…our range of projects grows as our dedication to advancing public knowledge about the past and the history of working people intensifies. ASHP/CML may have achieved a venerable age, but we’re still eager to embark on new ventures that, we hope, promote learning about the past and stretch the parameters of *how* we learn. To name just a few ongoing activities: While continuing our fifteen-year collaborative work in New York’s high schools, we have inaugurated several faculty institutes under the federal Teaching American History faculty-development program. Our social history-rich websites are being complemented by professional development and new media projects that focus on critical use of visual evidence in exploring the past. And our New Media Lab and participation in The Graduate Center’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy certificate program are direct interventions in shaping the future of innovative new media scholarship and teaching. Fortunately, our efforts on occasion receive recognition: most recently, the New Jersey Historical Society’s What Exit? New Jersey and Its Turnpike website, produced by ASHP/CML, was awarded the Special Web Art Bronze Award from UNESCO’s International Committee of Museums for Audiovisual, Image, and Sound New Technologies. So, as ASHP/CML nears a quarter-century, even as we face some uncertainties and obstacles, we look forward to a new year of vigorous and creative work.

In July ASHP/CML was a partner in two Teaching American History grants awarded to the New York City public schools by the U.S. Department of Education. ASHP/CML will be the lead partner working with middle and high school teachers in NYC’s Region 4, made up of schools in western Queens and the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. This program will provide teachers with a series of five day-long retreats, each featuring a noted historian and focused on a different topic in U.S. History, along with a week-long summer institute and ASHP curriculum materials. Other partners in the grant, who will host retreats and introduce teachers to their resources, include the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn Historical Society, and Museum of Television and Radio. Bill Tally of the Education Development Center will conduct research to evaluate the program’s effectiveness.

ASHP/CML is partnered with NYC’s Region 6, former Community School Districts 17 and 22, in Brooklyn for “Teacher as Historian: A Teaching American History Initiative.” The program features four ASHP/CML-led seminars as well as mentoring support for teachers and assistant principals in high schools region-wide. Other service providers include the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Gilder-Lehrman Institute for American History.

Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History at Columbia University and author of, most recently, the Bancroft Prize-winning In Pursuit of Equity: How Gender Shaped American Economic Citizenship, will discuss “Thinking Globally: Paradoxes of a Gendered Labor History.” The free event will be held on Thursday, October 7, at 6:30 in the Skylight Room (Room 9100) at The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue. The lecture series, co-sponsored by ASHP/CML and The Graduate Center’s Center for the Humanities and Ph.D. Program in History, is dedicated to the memory of the late labor historian and ASHP/CML co-founder Herbert Gutman.