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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

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Upcoming Event: ASHP at the OAH

Published March 30, 2011

On April 9, 2010, at the Organization of American Historians annual conference in Washington, D.C., ASHP/CML’s Teaching American History Programs Project Director Ellen Noonan will participate in a roundtable discussion on “Putting Pedagogy into Digital Archives: Making Online Collections Useful for K-12 Teachers and Students. William J. Tally of the Center for Children and Technology will moderate the discussion, joined by panelists Kathleen Barker of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Stacia Smith of ...Read more

New Media Lab Co-sponsors Conference: The Digital University: Power Relations, Publishing, Authority and Community in the 21st Century Academy

Published March 30, 2011

The City University of New York’s Digital Media Studies Group, in collaboration with the Center for the Humanities and the New Media Lab, has organized an all-day conference on Wednesday, April 21, 2010, at the CUNY Graduate Center. Bringing together an invited group of media practitioners, academic publishers, digital content developers, and academics, the conference will assess the impact of digital media on academic work and academic policy. The conference will include a series of workshops, round table discussions, and panels at which participants will discuss and debate a broad range...Read more

Featured Document: 1930s Diaries of Blink and Simple Sam

Published March 30, 2011

 

Boy hopping freight train, Dubuque, Iowa
Boy hopping freight train, Dubuque, Iowa

During the 1930s depression hundred of thousands of young people took to the road in search of work and adventure, or to help relieve their impoverished families. Thanks to Minnesota sociologist Thomas Mineham, we have excerpts of diaries from two youths nicknamed Blink and Simple Sam. Mineham traveled the freight trains and hitchhiked among the transient youths for three years recording their experiences and words. See this month’s In the Limelight feature on ASHP/CML’s homepage to read diary excerpts and more about youth...Read more

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Published March 30, 2011

The career of Howard Zinn took him from the Brooklyn shipyards to New York University on the G.I. Bill to a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and then to the faculties of Spelman College and Boston University, where he urged his students to social activism and mightily irritated university administrators. He published A People’s History of the United States in 1980, a single volume that told a very different story of U.S. history than traditional textbooks did at...Read more

ASHP/CML Website Makeover

Published March 30, 2011

The American Social History Project’s website has undergone an extreme makeover! Our new, improved and vastly more informative site, which went live this month, offers easier navigability, greater clarity, and lots and lots of resources. We’ve added new features such as podcasts of talks by noted historians and teachers at our seminars and clips from our award winning documentaries. You can still keep up with our latest activities-and insights-in the ASHP blog, or find more information about our books and other projects. We hope you will take the time to visit us and we invite any...Read more

Picturing United States History Forums

Published March 30, 2011

This fall the American Social History Project’s latest Web resource, Picturing United States History: An Interactive Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence, will host two online forums on teaching with visual evidence. The October 2009 forum on the West will be guest-moderated by Professor Catherine Lavender of the College of Staten Island at the City University of New York; the November 2009 forum on the Civil War will be guest-moderated by Professor Alice Fahs of the University of California-Irvine.

Representing a unique collaboration between historians and art historians, Picturing U.S. History is based on the belief that visual materials...Read more

History Hits the Road with Mobile Technology

Published March 30, 2011

This fall ASHP/CML begins partnering with the Apprend Foundation, a non-profit educational organization based in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, on a new digital initiative called “Crafting Freedom on NC 86: Discovering Hidden History with Mobile Technology.” With funding from a NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant, the team will plan and develop the first steps of a “re-version” of a highway tour, originally produced during the 1930s by the Federal Writer’s Project, focusing on the rich history of African Americans along North Carolina Highway 86. A major goal of the project is to evaluate how open source mobile technology...Read more

New Teaching American History Program for Social Studies Special Education

Published March 30, 2011

In July, we learned that ASHP/CML received funding to carry out a new Teaching American History professional development program (our eighth since 2003). The U.S. Department of Education awarded this grant to Districts 19, 20, 21, 23, and 31 of the New York City Department of Education. The program will serve social studies teachers who teach U.S. history to special education students, engaging them in the development of curriculum materials and pedagogical approaches that are both intellectually rigorous and meet the needs of diverse learners.Read more

Featured Document: Bracero Workers

Published March 30, 2011

 

Leonard Nadel Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Bracero Workers
Bracero workers being fumigated with DDT in Houston, Texas, 1956. Leonard Nadel Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

In recognition of Labor Day and our professional development program focus on immigration, we’ve selected a document from our collection of material on the Bracero Program. Between 1942 and 1964, millions of Mexican agricultural workers entered the U.S. to work as farm laborers through the government-sponsored Bracero Program. This photograph of Department of Agriculture personnel spraying braceros with the now-banned pesticide DDT as...Read more

Panel discussion: “Public History in New York City’s Cultural Life”

Published March 30, 2011
“Public History in New York City’s Cultural Life” panel
L-R: Suzanne Wasserman, Deborah F. Schwartz, Ron Grele, Dave Herman, Ruth Sergel, Oneka LaBennett

The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning and the Gotham Center for New York City History co-sponsored a panel discussion on “Public History in New York City’s Cultural Life” at the City University of New York Graduate Center on Monday, April 6th. The event was held in memory of Adina Back, a historian, educator, and colleague who many at the ASHP knew personally. The evening’s five panelists represented an array of backgrounds, and...Read more

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