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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

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Published January 22, 2020

This episode features Kubi Ackerman, then-Director of the Future City Lab at the Museum of the City of New York. Ackerman is not interested in monuments for the past, but instead asks how we might memorialize the present and the future, as well as send warnings or messages to future generations. Encompassing topics like socio-economic inequality and the climate crisis, Ackerman and the Future City Lab help us challenge conventional notions of monuments and develop participatory exhibitions about urban futures.

This episode features audio from the program “Monuments of the Future: Alternative Approaches," held on February 6, 2019, in...Read full description

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Published December 11, 2019

This episode features Marisa Williamson, a multimedia artist based in Newark, New Jersey whose site-specific works, videos, and performances focus on the body, authority, freedom, and memory. Speaking during the third and final event in our public seminar series, “Difficult Histories/Public Spaces: The Challenge of Monuments in New York City and the Nation,” Williamson details her work on “Sweet Chariot,” a smartphone-based, augmented-reality tour of Philadelphia’s spaces of black freedom struggle. By inviting the viewer to interact and engage with this history, Williamson opens new doors for alternative approaches to monuments and memorialization.

This episode features audio from the...Read full description

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Published December 9, 2019

This July, the American Social History Project will once again host a two-week NEH Summer Institute for college and university faculty on the Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath

The fifth iteration of our institute will focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction era's array of visual media--including prints, photographs, cartoons, illustrated newspapers and magazines, maps, ephemera, and the fine arts.  The institute will examine how information and opinion about the war and its aftermath was recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans' understanding, North and South, free and enslaved. Guided by a team...Read more

Institute Faculty 2023

Principal Faculty

Joshua Brown is professor of history emeritus and former executive director of the American Social History Project at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is a noted scholar of visual culture in U.S.

Published October 2, 2019

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Anne Valk has been named to succeed Dr. Joshua Brown as ASHP/CML’s new executive director and as a professor of history with a focus on public history at the CUNY Graduate Center. Dr. Valk brings to her new position extensive expertise in oral history and digital media projects as well as years of public humanities administrative experience, most recently at Williams College. Altogether they reflect her innovative ideas, commitment to public history, and ability to incorporate public history into graduate education. Her published works have focused on U.S. women's and social history, including...Read more

Published September 4, 2019

We are pleased to announce that the Mission US series has been selected as a 2020 “Teacher’s Choice Award for the Classroom” by The Education Center Media Group.  For over 45 years, The Education Center has been bringing influential teachers and organizations together through a host of pedagogical resources and materials. The "Teacher’s Choice Awards" are a prestigious collection of innovative classroom-tested products recommended by teachers currently in the field. The 2020 awards were announced on September 1 and will be available to view on their website later this fall.

As lead historical content developers on all five completed and two...Read more

Published September 3, 2019

We are pleased to announce that the office of the President of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice has awarded ASHP a grant of $150,000 for Who Built America? The Open Educational Resource (WBA? OER).  The grant will be used to clear rights for twentieth- and twenty-first century visual, audio, and text primary sources; develop interactive maps and charts; and supplement the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities grant we received for the project in January 2019.

The Ford Foundation supported the Who Built America? project at its origin, and this grant will allow the textbook and rich teaching materials to reach a...Read more

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