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| FEBRUARY 2005
Announcements:
1. P. T. Barnum's American Museum Rises Again! ASHP/CML is pleased to announce the completion of The Lost Museum: Exploring Antebellum American Life and Culture, one of its most ambitious and innovative Web projects ever. Eight years in the making and almost 140 years after the fiery destruction of the original structure in lower Manhattan, The Lost Museum is an interactive re-creation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, circa 1865. Barnum’s Museum, mid-nineteenth century America’s pre-eminent popular cultural institution, offered its visitors a cornucopia of attractions that merged entertainment and education and, often in odd but compelling ways, highlighted some of the major compromises, accommodations, and conflicts of the antebellum and Civil War periods. Its present-day digital reincarnation combines a 3-D spatial exploration of four rooms containing 130 interactive artifacts and attractions, a searchable archive of more than 300 primary documents, and 14 teaching resources geared to diverse classroom settings. Working independently and together, these features allow contemporary virtual visitors to experience the fascinating intricacy of nineteenth-century exhibitions, to embark on a search for clues to solve the mystery of who burned down the building in July 1865, or to choose lesson plans and strategies suitable for high school and college teaching.
Even before its completion, The Lost Museum garnered coverage in The New York Times and on CBS News Sunday Morning and won the 2000 New York Metropolitan Archivists Roundtable Prize for “the most innovative application of archives to the Internet.” Now, with the help of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and thanks to the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Old York Foundation, you are welcome to point your browser to http://www.lostmuseum.cuny.edu and investigate the past in a way you've never done before! And after you've paid a visit, let us know what you think--or tell us how The Lost Museum worked in your classroom. 2. JP Morgan Chase Foundation Awards ASHP/CML Grant The JP Morgan Chase Foundation awarded ASHP/CML a $30,000 grant in December 2004, to support a two-year education program for new small schools. The grant provides partial funding for a partnership between ASHP/CML and a consortium of eight new small theme-based schools in the Bronx, New York. ASHP/CML will provide sustained professional and curriculum development support to participating humanities teachers. 3. History Matters Wins AHA Teaching Resource Prize The American Historical Association awarded the American Social History Project and the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University the 2005 James Harvey Robinson Prize for our website History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. The Robinson Prize is awarded biennially for the teaching aid that has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes. In the award program, the AHA lauded History Matters as "an incredibly rich and 'user friendly' web site" and as "a model of its kind." This is the second Robinson Prize given to one of our projects: our CD-ROM, Who Built America? From the Centennial Celebration of 1876 to the Great War of 1914, won the 1994 prize. 4. ASHP/CML New Hires ASHP is pleased to welcome two new staff to our education programs this year. Abigail Sara Lewis began work as our Making Connections Coordinator in September 2004. Her previous work experience includes coordinating the High School Teachers Institute and other projects at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, as well as legislative project work for Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY). She is currently completing her dissertation on “The Young Women’s Christian Association and the Christian Foundation of Interracial Women’s Activism, 1940-1973” at Rutgers University. Leah Potter arrived in January 2005, to take on the position of Teaching American History Coordinator. Before joining ASHP/CML, she coordinated a NEH Landmarks in American History workshop in Durham, North Carolina, and produced "Exploring the World of Thomas Day", an award-winning CD-ROM on free African Americans in the antebellum era. She is also a Ph.D. candidate in History, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and her dissertation focuses on journalist Nellie Bly’s around-the-world trip and the popularization of American expansionism in the 1890s 5. ASHP/CML Internship Opportunities For the past few summers, advanced undergraduate history students have worked with ASHP as researchers and writers on The Lost Museum and Who Built America? videos websites. This summer and through the fall ASHP will be producing a new Web project, the Young America: Experiences of Youth in U.S. History, and we welcome interns interested in social history, public history, new media, and the history of children and youth to participate. Interns conduct primary document research, timeline and bibliographic writing, and join the ASHP staff in planning, designing, and producing online teaching materials in U.S. history. Interested students should contact Pennee Bender at: pbender@gc.cuny.edu
6. The Fight for Academic Freedom at CUNY: Past and Present ASHP/CML is cosponsoring a series of three public programs at The Graduate Center on the history and ongoing struggle for academic freedom in the U.S..
Rehearsing for McCarthyism at City College Defending Academic Freedom in an Atmosphere of Terror A Conversation with the Critical Art Ensemble The programs accompany the exhibition "Activism and Repression: The Struggle for Free Speech at CCNY, 1931-42," which will be displayed in the lobby of The Graduate Center from February 4 to March 4, 2005--and featured online on the Virtual New York City website. For more information about the events (cosponsored with the Center for the Humanities, the Office of the Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies, and the Center for Continuing Education and Public Programs at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY), click here. |
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| MAY 2005
Feature Articles :
1. Teaching American History Programs – NYCDOE Region 4 and 7 In our second year of providing professional development to New York City public school teachers through the federally-funded Teaching American History initiative, ASHP/CML is conducting two large programs serving teachers in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island (in addition to offering workshops through other TAH-funded projects). These programs have enabled ASHP/CML to undertake in-depth work with 80 middle and high school social studies teachers, challenging them to engage with broad historical questions and helping them to develop classroom materials appropriate to their students’ diverse needs.
Teachers have responded enthusiastically to talks by historians Karen Kupperman (Early Encounters), Herbert Sloan (American Revolution), Joshua Brown (Gilded Age), Kevin Kenny (Irish immigration), Van Gosse (Cold War), and Matthew Frye Jacobson (Early 20th Century Immigration). The program uses these talks to anchor day-long Retreats focused on particular topics, and teachers also explore resources and approaches for teaching the topics to their students. Museum partners the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn Historical Society, and Museum of Television and Radio have hosted Retreats introducing teachers to materials unique to each institution’s collection. Both TAH programs will culminate at the end of the school year with four-day summer institutes where teachers will work in small groups to revisit the historical questions raised at each Retreat and develop materials that they can use with their students. Program evaluators from the Center for Children and Technology at the Education Development Center are providing data to ASHP/CML about the program’s effectiveness and its impact on teacher practice. 2. Strengthening Humanities Education in New Small Schools For the last few years, ASHP/CML has participated in a national education reform initiative focusing on improving student achievement in new small schools. Making Connections program has worked with new small public secondary schools in the Bronx to develop rigorous professional development models to enrich interdisciplinary humanities education. The program seeks to address some of the challenges facing new small schools such as sustaining effective learning communities, particularly with educators new to teaching.
Making Connections’ new Bronx small schools include New Explorers High School, Community School for Social Justice, Fannie Lou Hamer High School, Peace and Diversity High School, School for Community Research and Learning, School for Excellence, and High School for Teaching and the Professions. More than twenty-five teachers have received sustained professional development from ASHP/CML education staffers and CUNY faculty mentors via year-long training seminars that feature American history curriculum resources (documentaries, lesson plans, textbooks, study guides) and multimedia technology instruction. Matching content and direct access to CUNY faculty mentors, the program has garnered the praise of participants: My mentor, one social studies teacher reported, “was a joy to work with. I gained encouragement and the support [I] needed. . . [H]er English background was a source for strategy ideas I’d never considered before. Her personal background is one my students can appreciate and relate to as well.” Program content covers subjects that range from the American Revolution to the Great Migration, and teaching topics such as multicultural education, using primary sources, and classroom management. Seminar locations have included the Museum of Television and Radio and the New York Public Library. When asked about ASHP/CML’s impact on student achievement, teachers have remarked on the program’s contribution to improving their students’ Regents examination scores. Making Connections is funded by CUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs, the New York Community Trust, and the J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation. For more information on the program: http://www.ashp.cuny.edu/mc.html
3. The Lost Museum Goes Platinum The Lost Museum, ASHP/CML's online re-creation of Barnum's American Museum and introduction to mid-nineteenth-century U.S. history, won the Platinum Award for Interactive-Educational New Media at the 38th annual WorldFest Film Festival. Worldfest, one of the oldest competitive international media Festivals, was held in Houston, Texas, during the last week in April 2005. In April The Lost Museum also was the recipient of an Honorable Mention Award for excellence in interactive media production in the Horizon Interactive Awards competition. 4. History Matters Awarded NYPL's "Best of Reference" Each year a committee of librarians from The New York Public Library selects reference books and websites to be designated "Best of Reference" based on their usefulness in local branch reference work. This year our History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web website was among the 25 recipients of this citation celebrated at a ceremony at NYPL's Donnell Library Center on April 29th. This is the second year an ASHP/CML online resource has been cited by the New York Public Library: The September 11 Digital Archive (also produced in collaboration with the Center for History and New Media) was included in 2004's Best of Reference. 5. ASHP/CML Site Survey Here at the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, we pride ourselves on creating innovative and challenging digital projects as well as devising critical and rigorous approaches to their use in classroom and other educational settings. Now that the World Wide Web encompasses a good part of our activities, it is increasingly our most accessible public face. Since we began establishing our presence on the Web relatively early in the development of the Internet, that face has a habit of aging rather rapidly. As we update our website with new programming and content we realize a few short years later that it needs a new technological and informational face lift! The limitation of cosmetic metaphors notwithstanding, we have been striving to make our central site (www.ashp.cuny.edu) as useful and transparent as possible, permitting visitors to more easily locate whatever information they seek (whether it be information about ASHP/CML and its activities and "products," teaching resources, ways to order our materials, etc.) not to mention to better understand our rather intricate and eclectic nature. To that end, we would like to turn to you, our friends, colleagues, and users, to help us determine what the ASHP/CML website needs to best serve our diverse community. We have set up an online survey and would deeply appreciate your taking the time to let us know what you think. |
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| SEPT 2005
Featured Articles :
1. Teaching American History Programs Update This summer middle-school and high school teachers from Queens, Brooklyn, and Staten Island participating in ASHP/CML’s Teaching American History professional development program attended two four-day Summer Institutes. The workshops provided an opportunity for teachers from Regions 4 and 7 in the New York City public school system to use the historical information and approaches they had learned during the previous year to create classroom activities for the 2005-06 school year. Participants, led by historians and history educators, worked with sets of 10 to 15 documents—including photographs, cartoons, letters, and oral histories—and then met in groups to create activities using the primary sources, such as devising “document based questions,” role playing situations, and debates. Teachers had an opportunity to model many of their activities in front of peers and to receive constructive feedback. The Summer Institute also featured several guest presenters. For example, Eugene Resnick, a social studies teacher from Midwood High School in Brooklyn presented “Doing Local History,” about assignments he developed to teach major themes in U.S. history through students exploring their own neighborhoods. Terry Judson, Sara Wolf, and Michael Starkey from International High School in Queens conducted a workshop on adapting primary source materials for English as a Second Language and low-literacy learners. Critical interrogation of documents was a key component of ASHP/CML’s Teaching American History 2005 Summer Institute (which is funded by the U.S. Department of Education). For example, teachers analyzed and discussed these photos, taken by Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano in October 1941, along with other primary sources, and then used them to create classroom activities on school segregation and racial discrimination in the Jim Crow South.
The Summer Institute's focus on incorporating documents into the classroom was praised by participating teachers. As one teacher explained, "training our students to use primary sources makes them less dependent on us as teachers because they learn critical thinking." Taking a student perspective, another participant exclaimed, "History is boring! But if we can move towards activities that arouse [students'] curiosity, engage them, and get them to ask questions, then we will achieve what we set out to do, and they'll do better on the tests." Another teacher put it succinctly: "Becoming better historians will make us better teachers." ASHP/CML's Teacher as Historian program kicked-off a three-year professional development collaboration with NYCDOE regional district 6 in Brooklyn. The program features four all-day seminars, intensive school-based mentoring, and after-school workshops with American history scholars and classroom educators. The goal of the program is to engage American history/social studies teachers in the process of advancing skills in historical studies and effective classroom instruction. 2. Ground One: Voices from Post-911 Chinatown ASHP/CML—in collaboration with the Museum of Chinese in the Americas, the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, and NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute—recently completed Ground One: Voices from Post-911 Chinatown. This project provides an in-depth portrait of the ways in which the identity of a community, largely neglected by national media following 9/11, was indelibly changed by that day. Ground One presents videotaped and transcribed interviews with 30 people who lived and worked in Chinatown, which are fully searchable by theme, keyword, or interviewee in English and Chinese. Ground One enriches the collection and extends the mission of The September 11 Digital Archive to use electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the 9/11 attacks.
3. ASHP/CML Awarded 2 New Teaching American History Grants ASHP/CML in partnership with Region 3 and Region 4 of New York City public schools and the Program in Social Studies, Department of Secondary Education, Queens College, CUNY has been awarded two new Teaching American History grants by the U.S. Department of Education. The diverse urban schools served by the program have high numbers of students from low-income families, high rates of student failure in U.S. history, and significant numbers of teachers with little American history teaching experience. Activities include four day-long retreats with historians, four day-long retreats with history educators, a two-day leadership retreat, and the use of evaluation data designed to help improve instructional practice and student performance. Participants include 90 teachers in Grades 7, 8, and 11, and 15 social studies instructional supervisors; both groups will disseminate program insights and resources to all history teachers in their districts. The first year of the program focuses on "Defining and Refining Democracy" and includes topics such as the American Revolution, the Constitution, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The second year continues the theme with topics such as the Rise of Industrial America, the Progressive Era, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement. The third year's theme of "American Encounters" will introduce teachers to topics such as Mid 19th Century Immigration, Settling the West, and 20th Century Immigration. 4. Dance, Disasters, and Divinity! A New Media Lab Expo for the Graduate Center Community On Wednesday, November 30th, the New
Media Lab (NML) will host an event to showcase innovative work by
CUNY faculty and doctoral students that incorporates new technology into
their scholarship. The NML Expo will feature panel discussions and demonstrations
that address the challenges posed by new media in doctoral training and
the latest approaches to using interactive technology in the graduate
classroom. Come, participate, and learn about the opportunities and benefits
available to faculty and GC Wednesday, November 30th, 2005, 1 - 4:00 pm Martin Segal Theatre, Refreshments will be served. 5. Biography and the Practice of History: A Public Seminar As biographies top bestseller lists and take up ever more shelf space at chain bookstores, some academic historians hold these popular publications at arm’s length and decry their narrow approach and lack of rigor. But what are the possibilities and limitations of biography as a medium for communicating history? As part of a series of public seminars on the presentation of the past, on December 20, 2005, ASHP/CML will host a conversation about history and biography at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A panel of historians and publishing professionals will address how scholars use biography as a form in interesting ways, recent publishing trends toward biographies of historical figures, and the tensions between the practice of academic history and the pressures of publishing and public tastes. Panelists will include: *Jennifer Fleischner, Professor of English at Hofstra University and author of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave *David Greenberg, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University; author of Nixon’s Shadow: The History of an Image, and columnist for Slate.com *David Nasaw, Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst *Wendy Wolf, Executive Editor, Viking Penguin Tuesday, December 20, 2005, 6 – 8 pm 6. A New Look for History Matters: Teaching the U.S. History Survey on the Web Check out the new design of our award-winning online gateway and resource for teaching the U.S. past, History Matters with improved navigation to get you to the site’s most popular and useful features—and a less somber (New York black) appearance! |
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| DECEMBER 2005
Featured Articles :
1. IS THERE A FUTURE FOR NEW MEDIA AND DOCTORAL EDUCATION? 
After welcoming remarks by Steve Brier, GC's Vice-President for Information Technology and External Programs and New Media Lab Co-Director, three panels addressed aspects of new media doctoral work from the vantage-point of faculty, students, and funders. On the first panel "Problems and Possibilities of Integrating Digital Media into Doctoral Education," Professors David Jaffee (History), Kevin Murphy (Art History), and Brian Schwartz (Physics) considered how using digital media has changed, with differing effects, their respective fields. The second panel featured five Graduate Center students whose multimedia projects were developed in the Lab: Yuri Artemov, a recent Ph.D. in Physics, discussed the impact of creating 3-D simulations of vortices in superconductors on his dissertation (http://www.newmedialab.cuny.edu/vortex/); Beth Counihan, a recent Ph.D. in English and Queensboro Community College faculty member, considered the opportunities and professional hazards of producing "Mousepads and Memoirs: An Online Oral History Project with Senior Women" (http://www.newmedialab.cuny.edu/beth/); Rebecca Amato, a fourth-year student in History, described the challenge of constructing teachable narratives for the "Virtual New York City" website (http://www.vny.cuny.edu); Ed Lingan, a recent Ph.D. in Theatre, talked about the online life of his doctoral research on occult religions and performance; and Ellen La Forge, a second-year student in Art History, described her digital re-creation of the experience of viewing Frederic Church's panoramic 1859 painting "The Heart of the Andes (http://www.timegallery.org/HA/). The last panel, "New Problems, New Solutions: Institutional Support for New Media Scholarship," addressed funding opportunities in the humanities and sciences and featured Dr. Saul Fisher, Director of Fellowship Programs at the American Council of Learned Societies, who delineated the purpose of and response to ACLS's new Digital Innovation Fellowship initiative. And, to show that there is, incredible as it may seem, a lighter side to doctoral education, John Jay mathematician and New Media Lab participant Gary Welz offered a satirical Powerpoint presentation on "The Digital Archive of Everything." The compelling and controversial presentations prompted enthusiastic interaction with the well-informed audience. As revealed by the lively proceedings, this is a topic of great interest to Graduate Center students, faculty, and administrators. Having only scratched the surface of issues involving new media and a range of graduate disciplines, this event will be followed by future Expos that will continue to explore the subject as we also highlight the many ways that students and faculty can produce digital projects at the New Media Lab's facility. For more information about work at the Lab contact: NML Managing Director Andrea Vasquez at avasquez1@gc.cuny.edu 
2. THE LOST MUSEUM RECEIVES NEH CITATION 3. BIOGRAPHY AND THE PRACTICE OF HISTORY: A PUBLIC SEMINAR *Jennifer Fleischner, Professor of English at Hofstra University and author of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckley: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave *David Greenberg, Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University; author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image, and columnist for Slate.com *David Nasaw, Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center, CUNY, and author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst *Wendy Wolf, Executive Editor, Viking Penguin Tuesday, December 20, 2005, 6 8 pm Martin Segal Theatre, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th Streets) (Cosponsored with the Center for the Humanities) 4. FOREVER FREE: THE STORY OF EMANCIPATION AND RECONSTRUCTION |
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2005
NEWSLETTERS |
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On November 30th the ASHP/CML's New Media Lab hosted a one-day conference at
the City University Graduate Center, "Career Path or Road to Nowhere? A New
Media Lab Expo on Graduate Education and Digital Media"
(