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The Social History of Queens and Brooklyn Research Project
Resource Type: Research assignment Instructor: Kara Schlichting Title: Associate Professor Department: History Course: Hist 348, History of the Outer Boroughs Description “The Social History of Queens and Brooklyn Research Project” is a research assignment that culminates in an original research paper. Students will research a topic of their interest related to 20th century social history. Social history explores the everyday experiences of regular people, including how ordinary people experienced major events (political, social), the institutions that shape peoples’ lives, cultural practices, and family and community dynamics. We will use material from 2 oral history collections as inspiration: Brooklyn Center for History Oral History Collection LaGuardia Wagner Archives’ Voices of Queensbridge…
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Place, History, and Memory: New York City’s World’s Fairs in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park
Resource Type: Experiential activityInstructor: Peter Conolly-SmithTitle: Associate ProfessorDepartment: HistoryCourse: HIST 392W Description This proposal for an intermediate-level History seminar taps into students’ memory, sense of place, and history skills by focusing on a space many of them already know: Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. From its origins as wetlands converted in the early twentieth century to a dumping ground for ashes memorialized in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and on to its later incarnation as the site of the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, the park’s history and those of the two fairs—richly documented, all—provide ample material for a place-based seminar that utilizes multiple aspects of experiential learning. While all the…
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Local Activism, National Movements: Civil Rights Movements in Queens
Resource Type: Unit Module Instructor: Kayla Cato-Piersaint Title: Adjunct Professor Department: Africana Studies Course: N/A Description This teaching resource is a unit module on the Civil Rights Movement, developed for use in my Africana Studies course and available to faculty in both the Africana Studies and History departments. While the Civil Rights Movement is often framed through its events in the American South, this module centers the borough of Queens, New York, as a critical site of civil rights activism, leadership, and political strategy. By localizing this movement to the borough of Queens, students are encouraged to see the Civil Rights Movement not only as a national struggle, but also…
