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American Social History Project • Center for Media and Learning

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Published September 8, 2016

As higher education is increasingly a subject of contentious debate, one way to explore the history of our own public university system is to visit the onine CUNY Digital History Archive. This online participatory archive and portal is a work-in-progress and we welcome your contributions. Focused on stories and material that document the struggle to build and sustain the democratic mission of the university and its colleges, this growing resource will inform and involve teachers, students and the general public. Visitors to the website can do keyword searches, browse all items (now over 300), or search by subject, date,...Read more

Published September 2, 2016

Up from the Dust, the fifth in the Mission US series of online history games produced in collaboration with New York public television station WNET/Thirteen and game producer Electric Funstuff, was released on September 2nd. The role-playing game provides young people with an experiential understanding of the enormous hardships Americans faced during the late 1920s and early 1930s as they struggled against the joint catastrophes of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. The game is divided into five parts, with a prologue offering background on the settlement of the Texas panhandle and the expansion of wheat farming, and...Read more

Published February 16, 2016

City of Immigrants—the fourth in the Mission US series of free online history games produced by public television station WNET/Thirteen in collaboration with ASHP/CML, the game company Electric Funstuff, and the Educational Development Center—just received the Parents' Choice Gold Award in the Spring 2016 website competition. Issued by the Parents' Choice Foundation, the oldest nonprofit guide in the U.S. for outstanding children's media, Gold Award winners are judged as "the highest quality, most appealing products in their genre," the criteria including the "highest production standards, [and conveying] universal human values."

Launched in 2015, City of Immigrants immerses players...Read more

Published February 1, 2016

​ASHP is pleased to be participating in an ambitious social studies curriculum writing project currently underway at the New York City Department of Education. NYCDOE's centrally-based Social Studies team, led by Executive Director Eric Contreras, has selected a group of social studies teachers representing grades K-12 who are writing model curriculum lessons and units to align with each year in the city's Scope and Sequence for Social Studies. Once complete, these units will be made available to social studies teachers citywide. Since January 2015, Ellen Noonan, ASHP's director of online professional development, has been meeting regularly with the high school grade level teams of curriculum writers to...Read more

Published January 29, 2016

ASHP recently launched new features on the Who Built America: Badges for History Education website, our online professional development program. These improvements represent our continued commitment to providing classroom ready, discipline specific professional learning to history teachers.

We’ve developed four tutorials designed to aid teachers in modeling disciplinary literacy and historical thinking skills in their classrooms. The skill tutorial topics include: thinking historically, building context, using evidence, and reading and writing for arguments.  We feel strongly that such skills are essential to effective instruction, and have incorporated the tutorials into the badge earning process.

To make badges more accessible to those...Read more

Published January 29, 2016

ASHP is pleased to announce a major overhaul of HERB: Social History for Every Classroom, our free web resource of primary sources, curated collections, and teaching activities on U.S. history. HERB is now entering its fifth year online, and has been used by thousands of educators around the country.

We’ve improved the visual layout of the site, optimized it for use on tablets and other mobile devices, and redesigned the search functionality with more accurate and filterable search results. And teaching activities are now sorted by pedagogical strategy and include a description of how best to implement each in the...Read more

Published January 27, 2016

As part of our effort to keep our online teaching resources accessible and user-friendly, we have revised and upgraded our Investigating U.S. History website. The site now has a responsive design, to make it tablet and mobile friendly, a new audio format for greater compatibility, and updated links programmed in HTML 5. Originally created in 2007 by CUNY history faculty, and supported by an NEH grant, the twelve inquiry-based activities feature primary source materials such as presidential audiotape excerpts, 1930s photographs and folk music, revolutionary war artifacts, and nineteenth-century religious tracts that challenge students to “do history.”Read more

Published January 14, 2016

The CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) is an open, participatory digital archive and portal that gives the CUNY community and the broader public online access to a range of materials related to the history of the City University of New York. The CDHA will conduct and collect oral history interviews as well as accept historical materials and records contributed by individuals whose lives, in diverse ways, have shaped, and been shaped, by CUNY. Faculty, staff, and students have fought to sustain CUNY's democratic mission and one of the goals of the CUNY Digital History Archive is to document and preserve the...Read more

Published January 7, 2016

ASHP has received funding from the Arthur P. Sloan Foundation to further develop the CUNY Digital History Archive, a participatory project to create, collect, and conserve the histories of the City University of New York. This open archive and portal gives the CUNY community and the broader public online access to a range of materials related to the history of the City University of New York. The CDHA will make available materials contributed by individuals whose lives, in diverse ways, have shaped and been shaped by CUNY.  Faculty, staff, and students have fought to sustain the university’s democratic mission and one of the goals...Read more

Published November 18, 2015

The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center will host a two-week NEH Summer Institute for college and university teachers in July 2016 on the visual culture of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Applications to participate will be accepted via mail, e-mail, and our online application system until March 1, 2016.

The Institute will focus on the era's array of visual media--including the fine arts, ephemera, and photography--to examine how information and opinion about the war were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped Americans' understanding...Read more

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