Previous posts here have addressed issues raised at the annual conference of the American Historical Association (AHA) on of the lack of history jobs and the lack of history interest by the press. Related to that, a discussion on a history list last summer focused on the disconnect between the world of academic historians and the general public under the heading of “Scholarly versus Popular History.” The following submission by Lance R. Blyth, University of New Mexico (7/19/11) deserves attention: Read more
Education
History Habits: National Parks Passports for Kids
History Habits is a series designed to offer activities to parents to encourage their children’s love and enjoyment of history. The goal is to provide parents with tools they can use to stimulate your children’s active involvement in the history that surrounds them every day.
Next time you go exploring either locally or across the country, do not forget your Passport. That is your Passports to Your National Parks and, most importantly for parents, do not forget to bring along your Kids’ Passport to Your National Parks Companion. Passports are a way to “record” your visits to National Parks, Monuments, Recreation Areas, etc. National Park visitors centers and book stores usually have passport stations where you can stamp your books with their location stamp. (Many sites in New York actually have more than one stamp.) The cancellations, similar to those received on an international passport, record the name of the park and the date you visited.
“It is always a delight for me to see families with children come to Martin Van Buren National Historic Site and the first thing they ask for is the stamp for their NPS passports” explains Park Superintendent Dan Dattilio. “Once they get that important task done they
go out and enjoy the park.”
As a parent of two preschoolers, I have seen these passports engage my children by creating a fun learning experience. What I really appreciate is the Kids’ Passport to Your National Parks Companion is an owner manual to the National Parks for children. This companion allows children (guided by parents) to develop a connection with history and the natural world. I hopeful someday my children will appreciate having this record and that is will spark great memories.
These passports provides background information on the National Park Service (NPS) and encourages children to use all of their senses to explore parks. There is plenty of space to record observations, sketch plants and animals, list accomplishments, track visits, and even collect park ranger autographs. The collecting of autographs has created a dialogue between my children and the Park Rangers. It is great fun to see the children engaged in learning and it is my hope that this is the first step in creating stewards for history and National Park sites.
Passports are easy to obtain. You don’t even need a birth certificate or photo. Most NPS visitors centers sell the spiral-bound 6 x 3.5 inch passports and a special Kids’ Passport to Your National Parks Companion for $13.95. For further information call Eastern National 1 (877) NAT-PARK or go to www.eparks.com.
One suggestion for parents to extend the learning is to bring extra index cards and collect each cancellation stamps on its own index card. This allows for scrap booking the stamp with photos from the site to create a memory book.
If you want to dig deeper into NPS cancellation stamps, think of joining the National Parks Travelers Club. This is a nonprofit, hobbyist organization that have an entire list of where NPS stamps and non-NPS stamps (lighthouses, National Registry homes, State Parks, etc) are located. It is free to join the discussion boards for information on National Park travel or for $10 a year one has access to the entire stamp database, as well as Google Earth maps to each location.
Cancellation sites in New York include:
African Burial Ground NM—New York City
Castle Clinton NM—New York City
Eleanor Roosevelt NHS—Hyde Park
Ellis Island—New York City, N.J./N.Y.
Erie Canalway NHC—Waterford, Buffalo,Rome, Stillwater, Seneca Falls, AKWAABA, Amherst Museum, Burden IronWorks, Camillus Erie Canal Park, Chittenango Landing Canal Boat Museum, Day Peckinpaugh, Erie Canal Discovery Center, Erie Canal Museum, Erie Canalway Visitor Center, Historic Palmyra Museums, Mabee Farm HS, Mary Jemison, Port of Newark Canal Park, RiverSpark VC, Rochester Museum & Science Center, Sam Patch, Sch’dy CHS History Museum, Schoharie Crossing SHS, Seneca Museum of Industry & Waterways, Spencerport Depot & Canal Museum, UGR History Project
Federal Hall N MEM—New York City
Fire Island NS—Wilderness, Watch Hill, Lighthouse, Sailors Haven, William Floyd Estate, Patchogue, Long Island
Fort Stanwix NM—Rome
Gateway NRA—Jamaica Bay- Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn- Wildlife Refuge District, Queens- Breezy Point, Fort Tilden, Ft. Wadsworth- Miller Field, Staten Island- Great Kills Park, Staten Island
General Grant N MEM—New York City
Governors Island NM—New York City
Hamilton Grange NM–New York City
Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt NHS–Hyde Park
Lower East Side Tenement Museum NHS— New York City
Manhattan Sites–Federal Hall, St. Paul’s Church NHS Mount Vernon, General Grant New York City
Martin Van Buren NHS—Kinderhook
North Country National Scenic Trail
Sagamore Hill NHS—Oyster Bay, Sagamore Hill Nature Trail, Roosevelt Museum at Old Orchard,
Saint Paul’s Church NHS–Mount Vernon
Saratoga NHP—Stillwater
Statue of Liberty NM—New York City
Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace NHS—New York City
Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural NHS—Buffalo
Thomas Cole NHS—Catskill
Upper Delaware SRR—Narrowsburg, Zane Grey Museum
Vanderbilt Mansion NHS—Hyde Park,
Women’s Rights NHP—Seneca Falls, M’Clintock House
Sean Kelleher. Kelleher is the Historian for the Town of Saratoga and Village of Victory in the Upper Hudson Valley. As an educator, he was a New Hampshire Council for the Social Studies Executive Board member and the Director of the New Hampshire Teacher Training Institute for Character and Citizenship Education.
Peter Feinman: Why is the Press Indifferent to History?How Do We Communicate History?
At the recently concluded annual conference of the American Historical Association, in addition to the passionate discussions about “NO HISTORY JOBS! NO HISTORY JOBS! NO HISTORY JOBS!” featured in my previous post, there were four panels on “Historians, Journalists, and the Challenges of Getting It Right.” Excerpts from a report by Rick Shenkman, publisher and editor-in-chief of the History News Network on these presentations follow [his full report is online]. Read more
Students Write About Place, Win Class Trips
Teaching the Hudson Valley (THV) has announced the winners of its first student writing contest. Three winning writers and their classmates will visit the places they wrote about with costs covered by a THV Explore Award.
Aayushi Jha, a fifth grader at Main Street School in Irvington, is the elementary school winner. Her essay, Tug of War, describes an experience aboard the Hudson River Sloop Clearwater. Aayushi’s teacher, Susan Wallace, responded to the announcement with this note, “WOW! We are so THRILLED! Thank you so much for offering this opportunity to the future
environmentalists and writers of the world!” You can read Aayushi’s essay online.
“Climbing up Bonticou Crag, I split open the wilderness,” is the provocative opening line of Looking Topside Down, a poem about the Mohonk Preserve by high school winner Nicole Yang. The middle school winner is seventh grader Emilie Hostetter who wrote a poem about Minnewaska State Park called I Did Not Know. Nicole and Emilie are students of Janine Guadagno at Tabernacle Christian Academy in Poughkeepsie. You can read both poems here.
“We received many wonderful and inspiring pieces of writing,” said THV coordinator Debi Duke. “Although we could have only three winners, we’re looking forward to publishing more student writers throughout the winter and spring. Essays about Eleanor Roosevelt’s Val kill in Hyde Park, the replica of Henry Hudson’s Half Moon, and Muscoot Farm in Westchester County
are among those readers can watch for.”
Peter Feinman: The Debate Rages Over History Jobs
The American Historical Association (AHA) held its annual conference on January 5-8, 2012, in Chicago. One of the non-academic issues it addressed was the employment situation in the history profession. The impetus for the last-minute session at the conference on the subject was an essay by Jesse Lemisch, Professor Emeritus of History at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York titled “History is Worth Fighting For, But Where is the AHA?“. Read more
New School Break History Programming in Troy
The Rensselaer County Historical Society (RCHS) has announced new school-break week programming for 2012. Each day includes activities, projects, crafts and games. Children will also have time to tour the Hart-Cluett House and explore downtown Troy. The programs are for children in grades 3 – 6. The programs run from 9:00am – 4:00pm (early drop-off and late pick-up, and extended care are available for an additional fee). Each program includes materials, craft supplies and daily snacks (though not lunch). The cost for RCHS Members is $225- Non-Members, $275. Early-bird registration provides a 10% discount if you register before January 27, 2012 for February’s program and March 16, 2012 for April’s program. To register call 518-272-7232 x.12 or visit www.rchsonline.org for registration materials.
If These Walls Could Talk
Tuesday, February 21, – Friday, February 24, 2012
Buildings, buildings, they are all around us but how many times have you really looked at a building? In this program, students will explore the many sides of buildings and participate in scavenger hunts in downtown Troy looking for Lions, Bells and Faces, design their own dream home, build a model city and more.
Trail of Hope – The Underground Railroad
Tuesday, April 10 – Friday, April 13, 2012
Who were the people who made up the Underground Railroad and where did it take place? Students will take a walking tour to sites that are connected to the Underground Railroad, view an art exhibit, make their own pieces inspired by history, and perform a play about a dramatic rescue.
Finger Lakes Museum Eagle Naming Contest Winner
The Finger Lakes Museum’s first school-based program, Name the Eagle, was featured participation from over 20 school districts and private schools across the Finger Lakes region. Students from all grade levels were given the opportunity to submit their favorite name for the future Finger Lakes Museum bald eagle.
Hundreds of submissions were received from kindergarteners to seniors. After careful review, the Education/Programs committee of the Museumchose their top choice as well as a second, third and a special recognition.
Broden Harron, a first-grader from Frank Knight School in Seneca Falls, was the first-place winner with his name, Soren – the new name of The Finger Lakes Museum bald eagle. Second place was a tie between Elli Cromkeecke, a fourth-grader from the Penn Yan Elementary School with his name Eco, and Luke Monfort, a second-grader from State Road Elementary School in Webster with his name Lakely. Third place goes to Adrienne Marie Vedder, a fourth-grader from Cincinnatus Central School with her name Shadow. Special recognition goes to Ariana Boshack, a fifth-grader from Northstar Christian School in Rochester, who named the eagle Curtis, after a loved one who is serving overseas.
Broden Harron and his class at Frank Knight School will be receiving a visit from the Museum’s guest bald eagle, Liberty. All students will receive a special certificate of participation.
CCNY Early-Career Historians Win NEH Awards
Dr. Gregory Downs, associate professor of history, and Dr. Emily Greble, assistant professor of history at The City College of New York are recipients of faculty research awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grants, announced by NEH December 9, will support book projects currently in development.
“The NEH fellowships are extremely competitive- only eight percent of applicants are successful. To have two early-career faculty members in the same department come up winners is remarkable,” said Dr. Geraldine Murphy, acting dean of humanities and the arts at CCNY, in congratulating them.
“Our department has undergone significant growth because The City College administration made a commitment to bring in energetic scholars and teachers,” said Professor Downs, who serves as department chair. “We’ve hired eight new faculty members in nine years and we are seeing that faith pay off.”
“We seem to have become a hotbed of new and innovative scholarship,” added Professor Greble. “We see the product of this intellectually stimulating environment in so many areas of departmental life, from the number of students we have been placing in top doctoral programs to the rigorous publication record of our faculty, to the winning of top academic fellowships like the NEH and the Rome Prize.”
Four Class of 2011 history majors are now in PhD programs at Yale University, Princeton University and University of Michigan. Associate Professor of History Barbara Ann Naddeo received the Rome Prize in 2010 for her scholarship on the city of Naples, Italy. Assistant Professor of History Adrienne Petty is conducting an oral history project on African-American farm owners in the South in collaboration with Professor Mark Schultz of Lewis University supported by an NEH award.
Professor Downs’ project, “The Ends of War: American Reconstruction and the Problems of Occupation,” examines the transition from Civil War to Reconstruction and asks why former slaves, loyal whites, Freedmen’s Bureau agents and northern emigres became disillusioned. The problems emanated not as much from free-labor ideology or racism as from a sharp reduction of military force in the region, which resulted in a power vacuum, he contends.
At the end of the Civil War, the U.S. government, fearing budget deficits, demobilized at such a rapid pace that within 18 months only 12,000 troops remained in the former Confederacy. As the military withdrew from different areas, hundreds of small wars broke out between former Confederates and organized freedmen.
Professor Downs attributes the situation to a naive belief among elected officials in Washington that they could expand voting rights in the South at the same time that the federal government was reducing its presence there to cut the budget. “What was needed was not an expansion of democracy, but an expansion of enforcement,” he says. “Both sides figured out that violence was the logical conclusion. By the time they had mobilized it was too late for the government to act.”
The project grows out of an earlier monograph, “Declarations of Independence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1860 – 1908,” published in 2011 by University of North Carolina Press. However, Professor Downs says his thinking has been influenced by recent U.S. experience with occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Seeing how difficult it is to change social power, create new lines of authority and disrupt societies makes me wonder why we were so confident we could do it in the post-war South. Rights need enforceability to make them real,” he adds, pointing to the intervention by federal troops in the Little Rock Central High School in 1957 as an example.
Professor Greble’s project, “Islam and the European Nation-State: Balkan Muslims between Mosque and State, 1908 – 1949,” examines how South Slavic Muslims adapted to six significant political shifts over a 41-year period. In each instance new governments sought – in their own way – to limit, secularize and shape Muslim institutions as the region went from Ottoman to Habsburg control, to liberal nation-states, to authoritarian monarchs, to fascist regimes and to socialist regimes.
Her initial research suggests Muslims proactively adapted the norms and customs of their faith to define Islam in their own terms. Additionally, they sought to become part of the international community of Muslims to confront being dispossessed of property, Sharia law, institutional autonomy and the right to define Islam.
To assert their influence, some Muslims formed political parties and cultural societies that promoted Muslim cultural agendas. More conservative members of the community sought to strengthen and protect local Muslim networks through codification of Sharia law and Islamic society. Others engaged in clandestine activities such as underground madrassas.
Much of Professor Greble’s research will examine the changing role of Sharia courts. Under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, these were codified and given jurisdiction over Muslim socio-religious affairs, such as marriage, divorce and inheritance. Muslim parts of the Balkans, particularly Yugoslavia, retained this legal autonomy between the two world wars and during Nazi and fascist occupation, but lost it after communists came to power and shut down the Sharia courts in 1946.
Finger Lakes Boating Museum Appoints Exec Director
The Finger Lakes Boating Museum has announced the appointment of Dr. David C. Danahar, a retired college president, as Executive Director of the Boating Museum. Danahar, who now lives in Canandaigua, was President of Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, MI, from 2001 to 2011.
“We are delighted to announce the engagement of Dr. Danahar as Executive Director of the Boating Museum,” said William Oben, president of the Museum. “He brings a wealth of valuable knowledge in resource development and organizational administration gained from his extensive academic career.”
The Boating Museum reached agreement with the City of Geneva in the fall of 2009 to establish a permanent home on the Geneva waterfront in association with the city’s Visitor Center. The building, which will be located on the current Geneva Chamber of Commerce site, is being enabled by a $2 million grant provided to the city by state Sen. Michael Nozzolio.
Also named to the staff of the Boating Museum as assistant to the executive director is Bobbi Clifford of Romulus. Clifford is retired after 35 years of teaching in various local school districts, including Geneva, North Rose-Wolcott, Naples, Lyons, Clyde-Savannah and Newark. She coordinated and directed programs for Gifted and Talented Students and Arts-In-Education programs. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Seneca Lake Pure Waters Association, Inc.
As president of Southwest Minnesota State, Danahar was the chief executive officer of the university responsible for leading the faculty, staff and students in developing and accomplishing the university’s mission.
His administrative experience also includes serving as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Loyola University in New Orleans from 1992-2001, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Fairfield University in Connecticut from 1985-1992, Director of General Education at the State University of New York at Oswego from 1979-1985 and Acting Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences at the State University of New York at Oswego in 1983 and 1984-1985.
In another development related to the appointment of an executive director, the Boating Museum has engaged Danforth Development of Rochester to lead the creation of a fundraising plan for capital needs for the organization.
The Boating Museum’s collection of more than 100 historic boats and vessels built in the Finger Lakes also includes numerous related artifacts and extensive reference material. Besides the story of boat manufacturing, the Boating Museum also researches and informs on the impact that marine transportation has had on the development of the region.
The collection of boats and artifacts is being moved to a storage facility in the Geneva Enterprise Development Center on North Genesee Street arranged by the Geneva IDA. Portions of the collection will be displayed on a rotating basis within the new facility, which will also feature boat rides on Seneca Lake, active on-water programs including sailing and small boat handling, interactive workshops and displays to engage visitors in the design, construction and use of the boats and boating history materials and programs.
The Boating Museum is a 501c3 not-for-profit corporation and was chartered by the New York State Department of Education in 1997 to “research, document, preserve and share the boating history of the Finger Lakes region.”
Fort Ticonderoga Offers 2nd Material Culture Seminar
Fort Ticonderoga will host its Second Annual “Material Matters: It’s in the Details” seminar the weekend of January 28 & 29, 2012. This weekend program focuses on the material culture of the 18th century and is intended for collectors, re-enactors, and people with a general interest in learning more about objects of the 18th century and what they can tell us about history. “Material Matters” takes place in the Deborah Clarke Mars Education Center at Fort Ticonderoga and is open by pre-registration only.
A panel of material culture experts from the United States and Canada come to Fort Ticonderoga for the weekend to share their knowledge of 18th-century material culture in a series of presentations. Designed for those who want a deeper understanding of the everyday objects that help tell the story of life and the contests for control of North America during the 18th century, the weekend’s informal approach enables attendees to interact with presenters and provides an opportunity to examine 18th-century objects up close.
o Fort Ticonderoga’s Curator of Collections Chris Fox will discuss the archeological remains of clothing and sewing-related artifacts in the Fort’s collection found during the Fort’s restoration in the early 20th century.
o Matthew Keagle, a scholar of 18th-century Atlantic material culture, will talk about grenadier caps used by various 18th-century armies and their cultural significance.
o David Ledoyen, a heritage presentation coordinator from Montreal, will explore 18th-century surgeons’ instruments and the evolution of surgeons as a profession in New France.
o Stuart Lilie, Director of Interpretation at Fort Ticonderoga, will discuss equestrian saddlery and horse furniture. Lilie is a saddler specializing in 18th- and early 19th-century saddlery.
o Sarah Woodyard, an apprentice in millinery at Colonial Williamsburg, will talks about 18th-century undergarments.
Registration for “Material Matters” is now open. A brochure with the complete schedule and a registration form is available on Fort Ticonderoga’s website at www.fort-ticonderoga.org by selecting “Explore and Learn” and choosing “Life Long Learning” on the drop-down menu. A printed copy is also available upon request by contacting Rich Strum, Director of Education, at 518-585-6370. The cost for the weekend is $120 ($100 for members of the Friends of Fort Ticonderoga).
Photo: Speaker Henry Cooke (left) and Curator of Collections Chris Fox (right) examine an original 18th-century coat during a “Material Matters” session last winter.