Over the summer we received news of funding that will allow ASHP to build two additional “missions” in the award-winning Mission US series of online adventure-style games in which players take on the role of young people during critical moments in U.S. history. In June, the National Park Service awarded our project partner public television station WNET-Thirteen a grant to create “Prisoner in My Homeland,” which will place students in the role of a Japanese American teen-aged boy who must make choices as he and his family are forced to leave their home on Bainbridge Island, Washington, for one of...Read more

On July 13, 1865, in a spectacular fire witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers, P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in downtown Manhattan mysteriously burned to the ground. The five-story building on Broadway and Ann Street—called “the most visited place in America”—had housed a continuing array of artifacts, oddities, productions, and creatures since its opening in 1841. This July, to mark the 150th anniversary of the destruction of Barnum’s American Museum, the award-winning Lost Museum website (http://lostmuseum.cuny.edu/), first launched by American Social History Project in 2000, will re-launch in a new, enhanced format with larger graphics, clearer navigation, and with full access for the many tablets and devices that now connect to the Internet.Read more

February 11, 2015 marked the launch of the fourth Mission US digital role-playing game. This series of free online games is created to engage middle and high school students in the exploration and understanding of U.S. history. “City of Immigrants” supports the study of immigration, the labor movement, and cultural identity in the American History curriculum. Players take on the role of Lena Brodsky, a Russian Jewish teen who has immigrated to New York City in 1907. As Lena makes the Lower East Side her home, she struggles to help support her family and finds herself in the middle of the growing...Read more

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...Read more