The 1619 Project and the Battle over Black American History

Portrait of Omar Ibn Said, enslaved person
Portrait of Omar Ibn Said, enslaved person

“The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, signed on July 4, 1776, proclaims that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’. But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.” Nikole Hannah Jones, creator of the 1619 Project

“Critical race theory, the 1619 Project and the crusade against American history is toxic propaganda, ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve the civic bonds that tie us together. “ Donald Trump

“The #1619Project is a powerful and necessary reckoning of our history. We cannot understand and address the problems of today without speaking truth about how we got here.” Kamala Harris

In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine published The 1619 Project issue to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans to the British colonies in North America. 

The 1619 Project, created and organized by Professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, asserts that if we want to understand American history, we must begin with slavery and its consequences because slavery is at the center of our history, not on the margins. Ms. Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for her opening essay. The project includes other essays, as well as photographs, poems, and podcasts on a wide range of topics, including: 

Since its publication, The 1619 Project has been widely read and discussed; reactions to it have included high praise, sharp criticism, and passionate debates, especially about how to best teach American history. Coming up on three years after its publication, The 1619 Project continues to play a major role in reshaping public conversations about the consequences of slavery and racism in America.  

Many conservatives have pushed back at The 1619 Project, particularly its use in classrooms. Newt Gingrich called it “brainwashing” and “left-wing propaganda masquerading as the truth”.  Senator Tom Cotton proposed the “Saving American History Act of 2020” to ban using federal funds to teach anything related to the 1619 Project because (according to him) it “is a racially divisive and revisionist account of history that threatens the integrity of the Union by denying the true principles on which it was founded.” Not one to be outdone, President Trump established the 1776 Commission, appointing 18 conservative critics to craft an opposing response to the 1619 Project. The 1776 Report has been widely criticized for factual errors and overall lack of academic rigor.

The 1619 Project and its portrayal of Black American History continues to provoke us to think in new, deeper ways. This provocation can be uncomfortable for white Americans, who have been shielded from the realities of Black Americans. But it is critical that Americans of all colors be able to talk openly, honestly, and peacefully, about our painful shared past. 

Resources

Listen to the 1619  podcast

Read The 1619 Project

Watch an interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones

Study with Teaching Hard History: A Framework for Teaching American Slavery

 

Native American History Month in Lenapehoking

November is Native American History Month, and a good time for New Yorkers to acknowledge and honor the indigenous peoples who lived here before us. The Lenape thrived for thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. They called their homeland Lenapehoking, and their territory included portions of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.

In Brooklyn, the Lenape had settlements in what are now the neighborhoods of Bushwick, Canarsie, Flatlands, Fort Hamilton, Gowanus, and Sheepshead Bay. 

Indian Villages, Paths, Ponds, and Places in Kings County 1946 Map
Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Public Library 1946

The concept of shared land use was fundamental to Lenape society. Lenape peoples lived in fixed settlements, and their lives revolved around communal hunting and planting. Planting was managed by women, who cultivated corn, squash, beans, and tobacco. The men cleared the field and broke the soil. During the rest of the year, they would fish and hunt.  

The arrival of Europeans was devastating to the Lenape. By the 17th century, Europeans were setting up colonies to extract resources from Lenapehoking. They pushed the Lenape out of the East Coast and pressed them to move west. In 1626, the Lenape “sold” the island of Manahatta to the Dutch. The Dutch were of course deceptive in their dealings, as the concept of private land-ownership was not recognized by the Lenape. 

The loss of land led to a scarcity of essential resources, as the Lenape peoples could not farm and were forced to over-hunt. Their population fell sharply, due to infectious diseases brought by Europeans, such as measles and smallpox. Between 1600 and 1700, the Lenape were decimated by diseases and war. By 1750, they had lost an estimated 90% of their people.

The Treaty of Easton, signed in 1758 between the Lenape and the English, forced the Lenape to move westward into Pennsylvania and Ohio. Other deceptive land treaties and forced migrations followed, and the Lenape were pushed further and further west. In the 1860s, the federal government sent Lenape remaining in the eastern United States to the Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) under the Indian removal policy. Today, Lenape communities are found in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Wisconsin, Ontario, and New Jersey.

Land acknowledgements, or statements serving as offerings of honor and respect, are one way to pay respect to the Lenape and other tribes who were killed and displaced by European settlers.  Land acknowledgements are not a substitute for substantial reparative justice but they can raise awareness about histories that are often suppressed or forgotten.

The acknowledgement process involves asking: “Who lived here before us?” “What happened to them?” “Who should be accountable for their displacement?” “What can be done to repair the harm done to them?”

The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (not a real government agency but a “people-powered department”) offers a resource called Honor Native Land: A Guide and Call to Acknowledgement.

Here are their answers to the question: “Why practice Land Acknowledgement?”:

  •     Offer recognition and respect
  •     Share the true story of the people who were already here
  •     Create a broader public awareness of history  
  •     Begin to repair relationships with Native communities  
  •     Support larger truth-telling and reconciliation efforts
  •     Remind people that colonization is an ongoing process
  •     Opening up space with reverence and respect
  •     Inspire ongoing action and relationships

And here is their step-by-step guide to acknowledgment:

  1. Identify: “The first step is identifying the traditional inhabitants of the lands you’re on. . . it is important to proceed with care, doing good research before making statements of acknowledgement.”
  2. Articulate: “Once you’ve identified the group(s) who should be recognized, formulate the statement.. . . Beginning with just a simple sentence would be a meaningful intervention in most spaces.”
  3. Deliver. “Offer your acknowledgement as the first element of a welcome to the next public gathering or event that you host . . . Consider your own place in the story of colonization and of undoing its legacy.”

How can we do reparative work with Native communities who still live in New York? What role can an educational space like City Tech, on occupied Lenape land, play in reparative justice?

Spotlight: Open Education Resources

For many City Tech students, the high cost of textbooks may be an insurmountable obstacle. Students may not register–or may end up withdrawing or failing classes–because they cannot afford required materials. City Tech Faculty can reduce financial strain on students by designing their courses around Open Educational Resources (OERs).

Open Educational Resources are freely accessible teaching, learning, and research materials. Traditionally, textbooks are published under copyright, with strict limitations. But the OER model is more flexible; it uses Creative Commons licenses that allows educators to retain, reuse, revise, remix, or redistribe (the 5Rs) educational resources.

The 5 Rs:

  • Retain – make, own, and control a copy of the resource
  • Reuse – use original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource  
  • Revise – edit, adapt, and modify copy of the resource
  • Remix – combine original or revised copy of the resource with other existing material to create something new
  • Redistribute – share copies of original, revised, or remixed copy of the resource with others.

City Tech’s OER program is a CUNY success story. Since its launch in 2015, City Tech librarians have collaborated with professors to create course materials through the City Tech OpenLab, leading to the development of free and open resources for classes across the curriculum. City Tech professors, with library support, have created outstanding low-cost, high-quality OERs for students. 

Here are a few examples of OER materials created by faculty in our Social Science departments through the OER program. 

For US History Since 1865, Dr. Ryan McMillen uses The American Yawp, augmented with other materials. Instructions for the class on Reconstruction asks students to: “Read Chapter 15, Reconstruction…the text of the Mississippi Black CodesJourdon Anderson Writes His Former Master, 1865…Pick out one part of the Codes that strikes you as problematic, in that its main justification would be to criminalize the activities of former slaves in defending their freedom, and analyze it.”

Professor Diana Mincyte’s Environmental Sociology OER “examines the complex interactions between societies and the natural environments on which they depend. Special emphasis is placed on the link between the deepening ecological crisis and the operation of the capitalist socio-economic system.” For the first class, to introduce the subject, she assigns: The environment and society. The perfect conditions for coronavirus to emerge, Pangolins and pandemics: The real source of this crisis is human, not animal and What is Deep Ecology.

Dr. Jinwon Kim’s Urban Sociology is a course that encourages students to explore issues in Downtown Brooklyn, from gentrification to the new economy, and to use the neighborhood as a laboratory. Dr. Kim created her OER with links to open access readings, videos, and photo collections. For Class 4, Modernity and Modern Cities, he asks students to, “First, read The era of industrialization…in order to learn more about the historical background of modern cities. Second, read Industrial Manchester, 1844 in The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844. Third, learn more about New York City context by reading Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York…Watch The Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side. See Photos provided by Museum of the City of New York.”

More information about the OER program at City Tech

Questions/comments? Contact Cailean Cooney, Assistant Professor, Library at: ccooney@citytech.cuny.edu.

New Podcast Episode: The Library One Shot

The latest episode of City Tech stories features an interview with Prof. Anne Leonard, Coorindator of Library Instruction, and a discussion about the “library one-shot”–a term that refers to the discrete instruction sessions that the library offers to help support students doing research, usually in their first semester of college.

A recent editorial from the journal College & Research Libraries by Nicole Pagowsky on “The Contested One-Shot” is used as a reference point for the discussion which touches on classroom power dynamics, student engagement, and the challenges and opportunities presented by online learning.

Check out our latest episode, and subscribe to the podcast!

Remembering 9/11 twenty years later

image by Michael Foran via Wikimedia Commons

This past weekend three former presidents and the current chief executive attended events to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Millions of others watched on television. Commemorations took place not just in the United States. Queen Elizabeth II requested that the Coldstream Guards at Windsor Castle play the “Star Spangled Banner” during the changing of the guard, just as she had done twenty years ago. And these were just a few public gatherings that marked the anniversary of a truly global event. It is important to remember that the victims came not just from the United States but around the world.

The arrival of September 11 on the calendar each year for the past two decades has always brought with it sadness and introspection but this year’s commemorations seemed different in some subtle way. After twenty years the events of September 11, 2001, at least to many, seem to have transitioned from current events to history. I have noticed over the past several years that when the topic of 9/11 arises, often as a topic for an assignment or research paper, that student recollection of the World Trade Center and other 9/11 attacks has grown increasingly vague. That is because most college-age students today were so young when those events took place. Today’s freshman and sophomores were not even yet born. To them—perhaps you, if you are one of those students—9/11 plays the roll that Pearl Harbor, the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the 1986 Challenger explosion play for previous generations. As I point out in the introduction to this research guide I recently created for those interested in exploring 9/11 more fully, many City Tech staff and faculty still working at the college today were here on that morning twenty years ago. I personally was not at the college yet, but I was living in Brooklyn and recall it all quite vividly. I noted to myself this past Saturday that the sunlight, weather, and cloudless sky were eerily familiar to the way they had been on that day. When I mentioned that to others, they said the same thing.

One of my colleagues told me of the college’s closing early that day, and how he and several others walked to a faculty member’s nearby apartment to watch the news unfold and to plan for how to get home. This was an issue because it was unclear at the time which public transportation might be operating and which might not. Could one get across the Hudson River and back home to loved ones in New Jersey? Were the commuter trains running to Westchester, Long Island, and Connecticut? And what about even the buses and subways? No one was sure. Communication itself was difficult if not impossible. So many were trying to reach friends and family that cell phone connectivity largely collapsed. This was especially true for millions in the Greater New York area because much of much of the communication infrastructure had been atop the Twin Towers themselves and thus destroyed. I recall that even on my landline at home I could make and receive calls to certain people out-of-state but not to others. This went on for several days. The internet was still a fairly new technology, and social media as we know it did not even exist. My own cable-less television lost its transmission and I was reduced to listening to commentary, much of it hearsay and speculation, on the radio. This was immediacy of that morning.

Nearly 3000 people lost their lives in the attacks here in New York City. People today might not realize how much worse it almost was. Many at the time feared the number might be closer to 40,000 or higher. Nearly 50,000 individuals worked in the Twin Towers. Many though were not yet at their desks because it was still early, an election day, and also the first day of school for many districts. Parents taking their children to school had not yet arrived. What is more, security officials at many of the organizations within the towers had also done a good job updating their emergency and evacuation plans in the eight years since the 1993 bombing of the same site. It is still unnerving to think of how much worse it all could have been. That does not even get into events at the Pentagon and aboard Flight 93 that crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

Twenty years is a long time—a lifetime for many. With time comes at least some perspective. Still, it never really gets easier. The events of 9/11 are something that will always stay with me, as they will for millions of others.

The Extraordinary Educators of the SEEK Program

Insurgent Knowledge: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Open Admissions is a wonderful dissertation, soon to be book, written by CUNY grad Danica B. Savonick. This post is based on her work.

In 1965, CUNY established the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge Program (SEEK) to recruit and prepare “economically and educationally disadvantaged” students to matriculate at City College. SEEK provided students not only with free tuition and free books, but also a stipend that addressed the material conditions of students’ lives beyond the classroom.

By 1968, four extraordinary women were teaching basic writing classes for SEEK down the hall from one another. Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Adrienne Rich all taught for SEEK in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These writers/activists/teachers shared a belief in the teaching of writing as a transformative, political, and creative process.

Lorde, Jordan, Bambara, and Rich observed how students who entered the university through SEEK at first distrusted them, and how many had been mistreated by previous educators. All of them saw the oppressive dynamics inherent in traditional classroom set-ups. They shared a fundamental respect for their students, and they understood that many of them had been disempowered in previous classrooms. They listened to students and changed their approaches to teaching based on what they heard. They sought to be allies for their SEEK students, not saviors there to liberate oppressed students.

Together, they experimented with how the classroom might be a space of collective social change. Together, they explored how education can contribute to building a more just and equitable world. They believed in the transformative power of education and saw how their teaching could contribute to the Women’s Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the movement for Black Power.

Lorde, Jordan, Bambara, and Rich created a collaborative environment for teaching and writing. They exchanged syllabi, lesson plans, and assignments and sat in on each other’s classes. They deliberately researched and invented teaching strategies that would help working class students, first-generation students, and students of color. Their groundbreaking collaborative work at SEEK has had a profound impact on the teaching of writing, and is now considered of great theoretical importance.

“I teach myself in outline,” Notes, Journals, Syllabi, & an Excerpt from Deotha, is a collection of Audre Lorde’s teaching materials from her time at CUNY.

June Jordan: “Life Studies,” 1966-1976 includes texts from her time at SEEK.

Privacy Initiatives at the City Tech Library

Earth with Spyglass

June through November 2019, Web Services and Multimedia Librarian Prof. Junior Tidal and former adjunct librarian Michelle Nitto participated in the Library Freedom Institute (LFI). LFI is a grant funded educational project that trains librarians to be better privacy advocates. Alison Macrina heads the project.

Over a period of 6 months, participants learned about a wide-range of topics from the data and metadata passively collected from social media and search engines, to artificial intelligence(AI), facial recognition, digital redlining, and much more.

Guest lecturers at LFI included other librarians, lawyers, privacy experts and activists, journalists, artists, and authors. It was a well-rounded selection of guest speakers that examined the larger implications of losing our privacy and the importance of teaching patrons on how to better safeguard themselves from unwanted surveillance and data collection. 

For example, it is well known that search engine algorithms can reinforce racial stereotypes, however, it may not be that well known that facial recognition technology uses open datasets to “learn” about users. This learning can be used for such purposes of identifying one’s race, age, gender, and other attributes. These datasets are culled from publicly available images to open YouTube clips. This technology is far from perfect as there are instances of misidentifying users due to their darker skin or having a limited dataset that lacks the diversity of the real-world.

Technology platforms build in bias that also has implications for research. One instance may include a college that uses web filtering software. This software may block legitimate research conducted by students and faculty. If this information is filtered, the student may, at best, think that it is not available through their college network, or at worst think that it does not exist at all. Chris Gilliard, a guest lecturer and  Professor of English at Macomb Community College, notes that this “digitally redlines” community college students in comparison to R1 institutions.

Over the last few years, the City Tech Library has offered privacy workshops, open to both students and faculty. After participating in LFI, Prof. Junior Tidal led a redesign of the workshops, which he co-teaches with Profs. Nora Almeida, Monica Berger to be interactive more interactive. Participants are invited to consider what kind of information about them is being collected in different contexts, who is collecting it (and why, and how it is used. The workshop culminates by introducing attendees to practical privacy tools that can use. Want to learn more? Check out our online privacy research guide!

The City Tech Library and Librarians across CUNY are also discussing ways that they can build patron privacy protections into the technology and digital tools that we provide to our patrons. We’ve set all library computers to clear caches and wipe search histories automatically, are exploring installing alternative browsers like TOR on our public workstations, and have set the duck-duck-go search engine–which doesn’t use ad tracking–as the default on public service station browsers. The newly revived Library Association CUNY Privacy Roundtable has been working on building privacy protections for patrons into our contracts with vendors so that research database vendors, don’t collect patron data to sell to third-parties or share with law enforcement agencies. The Privacy Roundtable is hosting an upcoming workshop focused on strategies CUNY Librarians can adopt in order to address privacy issues with administrators, faculty, and staff at their campuses. The workshop will be lead by Bonnie Tijerina from the Data Privacy Project.

If faculty are interested in scheduling a custom data privacy workshop for their class, they can contact Profs. Junior Tidal, Nora Almeida, or Monica Berger.

Undergraduate Research and the City Tech Library

Many faculty at City Tech, myself included, are introduced to City Tech’s Honors and Undergraduate Research program by attending or volunteering as a judge at the semi-annual poster session for student research. It was great talking to the students and learning more about their work and their plans for the future. The experience was similar to attending commencement but intimate. This article discusses how the library has been able to form a deeper connection to undergraduate research at City Tech.

Back in 2014, at a conference, The Academic Librarian in the Open Access Future, Stephanie Davis-Kahl presented on how undergraduates at her campus were involved with open access and using the institutional repository. At the conference’s birds-of-a-feather discussion, we strategized how to get our campuses on board with our local institutional repository. At City Tech and throughout CUNY, we use Academic Works as our institutional repository and it is chiefly a platform that enables faculty scholarship to be made open access (allowing scholarship to be freely available to all readers) and to be preserved. 

Connecting City Tech’s emphasis on quality teaching and Davis-Kahl’s talk, I thought

Wouldn’t it be great if students were involved in our institutional repository?

Although it took several years, we developed an excellent synergy between undergraduate research and Academic Works. I am so grateful to be part of our excellent Undergraduate Research Committee. The Committee’s work, especially their mentoring handbook, has been acknowledged as outstanding at CUNY and nationally. Being a member of the committee made a critical difference in connecting the library.

Academic Works is now well integrated into the undergraduate research and honors experience. Workshops teach students learn how to self-archive . They especially like being able to link to their posters on their resumes and graduate school applications. Having the posters in Academic Works marks them as scholars. Below is the Fall 2019 winner for individual STEM posters.

Lastly, in addition to a required workshop teaching all undergraduate researchers how to perform the literature review, the library now offers an exciting, new workshop on how to research graduate school. The partnership between undergraduate research and the library continues to grow and strengthen and gives librarians opportunities for new roles as teachers and experts on research.

The Fourth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium, An Astounding 90 Years of Analog Science Fiction and Fact

City Tech’s annual Sci-Fi Symposium kicked off, as usual, with a beautifully crafted library exhibit which made great use of all four of our exhibition cases. The items featured brought together various City Tech contributors with works created by Analog magazine, this year’s symposium partner.

“The exhibits were a collaboration between City Tech and Analog Science Fiction and Fact. City Tech Student Design Intern Julie Bradford created the symposium poster, Prof. Ellis designed posters on the City Tech Science Fiction Collection and the history of the City Tech Science Fiction Symposium, Analog designed posters highlighting the symposium speakers, a timeline of the magazine’s long history, and Analog supplied the cover artwork that fills in the background of each display case. Artifacts in each case were pulled from the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, including the Jan. 1934 issue of Astounding. ” – Professor Ellis

Main Display case highlighting the 4th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium in celebration of 90 years of Analog SF. Courtesy of Professor Jason Ellis.
Display case highlighting the City Tech Science Fiction Collection. Courtesy of Professor Jason Ellis.
Display case highlighting the published work of speakers at the 4th annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. Courtesy of Professor Jason Ellis.
Display case highlighting the history of the annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. Courtesy of Professor Jason Ellis.

On December 12, 2019 over 100 attendees, many of whom traveled from out of town to participate, gathered in the Academic Complex to celebrate Analog, their contributors and our historic Science Fiction collection.

Fourth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium Poster by Julie Bradford.

Visit the collection’s OpenLab page to view the program of the day’s events, video of the readings and panel presentations, peruse the live finding aid, or to learn more about the collection.

Demystifying E-resources


In order to use e-resources off campus, you must have your library barcode (found on your City Tech ID) activated at the library’s Circulation (Borrow and Return) desk. When on campus, most e-resources are accessed automatically. When off-campus, login with your City Tech library barcode found on the lower left of your City Tech ID labeled LIB. All City Tech library barcodes begin with the prefix of 22477. Enter all the numbers without spaces.

The following e-resources require creating an account with a login using your City Tech email:

New York Times http://cityte.ch/nyt

RefWorks http://cityte.ch/rfw 

Wall Street Journal http://cityte.ch/wsj 

Note that the New York Times and Wall Street Journals have apps for phones and tablets. Apps are also available for some products, such as EBSCO. 

If a database is listed as fulltext, this does not mean that the entire contents is in full text.  Click Find it at CUNY to see if we have access to the article in another database. If fulltext is not available, consider using interlibrary loan.

Ebooks are varied in terms of options for download. For example, an Adobe Digital Editions account is required to borrow Ebook Central Ebook Central titles electronically. Other vendors allow downloading of books and book chapters as PDFs. Most textbooks are not available as e-books. 

Did you know that you can connect our e-resources to Google Scholar? This is extremely handy for more advanced student researchers and for faculty. Interested in learning more about how to maximize City Tech’s e-resources for your research? If you are faculty, please contact your subject librarian. Students can learn more about using the library’s e-resources at our workshops and visit us at the Reference (Ask a Librarian) desk for more help.  

If you have any questions, please contact Prof. Kimberly Abrams, kabrams@citytech.cuny.edu