Latina/o Americans
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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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.
In the introductory essay for the recently completed CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) collection “Save Hostos!,” professor emeritus Gerald Meyer states:
From the fall of 1973 until the spring of 1979, Hostos Community College became the site of one of the most prolonged and successful mass movements in New York City during the 1970s. Throughout that five-year period, students, staff, faculty, and members of the community mobilized three massive year-long campaigns.
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Working from a larger collection in the Hostos Community College Archive, Meyer and College archivist William Casari collaborated with CDHA collections coordinator Chloe Smolarski on “Save Hostos!,”selecting documents that were representative of the struggles to save the college at the time of the city’s fiscal crisis. Meyer meticulously saved hundreds of documents from the “Save Hostos” movement, and Casari carefully retained and catalogued the fliers, photographs, articles, correspondence, student newspapers, PSC papers, and and other materials Meyers had gathered. Now, a collection containing 67 of these items can be easily accessed online along with an introductory essay and contextual information for each item. As Casari suggested in his fall 2016 article in Academic Affairs on the CDHA collections, “These primary source items from across CUNY libraries and archives can be used for homework, primary source research, or could form the basis of a small in-class workshop on Hostos history. Numerous curricular uses are possible.”
The CUNY Digital History Archive is an open, digital archive and portal that gives the CUNY community and the broader public online access to a range of materials related to the history of the City University of New York. This project also involves coordination and collaboration with college libraries and archives that house significant historical collections. The CDHA accepts historical materials and records contributed by individuals whose lives, in diverse ways, have shaped, and been shaped, by CUNY. Faculty, staff, and students have fought to sustain CUNY’s democratic mission and one of the goals of the CUNY Digital History Archive is to document and preserve those stories.
Reading Area Community College in Pennsylvania, in partnership with ASHP/CML, was a awarded a two-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) professional and curricular development grant focusing on Latino history and culture. Conexiones: Linking Berks County Latino Communities to a Larger World, aims to build faculty participants’ competency in Latino history and culture, and help them develop Latino-based humanities content for Reading Area Community College’s (RACC) general education and other courses. ASHP will conduct four seminars featuring noted scholars and archive and museum professionals. In addition, teaching workshops featuring active learning pedagogies will focus on advancing student learning with primary source documents (text, visual art, audio, film), and help faculty create new and updated teaching modules.
Conexiones builds upon efforts begun by RACC faculty during ASHP’s 2013-2015 NEH-funded Bridging Historias program, which introduced thirty-six community college faculty to Latino histories and cultures and provided curriculum design support. RACC faculty participants designed three program courses: “Latino Literature and Writing,” “Latino Community Scholars,” and “Spanish for Heritage Speakers.” Conexiones will focus on the three most dominant Latino groups in the Reading area: Dominicans, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans. The first college to be federally designated as an Hispanic-serving institution (in 2015), RACC will collaborate with local cultural, historical, and social service organizations to strengthen ties between campus and community-based activities. By the end of fall 2018, RACC will have a collection of digitial teaching resources, a Latino Studies Associates of Arts program, and a dedicated network of educators and community leaders promoting Latino scholarship in Berks County, Pennsylvania.
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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.
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.