users and program a sample set of test images for an online, open-source resource prototype that will demonstrate how visual images from any library or museum collection can be linked to collection records and teaching materials.