News

Mission US Receives a "Teacher’s Choice Award for the Classroom"

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As lead historical content developers on all five completed and two...Read more

ASHP Awarded Ford Foundation Grant to Develop Who Built America? The Open Educational Resource

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

Check out ASHP Podcast Number 85

Published August 29, 2019

Did you know that American Social History Project Podcast (ASHP Podcast) has published over eighty episodes? With topics ranging from slavery and anti-slavery imagery to women’s history and women’s activism, and to border, immigration and citizenship, ASHP Podcast has presented subjects of interest to teachers and the public.

Our podcast is drawn from ASHP’s public seminars and professional development programs with scholars, activists, and educators working in social and public history. In the latest podcast, humanities scholar Maryanne Trasciatti (Hofstra University) shares the work of the Remembering the Triangle Fire Coalition, which is leading the effort to...Read more

July 2020 NEH Summer Institute on Visual Culture of the American Civil War and Its Aftermath

Published August 29, 2019

ASHP has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to host a two-week institute for college and university faculty in July 2020 on the visual media of the American Civil War and its aftermath. The institute (in its fifth iteration) will expand study on the ways the war was recorded and remembered through an array of visual media -- including the fine arts, photography, cartoons, prints -- and a range of “ephemeral” pictorial items and publications. Institute participants will work with leading scholars in the field and take part in hands-on workshops in local museums and archives....Read more

Mary Anne Trasciatti on Creating Public Art Memorials in New York City

Published June 12, 2019

“Lots of hard work, lots of collaboration, and a long horizon.” These, according to Mary Anne Trasciatti, Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Hofstra University, are the keys to erecting a public art memorial from the ground up in New York City. In this episode, Trasciatti speaks about the Reframing the Skymemorial for the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911.

As president of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, Trasciatti and her colleagues—all volunteers—dialogued with government and outside organizations to secure grants, donations, and permits. Her detailed and comprehensive summary offers a window into the public memorial creation process...Read full description

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Who Built America? Documentaries Now Streaming!

Published June 12, 2019

All ten of our award-winning documentaries are now available to stream for free and with closed-captioning. These accessible and exciting 30-minute programs explore the central role of working women and men in U.S. history, and have withstood the test of time by continuing to engage students in middle school through college level classes. Each documentary has a downloadable Viewer’s Guide that is written for student readers. It introduces the main topics, events, and composite characters that help to dramatize the historical themes in many of the programs. The streaming pages also help facilitate active-viewing strategies in the classroom by...Read more

Up South: African-American Migration in the Era of the Great War

During World War I, tens of thousands of African Americans fled the South. In Up South, a Mississippi barber and a sharecropper woman tell how they organized groups to escape Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and forced labor. The promise of freedom and full citizenship drew them to Chicago. Once there, the migrants faced poor housing, discrimination on the job, and racial violence. They responded by forming women’s clubs, engaging in political campaigns, and creating the “New Negro” movement. (Length: 30 minutes)

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Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City

An unexpected friendship between two Italian and Jewish immigrant girls provides the backdrop for this story of labor organizing and women’s growing activism. While working in harsh sweatshops and factories, the young women also experienced the thrills of movies, amusement parks and dance halls. As their numbers in the workforce grew and working conditions declined they took matters into their own hands. In 1909, garment workers staged the “Uprising of the 20,000,” a massive strike that won union recognition and transformed the role of women in the union movement. (Length: 30 minutes)

Read more about Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl: Immigrant Women in the Turn-of-the-Century City

Five Points: New York's Irish Working Class in the 1850s

New York’s Five Points, the most notorious urban slum of the antebellum period, is seen through the conflicting perspectives of a native-born Protestant reformer and an immigrant Irish-Catholic family. Members of the Mulvahill family describe daily life in a complicated neighborhood, contradicting nineteenth-century stereotypes about the immigrant poor. (Length: 30 minutes)

Read more about Five Points: New York's Irish Working Class in the 1850s