The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will host a National Endowment for the Humanities institute in Summer 2021 for 25 college and university teachers to study the visual culture of the American Civil War and its aftermath. Postponed this year due to Covid-19, this fifth iteration of the institute will focus on the era’s array of visual media—including the fine arts, ephemera, photography, cartoons, maps, and monuments—to examine how information and opinion about the war and its impact were recorded and disseminated, and the ways visual media expressed and shaped views before, during, and after the conflict.

Due to continuing restrictions regarding face-to-face meetings, the institute will be entirely online, giving participants the opportunity to view lectures and interact with noted historians, art historians, and archivists. In addition, they will participate in new “behind the scenes” virtual sessions with curators and staff in major museums and archives. A core team of three institute faculty will introduce participants to the rich body of new scholarship that addresses or incorporates Civil War and postwar visual culture, meet them via individual remote conferences to guide their research, and help them to use visual evidence to enhance their scholarship and teaching. The 2021 institute faculty includes: Jermaine Archer, Amanda Bellows, Louise Bernard, Joshua Brown, Sarah Burns, Gregory Downs, Matthew Fox-Amato, Amanda Frisken, Dominique Jean-Louis, Barbara Krauthamer, Turkiya Lowe, Maurie McInnis, Susan Schulten, Scott Manning Stevens, and Dell Upton.

Information about applying as well as the institute’s program of activities will be available in November at: https://ashp.cuny.edu/nehinstitute.

Thanks to a supplementary NEH grant, many of the institute’s resources and previous activities are available online on The Visual Culture of the American Civil War website. The site features video lectures and related picture galleries, primary documents, and print and multimedia bibliographies.

Image: Engraving. "Emancipation Day in South Carolina" - the Color-Sergeant of the 1st South Carolina Colored addressing the regiment, after having been presented with the Stars and Stripes, at Smith's plantation, Port Royal, January 1. , 1863.  Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Vol. 15, No. 382 (1863 Jan. 24), p. 276. 

Prisoner in My Homeland, the sixth Mission US interactive history teaching resource is now available along with an in-depth Educator’s Guide. In this online immersive role-playing game, the player takes on the role of Henry Tanaka, a 16 year-old Japanese American from Bainbridge Island in Washington State. After the U.S. entrance into World War II, Henry’s typical American teenage life is forever changed when President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal and incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans. Prisoner in My Homeland follows Henry as he struggles to make sense of the incarceration, tries to help his family and community, faces choices about how to adjust to life in the prison camps, and responds to the required loyalty questionnaire. Player choices throughout the game shape what ultimately happens to Henry and his family in the years after their incarceration. We are delighted that Newsweek provided a glowing review of the new mission.

During the three years of production, the Mission US team (WNET New York Public Media, Electric Funstuff, and ASHP/CML) worked in cooperation with Japanese American community and history organizations including with Densho, a Seattle-based organization and digital archive, the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community and the Manzanar National Historic Site. Funding for Prisoner in My Homeland came from the National Park Service.

On October 7, the Publics Lab at the Graduate Center will host a conversation with the historians and artists behind Ghost River.  

Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga (Red Planet Books and Comics, 2019) is a graphic novel about the Paxton massacres of 1763. However, as the title suggests, the Paxton vigilantes associated with this tragedy are peripheral to this story. This volume introduces new interpreters and new forms of evidence in order to foreground Indigenous victims, survivors, and kin in ways that colonial printed records – with their focus on colonial elites – cannot do alone. Written, illustrated, and published by Native partners, Ghost River confronts challenges that accompany studies of colonial America. How can we tell difficult stories that don’t reproduce past assumptions? Can we recollect tragedy without eulogizing it? And how can acts of artistic reinterpretation reveal the fluidity of history, memory, and collective mythology? Artist Weshoyot Avlitre (Tongva), author Dr. Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna), and editor Dr. Will Fenton will discuss their collaboration, and how artistic reinterpretation of colonial records enabled the team to imagine a narrative that re-centers the Indigenous past and present in colonial America.

Co-sponsored by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning.  Free and open to the public.  To register, go to: https://publicslab.gc.cuny.edu/events/ghost-river-decolonization-through...

We would like to remind everyone of the two online resource pages our team developed over the spring and summer months:

Epidemics in U.S. History

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus in the United States and around the world leaves many of us seeking ways  to place the pandemic in historical context. ASHP/CML has compiled a list of resources and discussion questions to assist students, teachers, and the general public in understanding past epidemics and connect this knowledge to the present situation. 

Historicizing Black Resistance in the U.S.

ASHP/CML has compiled resources for those who want to better understand the history of both black oppression and black resistance that make up the U.S. story. This selective compilation highlights materials drawn from our own collections, plus links to other freely accessible documents, collections, lesson plans, and items suitable for students, teachers, researchers, public historians, and the interested public. 

Please share these sites widely, and check back to each as we plan to update and expand the collections.  And stay tuned for another resource page, focused on Elections in U.S. history, that will be available next month.

We are interested in learning more about ASHP/CML’s supporters and the programs and resources that engage you. Our mission is to make social history resources available to students and teachers, so if you can’t find something please let us know.  Share, like, and tweet our resources with others; and download, rate, and review the podcasts for other potential listeners. Please give us feedback on your use of ASHP resources by completing this brief survey. Your responses will help us to better serve you.