Euro-Americans
September 16, 2021
This summer twenty-five scholars participated in the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning’s fifth National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute Visual Culture of the American Civil War and its Aftermath. Participants met virtually, with pre-recorded video presentations by seventeen noted historians, art historians, and archivists representing the range of current work in the field. Scholars led presentations, discussions, and hands-on workshops that assessed how information and opinion about the war were recorded and disseminated, and considered ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans’ understanding on both sides of the conflict. Several live “Q&A” sessions featured nationally renown cultural institutions: American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), and New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York, NY).
In addition, a team of three institute faculty (Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, and Gregory Downs) guided the participating scholars in ways to use visual evidence to enhance their research, writing, and teaching about the war and its short- and long-term effects. Topics discussed during the institute included Civil War photography, visualizing slavery and anti-slavery, the illustrated press, maps, Native America, Emancipation, the Black press, and commemorative sculpture and public monuments (the full schedule of activities and speakers is available here).
Thanks to a supplementary NEH grant, many of the institute’s resources and activities will be available online on The Visual Culture of the American Civil War website. The site, which currently includes sessions from past institutes, features video lectures and related picture galleries, primary documents, and print and multimedia bibliographies.
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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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.
February 11, 2015 marked the launch of the fourth Mission US digital role-playing game. This series of free online games is created to engage middle and high school students in the exploration and understanding of U.S. history. “City of Immigrants” supports the study of immigration, the labor movement, and cultural identity in the American History curriculum. Players take on the role of Lena Brodsky, a Russian Jewish teen who has immigrated to New York City in 1907. As Lena makes the Lower East Side her home, she struggles to help support her family and finds herself in the middle of the growing labor movement.
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As young people play “City of Immigrants,” they gain important insights into the struggle for safe working conditions, fair wages, and the right to bargain collectively. At the same time, they experience the challenges of cultural differences, assimilation, and prejudice. Players will interact with a variety of characters, from factory supervisors to family and religious leaders, who all had roles in creating America’s labor movement and strong communities in New York. As they assume the role of Lena, players must decide: Does she dare speak up and stand up for workers’ rights? Can she continue to support her family? Players will make choices and experience the consequences of those choices – the same choices immigrants grappled with as they made their way in the United States.
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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.
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.
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.
As part of our CUNY History initiative, the website Student Voices from WWII and the McCarthy Era has been completely redesigned. ASHP/CML worked with historian Adina Back to launch the website in 2006 as a resource to teach college level oral history interpretation and practice and to explore the history of activism on the Brooklyn College campus. The new design focused on making the site’s navigation simpler and more accessible for tablets and mobile devices. Other new features include a persistent menu for easy navigation and new audio formats, including downloadable mp3 files.
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.”