UPCOMING EVENTS

 

RECENT EVENTS

92 Talks: History in YOUR back YARD presents An Oceanic Solution to Race: Colonization and the Nineteenth-Century Dream of a White Nation

 

MOMA Archives Open House and Private Tour

The Museum of Modern Art is having Open House in their Library and Museum Archives on Tuesday March 13, 2012.  In conjunction with this, the NYU Chapter of the Society of American Archivists has scheduled a 45-minute private tour of MoMA’s library and an informal visit to their archives. The tour of the library will start at 2:00pm.

Space is limited.  Anyone interested in attending should contact, Lynda Van Wart at NYUChapSAA@gmail.com.

 

92 Talks: History in YOUR back YARD

From Wallabout Bay to the End of Her Rope A Brooklynite’s Valentine Turns to Bloody Revenge Thursday, February 2, 6:30pm

 

Oral History Workshop Series

The Archives and Public History Program invites you to participate in a series of Oral History Workshops Thursday February 9th, 16th and 23rd from 5-7pm. This  program is specifically geared toward graduate students planning on working with oral history methods in their dissertations or theses. Graduate students in History, Public History, Archives, Museum Studies, American Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology are especially encouraged to attend.

The sessions will be led by Sady Sullivan, Oral Historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Participants should come prepared to talk about a few short readings. All sessions will be held in the conference room at Fales Library & Special Collections, Bobst Library.

Please RSVP if you wish to attend the sessions by emailing aph.nyu@gmail.com with your name, year, and department. Enrollment is limited to 20 people, so sign up early!

Session 1: Intro to Oral History, Thursday, February 9
This introduction to the field of oral history will present theory and methodology through a discussion of the history of oral history; the strengths, weaknesses and peculiarities of oral history as evidence; reliability of memory; and how to use existing oral history collections (audio v. transcript), including examples of archives/collections with different levels of accessibility.

Session 2: Doing Oral History, Thursday, February 16
For students who are interested in conducting their own oral history projects, this session will focus on the practical issues of doing oral history: project planning, interviewing skills (how oral history interviewing is different from journalism, social sciences, documentary film, normal conversation), release forms, navigating the IRB, technological tools and equipment, choosing an archival repository and the importance of archival descriptions and accessibility – how to make sure your collection is usable by future generations.

Session 3: Ethical Issues in Oral History Thursday, February 23
Whether using an existing oral history collection or building your own, there are many ethical considerations to keep in mind at all stages, from interviewing to writing/exhibiting, to choosing an archival repository. Issues to be discussed: interpersonal dynamics in interviews, positionality, sharing authority with narrators, reciprocity/ restitution, confidentiality/anonymity/privacy, sharing interpretation, oral history as empowerment, oral history and documenting social movements, oral history and movement building.

 

92 Talks: Tools and Talent

Mapping History: 400 Years in 5 Minutes Thursday, March 1st 6:30pm

 

Private Tour and Lunch at New York Historical Society

Friday, January 27th, 10am-1pm

This three-hour event at the New York Historical Society will begin with a tour of the newly renovated building, including the Luce Center, the DiMenna Children's History Museum, and the Smith Gallery, as well as an overview of the library and its collections. There will also be time allotted for everyone to tour the galleries on their own to get a sense of the new ways in which the N-YHS is incorporating technology into their exhibition practices. The event will then conclude with a Q&A over lunch. This event is open to all Archives, Public History, and Museum Studies graduate students at NYU.

To RSVP, contact Lynda Van Wart at lynda.vanwart@nyu.edu

 

 

Archives and Public History Happy Hour Friday, December 16^th

The NYU student chapter of the Society of American Archivists invites  students, alumni, and faculty in the Archives and Public History  Program as well as professionals in these fields to an end of the  semester/holiday happy hour! Join us on Friday, December 16th from 5:30-9:30pm at Amity Hall (80 West 3rd St. between Thompson and Sullivan Streets). Open bar until we reach our funding limit and drink specials!

East 7th Street: Anatomy of an East Village Block
A Presentation by the NYU Public History & Archives Class

Co-sponsored by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation

Wednesday, December 14
6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
NYU Humanities Initiative
20 Cooper Square,
5th Floor
Free; reservations required.
RSVP to rsvp@gvshp.org or (212) 475-9585 ext. 35

With a varied and colorful history reflected in its architecture, East 7th Street could be considered a microcosm of the East Village itself. To the west, the street encompassed part of Peter Stuyvesant's old Bouwerie; to the east, historic rowhouses remind us of the early days of the working waterfront. In conjunction with GVSHP's architectural resource survey of the East Village, students in the Introduction to Public History course in NYU's Public History and Archives program will present their semester-long research about the social history of this fascinating street. The students, each of whom focused on a different block along East 7th Street, will discuss how they went about their research and will present their findings.

 

 

Lonnie G. Bunch III, Director, National Museum of African American History and Culture

The Challenge of Building a National Museum

The Program in Museum Studies at NYU has invited Lonnie Bunch, Director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture to be built on the Mall in Washington, to come speak at NYU. The lecture, co-sponsored by the Archives and Public History Program, the Africa-Diaspora Forum, Africana Studies, and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis will be on Wednesday, November 9th at 6:30pm in Hemmerdinger Hall, 100 Washington Square East.

Lonnie Bunch was appointed director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2005. Before this appointment, he served as president of the Chicago Historical Society (2001-2005), and he held several different curatorial positions at the National Museum of American History (1989-2000) and the California Afro-American Museum in Los Angeles (1983-1989). Bunch was named one of the 100 most influential museum professionals of the 20th century by the American Association of Museums in 2005.

 

A Panel on Non-Academic Jobs

Friday, November 4, 2011, 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m

With:

Justin Lorts, Associate Director of Academic Advising, College of Arts and Science, NYU * Ilana Pergam, Director of Studies, The Chapin School * Marci Reaven, Vice-President for Historical Exhibitions at New-York Historical Society * Ginger Strand, Author, editor

The Non-Academic Jobs Panel is an opportunity for Ph.D. students in History and other disciplines in the humanities to hear about the professional journeys and choices of four talented individuals who represent a variety of fields and careers available to doctoral students. The afternoon will feature brief remarks by professionals in the fields of publishing, public history, secondary school education and academic administration. Our panelists will share their own experiences and speak to ways in which students can best prepare for and present themselves in the non-academic job market. Students will then have the chance to talk individually with the panelists. The panel will be held at King Juan Carlos Center, Auditorium, 53 Washington Square South with a reception to follow.

 

Archive Lab: Digital Humanities and Literary Archives

Professor Deena Engel will lead this "Archive Lab" workshop, in conversation with Professor Lisa Gitelman on Friday, October 14, from 3-5 pm, in Room 222 of 19 University Place. We will consider how technologies not only allow us as scholars to access a wider array of archives, but also how we might ourselves intervene by creating or curating archives of our own.  As we seek to imagine an "archive lab," we must also explore the cultural freight carried by theories and histories of media.

 

Monster Mash Halloween Happy Hour

Hosted by NYU's Student Chapter of SAA

Calling all ghosts, ghouls and creatures of the night (or everyone else who loves Halloween). Please join us for an evening of spooky delight at the Four-Faced Liar (165 West 4th Street) on Thursday October 27th starting at 5:00pm. All are encouraged to share their favorite ghost stories and invite other Monster Mash enthusiasts.

 

Series of Events at the Greenwich Village Society for Historical Preservation in May and June. Click here for the pdf of their exciting program. Greenwich Village Society May and June Program

 

 

 

Guantanamo Public Memory Project, April 28-29 at Columbia University. The International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, the Columbia University Institute for the Study of Human Rights, the Columbia University Seminar on History, Redress, and Reconciliation, and the Columbia Oral History Research Office are partnering on “Remembering Guantánamo” - bringing together a working group of historians, advocates, museum professionals, and others to explore 1) Guantánamo Bay as a “state of exception” in American politics and political culture; and 2) strategies for building public awareness of Guantánamo’s century-long history – its exceptional and commonplace uses and re-uses – to inspire citizen participation in what happens there next. For more information: visit: http://hrcolumbia.org/guantanamo and http://www.sitesofconscience.org/activities/conferences/en/

PDF of Program: Remembering Guantánamo April 28-29, 2011 AGENDA

 

Triangle Shirtwaist Fire Commemoration, March 25

As the centennial anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire nears, stories of that day in March 1911 seem to be everywhere; Sunday morning news shows, the New York Times, HBO, PBS. If you are looking out for it, and even if you are not, at some point in the next week, you will likely learn something about the fire that changed America. And this spreading of information is great, amazing even. If the 100-year anniversary, and the proliferation of media attention help even just a few more people (and hopefully a lot more than that) learn about this century old disaster, this city and country will be a better place, or at least a more knowledgeable one.

I have known about the fire for a large part of my life. My father, a history buff, told me the story of what happened on March 25^th 1911 when I was in my early teens. I referenced the fire in my statement of purpose for graduate school, I wrote my Master’s thesis, in part about the commemoration of the fire, and in a few weeks I will present my research, along with a few others, on a panel about Triangle memorialization at the National Council on Public History annual conference. I am aware of the fire and its consequences and if you are reading this likely you are as well. And after this week, perhaps a large number of New Yorkers and Americans will also know about it. I said above that this knowledge will make America a better place. But will it? Is spreading knowledge enough?

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire is a unique history of tragedy, outrage, reaction, regulation and labor. But the commemoration of this event has a particular history of its own. The commemoration from the very beginning has been twofold. In the one type of memorialization, the actions are time and place based. Families, friends, fellow workers, and interested parties gathered on anniversaries at locations important to the event like the Brown Building. They gathered to remember those lost. A prime example of this type of memorialization is the Triangle Monument at Evergreen Cemetery in Brooklyn. A solemn memorial to those who died, people employed this location as a place of remembrance for the victims, divorced from the contentious legacy of labor that followed in the aftermath of the fire.

The second type of Triangle Fire commemoration was a kind of activist memorialization. Activists employed this event as the impetus for improving labor and safety regulations. Pauline Newman, a leader in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, said in 1913, “The way to honor the memory of the dead is to build up a strong and powerful organization that will prevent such disasters as that of two years ago and serve as a monument to the dead. Lest we forget!” In the immediate aftermath of the fire, The New York Call, a socialist paper printed a survey for workers to send in, reporting on unsafe conditions in their own workplaces. In the years after the fire, labor activists worked to write and pass dozens of laws, which aimed at cleaner, safer and more functional labor environments. In the 1930s, many of the politicians who witnessed the fire and its aftermath as young men and women, were at the height of their careers and in powerful positions to make substantive improvement to labor conditions in this country. This group included FDR and Frances Perkins, the President and his Labor Secretary. In this way, action and successful organizations were building a monument of progress.

The two different approaches to commemoration of the Triangle Fire both have struggled at various points and have seen their share of successes and failures over the last 100 years.  Anniversary events are well attended and regulations aim to make American labor safe for all, while at the same time, many people are still entirely unaware that this event ever occurred, and workplace accidents still occur when laws are broken and regulation is lax. Seemingly, commemoration still has a lot of work to do.

But as the Fire reaches its centennial anniversary, the question becomes: what is the most productive way to get that work done?  As I queried above, is making people aware of the event and its victims enough? How can commemoration continue in a way that both remembers those lost and moves forward with progressive actions in their memory?

Over the last month, and continuing in full force over the next few days, hundreds of events have been organized surrounding the Triangle Fire. The largest is the annual gathering at the Brown Building, organized by Workers United. The Remember the Triangle Coalition will process with banners of shirtwaists honoring each victim, speeches will be made, names will be read aloud, and the fire truck ladder will be raised to the highest floor it reached in 1911, many floors below the trapped workers. This event and the plays, musicals, exhibits, and vigils planned all play a major and important role in spreading knowledge about the disaster and honoring those who died. Less prominent in the events of the next few days are projects and organizations that are devoted to labor activism in the United States or abroad. Over the past 100 years, activist commemoration through tireless work for labor progress has come in fits and starts, never bound by the strict dates of the Triangle anniversaries. My genuine hope is that following the events of March 25, 2011, efforts begin and continue towards the aim of worker equality and safety worldwide, so that like Pauline Newman said in 1913, the dead of 1911 can be honored by preventing any future workers from suffering the same sad fate.

Brigid Harmon, a 2010 graduate of the Archives/Public History Program, wrote her capstone project on the commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the General Slocum disaster.  She will be presenting a paper based on her research at the National Council on Public History meeting in Pensacola in April.

March 25-26, 2011, Duke House Lecture Hall, Institute of Fine Arts

Generously supported by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the NYU Humanities Initiative, the IFA Visual Resources Collections, and Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology, Visual Resources Collection, this is the third in an ongoing series of conferences that investigate the role of photographic archives and collections in art historical studies. The discipline of art history and the technologies of image reproduction have developed concurrently, and their histories are closely interlinked. Presenters at this conference will explore the role of “hidden” photo archives in current art historical research, emphasizing those collections that are not digitized, cataloged, publicized, or readily accessible except in person and on-site.  An alphabetical list of speakers and their topics can be found below.  Download the full conference schedule here [PDF].

Seating is limited and reservations are required.  Registration is $20.00, $10.00 for students. Please click here to register.

This spring the Department of English, History and Social and Cultural Analysis, the Program in Archives and Public History and the Humanities are sponsoring what promises to be an extremely exciting and thought-provoking series of workshops.For a full list of events click here: NYU Workshop in Archival Practice

For more information on the series, check out their blog on twitter @NYUArchiveWork

WIKILEAKS PANEL
On 25 January 2011, the Archivists Round Table of Metropolitan New York and the Metro New York City Chapter of ARMA International co-sponsored a panel discussion concerning the archival implications of the Wikileaks controversy.  Rachel Miller, an archivist at the Center for Jewish History (CJH), organized the evening, which was held in the CJH auditorium and moderated by Peter J. Wosh, Director of the Archives and Public History Program at New York University.  Panelists included: Trudy Peterson, former Archivist of the United States and a respected international consultant who has worked on a variety of human rights records issues; Fred Pulzello, Solutions Architect at MicroLink LLC, and a prominent records management consultant; Jim Fortmuller, Systems Security Manager at Kelley Drye & Warren LLP; Mark Matienzo, Digital Archivist at Yale University; and Derek Bombauer, Associate Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School.  Approximately 150 archivists and records managers attended the lively event, which featured considerable debate and discussion over the ethical, professional, and theoretical implications of the controversy.  The Center for Jewish History generously videotaped the presentations, which you can access at: http://www.cjh.org/videoarchivelist/1791

GREENWICH VILLAGE PROJECT

This spring, the Greenwich Village Historic Preservation Society (GVHSP) will be releasing the results of their recent architectural survey of the East Village. Last fall, Dr. Peter Wosh’s asked his “Introduction to Public History” to supplement that survey with the social and cultural history of a particular East Village block—Tompkins Square North, (East Tenth Street between A and B). The block is currently one of the few in the area to remain untouched by development, with all of the original 19^th century buildings still standing.

Our class was divided into five groups of three, and each group was assigned 3-6 buildings on the block to research. Sheryl Woodruff and Elizabeth Finkelstein from the GVHSP asked us to find information about the tenants who had lived and worked in these buildings from the 1830’s onward. To give us a start, they provided us with tax assessment records concerning the original owners of the buildings and their subsequent sales, along with Sanborn maps - maps which were originally created to assess fire liability in urban areas of the of the block.

But the task still seemed daunting. Most of us were first semester master’s students, and having come from a range of different backgrounds, had never conducted in-depth historical research before. Though apprehensive, we met the challenge with hard work and perseverance. For two months, we researched the block, mainly using the census (handily available through ancestry.com), city directories (found in the New York Historical Society’s library) and archived copies of historical newspapers. Through our research, we discovered that government in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries were not particularly concerned with ensuring that the census recorded accurate spellings of names or correct ages. Additionally, it was also difficult to pin down individuals who had common names. Over time, we learned to manipulate search engine algorithms, finding that “295 E. 10^th St.” will yield different results than “295 East Tenth Street”. Sharing these strategies, these early obstacles were overcome as a class.

In the end, we uncovered a fascinating picture of the diverse residents of East Tenth Street A sample run down of the block’s tenants and businesses includes:

• George Law, who lived briefly at 293 East Tenth Street with his family and a whopping 17 servants. Law founded the U.S. Mail Steamship Company and made a fortune off of transportation services during the California Gold Rush. The sinking of one of his ships, the SS Central America, helped contribute the Panic of 1857, as it was carrying $400 million worth of gold bound for New York City banks.
• Women’s rights advocate and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger applied to set up one of the nation’s very first birth control clinics on this street. The application was eventually rejected.
• A number of tenants, whose names often remained unknown, lived and worked in their buildings. Cigar factories and other industries existed in “old-law” tenements, built between 1879 and 1901. The tenements were often overcrowded, and tenants worked round-the-clock in these industries, which for the most part went unregulated until after 1910. Many of the tenants living in these buildings were newly immigrated and of German descent, giving the area the nickname of “Little Germany”.

The project culminated in a presentation given to a standing-room only crowd in the conference room of the King Juan Carlos II Center. Many of those in attendance were long-time village residents, who had their own personal anecdotes to share about what it was like growing up in the area, and residents of the block they themselves had known. Lively discussions ensued, and the end result was a successful event where both attendees and presenters came away with new information about this historic block in the East Village!

Written by Jacqueline Colognesi. She is a second year student in the Archive and Public History Program and is completing an internship in the Place Matters Program at City Lore in NYC.