Dr. Jessie Wallace Hughan was a trailblazing New York City public school educator and pacifist. Hughan was a socialist, and she was among numerous teachers who faced investigations for anti-patriotic activities at the turn of the 20th-century, when teachers across the country faced intense scrutiny and legal challenges if they were suspected of…

"Terra Cognita" surveys the current landscape of archival research and the experiences of emerging scholars seeking to navigate it. Drawing on data from the Council on Library and Information Resources' (CLIR's) Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources, the report takes an in-depth look at how the conditions and…

College and universities were slow to start collecting records relating to the history of their institutions. In the nineteenth and into the twentieth century it was usually a dedicated librarian, administrator, or professor who decided to rescue the history of their school. Educating archivists to assume this role has become a top priority for…

This manuscript, written with the educator in mind, describes the Youth Historians in Harlem (YHH) program, a twenty-week after-school history program that engaged urban students in history by immersing them in aspects of the historical process. Throughout the program, a group of Black male high school students were apprenticed as historical…

"The value of the Art Education becomes more and more apparent as a means of honorable support and of high culture and enjoyment," stated the catalog of Ingham University in western New York State in 1863. The Art Department there would prepare "pupils for Teachers and Practical Artists." This statement reveals some of the…

Background/Context: William H. Kilpatrick is known worldwide as "Mr. Project Method." Despite considerable scholarship by Lawrence A. Cremin, Herbert M. Kliebard, Milton A. Bleeke, John A. Beineke, and others, the origin of Kilpatrick's celebrated paper of 1918 has never been explored in depth and its historical context. Focus of Study:…

In teacher's idealized history classroom, students are abuzz with questions. They are eager to jump into a serious analysis of primary sources. They relish additional opportunities to engage historiographical debates. They are, as teachers like to say, "thinking historically." While there are few easy ways to create these idealized…

This article examines the lives of three children of Dutch men and Mohawk women: the Mohawk leader Smits Jan and the siblings Jacques van Slyck and Hilletie van Olinda of the Dutch village of Schenectady. In recent years several historians have examined how cross-cultural settings enabled people to reshape their identities. William Hart sees the…

This article profiles Christopher Benfey, 53--an art critic for Slate, a poet, and a prolific literary essayist for such venues as "The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic," and "The New York Review of Books." His latest book, "A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily…

The New York State Newspaper Project identifies, describes, preserves, and makes available to researchers the significant newspapers in all communities in New York State since the first publication in 1725. This article describes the development of a Web site for publicity and to increase access to researchers and historians. (Author/LRW)

When students learn about history in elementary schools across the United States, they take tests and write essays explaining what happened in the past. It is not clear, however, that students necessarily "think about" history. Yet if students know dates and names, but not the meanings of events or how those events connect to other…

When asked by Thurgood Marshall during the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case to join a team of scholars to answer questions posed by the U.S. Supreme Court about the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment, Dr. John Hope Franklin didn't hesitate to accept. This document contains personal accounts of the famous…

Much good work has recently been done on the socioeconomic history of teaching in the United States, particularly in relation to the "feminization" of the profession that occurred over the course of the nineteenth century. This article brings together evidence from disparate local sources in both North Carolina and New York to explore…

The distinguished Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter possessed a scholarly imagination unusually open to fresh approaches to illuminating the past. In the seven years that separated the publications of "American Political Tradition" (1948) and "The Age of Reform" (1955), Hofstadter absorbed new intellectual…