Shakespeare in the Park

Description

Greg Young of the Bowery Boys details the history of the New York Shakespeare Festival, more commonly known as Shakespeare in the Park. Originating in 1954, in workshops and free performances spearheaded by Joseph Papp, the festival now takes place yearly at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Young looks at Papps's struggle with park commissioner Robert Moses over holding the festival in Central Park, resulting in the construction of the Delacorte Theater in 1961, and at the recent history of the festival and at the actors who have participated in it.

Prospect Park

Description

Greg Young and Tom Meyers follow the 19th-century creation and development of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had previously designed Central Park.

The Modern Civil Rights Movement: A River of Purposeful Anger

Question

Did individual African American activists spark the Civil Rights Movement?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks are silent about defining race and racism, even though the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements were efforts to challenge and eliminate racism. Rather than addressing the outrage of systematically being denied basic human rights by the U.S. Supreme Court, while citizens in a democracy, textbooks suggest that individual African Americans were merely sad or angry because individual white people did not want to fight wars, play baseball, learn, ride public transportation or eat lunch with them.

Source Excerpt

The most important lessons of the modern Civil Rights Movement will not be gained from passively reading textbooks. Examining primary sources will place students closer to the scenes of the modern Civil Rights Movement and its antecedent movements. Too often Dr. King is represented in textbooks as the person who was sent to save African Americans from racism, or the most powerful leader of the modern Civil Rights Movement, or as a political moderate. Instead, he was one of many powerful leaders.

Historian Excerpt

Textbooks define segregation benignly with little reference to the ways in which northern and southern state governments and businesses systematically – and over the course of several decades -- reinforced an ideology of white supremacy through violence. Other groups of people affected by these same laws and practices – including American Indians, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Jews and Arabs – are seldom included in textbook discussions of racism. These absences strip away the underlying motivation for collective anger and social action.

Abstract

Textbooks present the modern Civil Rights Movement in the same way as other U.S. social movements -- a spontaneous, emotional eruption of saintly activists led by two or three inspired orators in response to momentary aberrations in the exercise of democracy. In particular, textbooks imply that, until World War II, African Americans had been relatively content with social, economic, and political conditions in the U.S. Then, suddenly, African Americans were angered that they could not fight on battlefields, play baseball, attend schools, or sit on buses with whites. Further, African Americans were the only people to observe and protest these conditions. Finally, to act on their discontent, African Americans required instructions from a benevolent federal government, or a single charismatic or sympathetic leader. A more accurate telling of the story of the modern Civil Rights Movement indicates that the “river of purposeful anger” has been long, wide and well populated.

The modern Civil Rights Movement is often marked as beginning with the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision banning school segregation or the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move from a bus seat in Montgomery, AL and ends with the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act or with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 (Or, more recently, with the election of President Barack Obama). In some textbooks, the context for this movement are the years following the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court case of Plessy V.

The Malcolm X Project

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Photo, Introductory graphic, The Malcolm X Project
Annotation

This site is dedicated to the study of the life and legacy of Malcolm X. Only one of three "initiatives" is publicly available (Columbia faculty, staff, and students may also access the site's "multi-media study environment" section). "Oral histories," "outreach," and "Malcolm X biography project" are under construction. A chronology traces Malcolm's life from his birth in May 1925 to his assassination in February 1965, with short entries on major events. "Government Documents" offers FBI files on Malcolm X—4,000 pages of surveillance reports—covering the period 1954 to 1964. A brief summary accompanies each report and the files can be searched by keyword. The site's project journal, focusing on particular themes and issues, has seven articles on Malcolm X and eight weblog postings. Additionally, the site offers an e-seminar "Life after Death: Malcolm X and American Culture" by Columbia professor Dr. Manning Marble for a fee (available free to Columbia faculty, staff, and students). When this site is completed, it will be a good starting point for researching the ideas and life of Malcolm X.

Teaching with Laurel Grove School

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laurel grove school
Annotation

Laurel Grove is a one-room school house in Northern Virginia. In the 1990s, a community team successfully blocked a developer's bulldozer, formed the Laurel Grove School Association, and restored the one room schoolhouse. An interdisciplinary team of community members, curriculum experts, teachers, historians, and museum curators recovered the history of the school from oral histories and local archives, refurbished the classroom, and crafted a history curriculum to teach slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and life under Jim Crow. Today the school is a museum along the African-American heritage trail.

Six lesson plans (scaffolded for K-12) focus on understanding racial issues in Virginia from 1800 through the 1930s, on working with primary sources, and with an emphasis on critical thinking skills. Essays fill in the historical background including Slavery and Free Negroes, 1800-1860, A Look at Virginians During Reconstruction, The Impact of the Jim Crow Era on Education, and A Child's Life in a Segregated Society. Lesson plans are geared to standards and exemplify exploration of local resources to teach American history.

The Laurel Grove website is a work-in-progress, building on the open-source Omeka web-publishing platform especially for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and history enthusiasts developed through George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.

Images of African Americans from the Cook Collection of Photographs

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Photo, Boys with Banjo, 1880s
Annotation

This site consists of nearly 300 images of Afro-Virginians dating from the 1880s to the early 20th century. Images are scanned from prints taken by father and son, George S. Cook and Huestes P. Cook, principally in the Richmond and Central Virginia area. Users can search the digital collection by keyword or browse images, including agriculture, education, recreation, religion, tobacco, and urban life. Documentation of labor is the most extensive, while the images of children ad education are fascinating. This site is valuable to those studying African-American life at the turn of the century or Virginia history.

Dox Thrash: An African American Master Printmaker Rediscovered

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Graphite and brown pencil, "Self-portrait," Dox Thrash, Early 1930s
Annotation

The art of Dox Thrash (1893-1965) is exhibited in more than 60 images—mostly reproductions of his prints, but also including drawings and photographs of the artist at work. Born in Griffin, GA, Thrash spent most of his life in Philadelphia, which he expressively documented in his artworks. The exhibit proceeds along a timeline from birth to death that allows visitors to read a biographical narrative placing his life in appropriate historical context and to view images relevant to each period. Texts and images also can be downloaded in PDF format. Thrash's prints illuminated aspects of African American community life in Philadelphia with scenes of street life, workers, domestic scenes, and leisure activities. Thrash also portrayed scenes drawn from his experience as a soldier in World War I, life on the road, and the lynching of blacks.

In addition to his artistic creations, Thrash invented a new and influential printmaking technique—the carborundum process—in the 1930s as he worked in the WPA Graphic Arts Workshop. The exhibit provides descriptions and images of nine techniques Thrash used, and also includes four audio files of the curator discussing the process of putting the exhibit together. Valuable for students of the history of art and for those interested in expressive depictions of African American life and culture in Philadelphia.

Atlanta in the Civil Rights Movement

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Logo, Atlanta Regional Council for Higher Education
Annotation

This well-designed website explores the fundamental role of the churches, businesses, and institutions of Atlanta's Auburn Avenue, as well as the colleges and universities of the Atlanta University Center, in developing black leadership in the civil rights movement. The main section, "Atlanta's Story," is a timeline of Atlanta's civil rights movement between 1940 and 1970 with four essays: "Gradualism and Negotiation" covers the years 1940-1949; "Retrenchment and Redirection" discuses the events of 1950-1959; "Direct Action and Desegregation" examines the years between 1960 and 1965; and "The Quest for Black Power" explores 1966-1970.

Additionally, an extensive bibliography offers a list of more than 120 books and 50 articles both on the Atlanta Civil Rights movement and the movement in general. "Web resources" has more than 50 links to related websites. The site also provides a searchable inventory of special collections materials. Finally, the site offers a small photo gallery of 25 images. A useful starting point for anyone researching the civil rights movement or Atlanta.

Rochester Historical Society [NY]

Description

The Rochester Historical Society chronicles the history and architectural heritage of Rochester, New York. The society is primarily a research-oriented organization, but also offers school outreach programs including the "History of the Road" program, which is a traveling presentation program. In addition, the society offers extensive research resources that are open to the public.

The website offers information regarding the society and the programs it offers.

The American 1890s

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Painting, Chicago World's Fair, The American 1890s
Annotation

A collaborative effort between students and faculty at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, this site includes two sections. In the first, a timeline from 1888 to 1899 provides, for each year, snapshots of major national events, personalities, and statistics as well as excursions to approximately 30 additional links, background essays, images, quotations, bibliographies, and other material. The second, "Bowling Green, Ohio: A Tour of the Crystal City," contains 27 photographs; a month-by-month timeline covering town events during the years 1892-97; a 19,000-word essay written in 1897 on Bowling Green's "early history"; and essays ranging from 1,500 to 3,000 words on specific topics. No search engine, but the site may be browsed by year. Useful both as a general overview of the period and as a local history resource.