Expansion and Imperialism

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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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.

During two weeks in July, the American Social History Project-Center for Media and Learning hosted a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on “The Visual Culture of the American Civil War” at the CUNY Graduate Center and cultural institutions in the New York area. The 2014 institute built on the work established in our 2012 NEH Civil War Summer Institute.

Attended by thirty NEH Summer Scholars from colleges and universities across the country, the institute featured presentations, discussions, visits to local archives and museums, and hands-on workshops that focused on the era’s visual media to assess how information and opinion about the war were recorded and disseminated, and to consider ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans’ understanding on both sides of the conflict.

NEH summer scholars and faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The institute featured talks by fourteen noted historians, art historians, and archivists representing the range of current work in the field. The topics included Civil War photography of the home front and war front, interdisciplinary methods for researching and teaching the Civil War, the illustrated press, images of slavery and antislavery, political cartoons, the paintings of Winslow Homer, the vision of total war, and public monuments (the full schedule of activities and speakers is available here). Building on the information and resources discussed and viewed at the institute, the participants also worked independently on their own research and teaching projects utilizing visual evidence to enhance understanding of the history of the war.

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.

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!

With the support of a supplementary grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, ASHP/CML just launched Visual Culture of the American Civil War. The new website provides broad public and educational access to the resources of our 2012 NEH summer institute for college and university teachers. The website features videocast presentations by historians, art historians, and archivists focusing on the war’s different visual media as well as major themes of the conflict. In addition, each presentation is accompanied by a selection of archival images, primary documents, and a bibliography. Additional presentations and resources will be posted on the website over the course of the coming fall.

Visual Culture of the American Civil War is a special feature of ASHP/CML’s Picturing U.S. History, an interactive resource for teaching with visual evidence.

Mission US 3Launching soon! Mission US: A Cheyenne Odyssey will introduce middle school students across the country to Little Fox and his Northern Cheyenne band. The third installment of the Mission US series of adventure games begins in 1867 in what is now Montana. As the fictional Little Fox, players will decide how best to survive changing life on the Plains and respond to encroachment from white soldiers and settlers. Visit Mission US on October 16, 2013 to start playing—and learning.

ASHP/CML is the content developer of Mission US, which is produced by public television station WNET/Thirteen in partnership with game developer Electric Funstuff, and supported by major funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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.

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.