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...Read more
Launching 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...Read more
As part of our continuing effort to support digital research and experimentation in a collaborative interdisciplinary environment, 2013 ushered in 10 new doctoral students into the ranks of the New Media Lab. Bringing our total to 24, NML’s coterie of students comes from 14 programs/subprograms at the Graduate Center, with each student incorporating a range of approaches and tools as they explore the use of new technology in his or her doctoral work. For the first time, we have representation from Educational Psychology (Second Life environments to teach autistic children), French (Digitization of 17th century manuscripts), and Criminal Justice...Read more
The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera by Ellen Noonan has been selected as the winner of the 2012 George C. Rogers Jr. Book Award, which is presented annually by the South Carolina Historical Society for the best book on South Carolina history published during the preceding year.
Published by University of North Carolina Press, The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess examines the 1935 Gershwin opera’s long history of invention and reinvention as a barometer of twentieth-century American expectations about race, culture, and the struggle for...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
We are excited to announce a new look to our website. After a year of hard work and many discussions, we are pleased to go public with a home page that highlights new material and current ASHP/CML projects. Also, items from HERB and our podcast series are featured right on the homepage.
Bolstered by the recent installation of sleek new computer tables that replaced the old and eclectic assortment of furniture we’ve had until now (see right), the New Media Lab—the Graduate Center’s interdisciplinary digital facility run by ASHP/CML—began the fall semester with new participants and innovative initiatives. The Lab is busier than ever with 22 students from 13 doctoral programs working from early in the morning until late in the evening on digital projects.
This academic year, the Lab’s activities have been enhanced by the Graduate Center’s inauguration...Read more
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...Read more
ASHP/CML is pleased to announce its role as a subgrantee on Zoom In, a new online professional development project being undertaken by our longtime evaluation partner Education Development Center (EDC) and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We will work with EDC to create, test, and disseminate a suite of digital tools and resources for middle-school history education. Drawing on the professional development materials and approaches ASHP/CML has developed over the past two decades, the project will help teachers create document-rich inquiries in U.S. history, with explicit supports for building both historical content understanding and Common Core literacy...Read more
Launching 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 
The Strange Career of Porgy and Bess: Race, Culture, and America’s Most Famous Opera by 
Bolstered by the recent installation of sleek new computer tables that replaced the old and eclectic assortment of furniture we’ve had until now (see right), the