May 19, 2011
What If Poor Mothers Ran the World? Rethinking the War on Poverty
Annelise Orleck, Dartmouth CollegeCUNY, Graduate Center In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, poor mothers in New York City and across the United States took charge of their lives and their communities, using federal anti-poverty dollars to build health clinics, serve free meals to poor children, publish community newspapers and even open free public swimming pools. […]
April 5, 2011
U.S. Territorial Expansion
Jay Gitlin, Yale UniversityU.S. Territorial Expansion: From the Louisiana Purchase to the California Gold RushThe Graduate CenterFebruary 22, 2011 Historian Jay Gitlin examines American diversity through the lens of westward expansion rather than immigration. In the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of people who spoke a different language, held different religious beliefs, and came from […]
March 11, 2011
Cubano New York: Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the World’s Sugar Capital
Lisandro Pérez, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNYCubano New York: Nineteenth Century Immigrants to the World’s Sugar CapitalThe Graduate Center, CUNYMarch 4, 2011 In the nineteenth century, Cubans were the largest Latin American or Spanish-speaking population in New York City. Lisandro Pérez discusses the importance of these immigrants to both Cuban and U.S. history […]
February 25, 2011
Immigrants of the Irish Famine (1845-1855)
Carol Groneman, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNYCUNY, Graduate Center Historian Carol Groneman, whose dissertation grounds the scholarship of ASHP’s documentary “The Five Points: New York’s Irish Working Class in the 1850s,” looks at what happened when immigrants of the Irish famine came to the United States (1845-1855): How were they perceived? What institutions […]
February 10, 2011
Teaching With Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series
Donna Thompson Ray, American Social History ProjectCUNY, Graduate Center In this three-part video podcast, ASHP/CML’s Donna Thompson Ray shares the benefit of her area of expertise with New York City Department of Education teachers in a discussion about the work of artist Jacob Lawrence. Eliciting contributions from teachers, Thompson Ray leads a conversation about Lawrence’s […]
January 18, 2011
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
Fritz Umbach and Kojo Dei, John Jay College, CUNY“Teaching America and the Slave Trade in Global Perspective”The Graduate Center, CUNYFebruary 8, 2008 While most Americans understand slavery solely through the prism of its existence in the Americas, in fact the “peculiar institution” as practiced in the new world makes up only a small part of […]
January 7, 2011
Free Blacks in the South: The Life of Thomas Day
Peter H. Wood, Duke University Professor Emeritus“Thomas Day: Nineteenth-Century Free Black Cabinetmaker”The Graduate Center, CUNYNovember 8, 2010 How might a southern-born free black also be an abolitionist? ASHP staff member, Donna Thompson Ray, interviews historian Peter H. Wood about the life of cabinetmaker, Thomas Day, and how his experience as a free black characterized nineteenth-century […]
December 7, 2010
Rethinking the Civil Rights Movement
Premilla Nadasen, Queens College, CUNYWomen and Black Freedom: Rethinking the Civil Rights MovementThe Graduate Center, CUNYApril 22, 2010 Historian Premilla Nadasen examines the importance of women in the Black Freedom Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In Part 1 of this podcast, she outlines how the traditional narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, which tended […]
April 21, 2010
Slavery and Community
Gregory Downs, City College of New York, CUNY“Power & Slavery: Slave Communities in the Antebellum South”The Graduate Center, CUNYDecember 4, 2008 Historian Gregory Downs explores the capacity for individual and social resistance evident in the American system of slavery. In the antebellum South, American slaves worked to build communities through religion, family, political networks, and […]