Mark your calendars—ASHP/CML is helping to organize and sponsor the first annual CUNY Games Festival, which will take place on January 17, 2014 at the City University of New York Graduate Center. This one-day conference to promote and discuss game-based learning in higher education will bring together faculty, students, game designers, and other domain experts from various disciplines. Open to the public, the conference features an Arcade where attendees can play learning games and games-in-progress, as well as sessions addressing questions such as:
Apart from engaging college students, what real learning can happen
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...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
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.
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
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
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
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
Institute faculty member David Jaffee discusses a Civil War print with NEH summer scholars.
During two weeks last 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. 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...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
The 
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 