Tag Archives: American history

by | March 17, 2023 · 11:00 am

From the Archives: Emily Horihan, PhD Candidate, visits the Archives & Special Collections at the College of Staten Island

Emily Horihan – History department PhD Candidate (Cohort 2019-20) working with Dr. Daniel Soyer – is currently working on her dissertation, the working title of which is: “Suburb in the City: Negotiating Change in Staten Island after the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.” In this week’s From the Archives, Emily shares some of her experiences while researching at the Archives & Special Collections at the College of Staten Island.

What is your current research on?

My dissertation research looks at how Staten Island residents responded to rising development –  in the form of housing, highways, commercial spaces, and industrial facilities – in the borough following the opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in 1964. I’ve been looking at collections organized by local officials and citizen groups during this period.

What archive(s) did you visit and can you describe the archive a little?

Most of my archival research has been done at Archives & Special Collections at the College of Staten Island (CSI). The archive is housed within CSI’s library in Staten Island. The archivist and a college assistant helped me to schedule research appointments,; made sure I was cleared to visit campus (which requires proof of vaccination and a recent negative COVID-19 test); and prepared materials requested for each of my research trips. The archive has limited hours – it’s open Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm and Thursdays from 9:00 am – 2:00 pm. 

What was an average day in the archives like?

Since I work full-time, I always plan to take vacation time and spend a full day at the archive (which is only possible on Tuesdays and Wednesdays). I email archives@csi.cuny.edu to request an appointment in advance – noting how long I plan to spend in the archive and which materials I plan to look at for the day. I also make sure that I am still cleared to enter campus before each appointment.

I take public transportation to the CSI campus from Brooklyn (along with a bunch of students that commute there from around the city). The bus drops passengers off at the front entrance and the library is a leisurely 15-minute walk to the back of the campus. Once at the archive, I check in with the staff, who set me up with a cart of research materials and a workspace. On most days, I’m the only researcher at the archive.

The research room is pretty cold, so I always bring a sweatshirt to keep warm. To maximize research time, I usually pack a quick lunch to eat outside while the archivist and archive assistant take their lunch break. Unless you want to grab lunch at an on-campus eatery, most places are a short drive away. I connect to the guest wifi and spend much of the day taking photos and to upload and catalog for each collection (taking limited notes as needed along the way). I usually wrap up around 4:30 pm to give the archive assistant enough time to put away any materials taken out for the day.

Was there anything surprising you found in your research?

The Staten Island Advance, a local newspaper that is important to my research, is only available on microfilm. In my archival research, I was surprised to find how many collections contained newspaper clippings from the Staten Island Advance, which helped me to save time sorting through microfilm. If you do need to use microfilm, you can also request it from Fordham’s Interlibrary Loan Office to use during business hours in Walsh Library.

What advice would you give for anyone interested in visiting the archive you went to?

As with any archival trip, come prepared! Schedule an appointment in advance. Set goals. Bring what you need. And have a system for organizing your photos and/or notes.

What advice would you give to someone interested in pursuing historical research?

Start your research online. Many collections are digitized and you should do as much research online as possible before heading to the archives. 

How can people follow your research?

Emily recently published a blog post in SAPIENTIA: Reflection and Revival: Sandy Ground, One of New York’s Oldest Free Black Settlements.

Pen dispensers at the College of Staten Island Library.
Pen dispensers at the College of Staten Island Library. 

From the Archives is a special series for the Fordham History blog which highlights the research experiences of members of the history department in an effort to both showcase their work and provide insight for future researchers preparing for their own archival projects.

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by | March 12, 2021 · 3:52 pm

Dr. Laurence Jurdem publishes a new book, “The Rough Rider and The Professor: Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, and The Friendship that Changed American History.”

Dr. Jurdem’s book, The Rough Rider and The Professor, chronicles the nearly forty-year friendship between Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, illuminating the impact that their relationship had on American history, and showing how many of the critical issues facing our nation today, including big corporations, income inequality, immigration, demographic shifts, tariffs, and the future of the Republican Party, dominated headlines during Roosevelt’s presidency and remain at the forefront of American politics and society today, to Claiborne Hancock at Pegasus.

Laurence Jurdem (@LaurenceJurdem) | Twitter
Dr. Laurence Jurdem

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by | January 20, 2021 · 3:13 pm

Prof. Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, published “What today’s Second Amendment activists forget: The right to not bear arms” in The Washington Post.

On January 18, 2021, Prof. Saul Cornell, the Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History, published “What today’s Second Amendment activists forget: The right to not bear arms” in The Washington Post.

Prof. Saul Cornell
Prof. Saul Cornell

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by | January 19, 2021 · 2:21 pm

Prof. Kirsten Swinth’s work featured in The New Yorker.

Prof. Jill Lepore’s January 11, 2021, article, “What’s Wrong With the Way We Work,” featured Prof. Kirsten Swinth’s work. Lepore writes, “Plenty of people still feel that way about their jobs. But Terkel’s interviews, conducted in the early seventies, captured the end of an era. Key labor-movement achievements—eight hours a day, often with health care and a pension—unravelled. The idea of the family wage began to collapse, as Kirsten Swinth points out in ‘Feminism’s Forgotten Fight: The Unfinished Struggle for Work and Family’ (Harvard).”  

Kirsten Swinth

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by | · 2:13 pm

Prof. Asif Siddiqi publishes “Whose India? SITE and the origins of satellite television in India” in History and Technology: An International Journal.

Prof. Asif Siddiqi publishes “Whose India? SITE and the origins of satellite television in India” in History and Technology: An International Journal.

Below is the abstract:

This essay explores the origins of the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that used a NASA satellite to beam educational programs to over two thousand villages in India in the mid-1970s. Touted as a major success in using advanced technology for the purposes of poverty alleviation, the results of the project remain contested. I argue that the causes of its ambiguous outcome can be traced to the late 1960s when Indian and American scientific elites mobilized support for this project by uniting a coalition of diverse actors that each imagined a different ‘India’. Although each of these ‘Indias’ represented a starkly different vision of the nation, they were consonant for a brief historical moment, thus enabling SITE to come to reality. Their ability to do so depended on framing as monolithic and passive, the one population central to the project, the ‘poor and illiterate’ of India.

Asif Siddiqi
Asif Siddiqi

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by | October 17, 2020 · 5:46 pm

Prof. Asif Siddiqi is Featured in The National Geographic.

Professor Asif Siddiqui was featured in an October 7, 2020, National Geographic article, “How the ‘right stuff’ to be an astronaut has changed over the years.”

Prof. Siddiqi is quoted:

“They’re green,” says Fordham University history professor Asif Siddiqi of the first group of cosmonauts. “You essentially have the space program mold and shape them.”

The author Jay Bennett continues, “As the U.S. and U.S.S.R. gained experience flying people in space, they began to attempt more complicated missions, such as docking in orbit and sending astronauts outside their spacecraft. In the astronaut selection process, the two space programs put more emphasis on engineering education, and the Soviet program raised its standards for flight time, making the second group of astronauts older and more experienced than the first, Siddiqui says. Buzz Aldrin, selected in the third group of NASA astronauts in 1963, was the first person to join the corps with a doctoral degree (in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).”

Asif Siddiqi

You can follow Prof. Asif Siddiqi on Twitter @historyasif.

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by | October 5, 2020 · 8:59 am

Prof. Kirsten Swinth Publishes “What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Learned From Swedish Social Democracy” in the Jacobin Magazine.

On September 29, 2020, Prof. Kirsten Swinth published, “What Ruth Bader Ginsburg Learned From Swedish Social Democracy,” in Jacobin Magazine.

She begins the article by writing: “The pioneering sex-discrimination law casebook that Ruth Bader Ginsburg published with two of her colleagues in 1974 closes, after nine-hundred and twenty-seven pages, with a brief chapter of “Comparative Side-Glances.” Ginsburg and her colleagues avowed a “modest purpose” for the pages that followed. They sought merely “to suggest the breadth of the movement toward equal rights for men and women” that went well beyond the borders of the United States. The side-glances, however, had a rather surprising focus: Sweden.”

You can read more here.

Kirsten Swinth

You can follow Prof. Kirsten Swinth on Twitter @kswinth.

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by | September 23, 2020 · 3:08 pm

Prof. Steven Stoll Publishes “Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation: On Working and Being in Modern Times” in Public Seminar.

On September 21, 2020, Professor Steven Stoll published, “Charlie Chaplin and Karl Marx in Conversation: On Working and Being in Modern Times,” in the Public Seminar,” in Public Seminar.

Stoll writes: “At a time when some predict that the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic could leave many unemployed for months or years, and when the working-class already endures the worst of everything, in a rolling crisis of despair, Modern Times doesn’t look like an excavated relic but a message from the dawn of the American Century to its dusk. The story of the Worker, played by Chaplin, and his homeless partner, the Gamin, played by Paulette Goddard, depicts alienation and disillusionment with capitalism, law enforcement, and the world of industrial work that had failed the working class.”

You can read the full article here.

Prof. Steven Stoll

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by | September 14, 2020 · 3:45 pm

Prof. Westenley Alcenat Makes Media Appearances on Scope & TRT World.

Here are the links to Prof. Alcenat’s two most recent media appearances:

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by | August 7, 2020 · 6:57 pm

In Memoriam the Victims of the El Paso Massacre, August 3, 2019

On Saturday, August 3, 2019, in El Paso, Texas, a 21 year old white male brandishing a semi-automatic rifle walked into a Walmart known to be popular with Americans and a convenient destination for Mexicans crossing the nearby border for their weekly shopping excursion into the United States. He began to shoot, deliberately targeting people of apparent Mexican and Latin  American descent. Twenty three people died in the shooting (the last dying in April of 2020), and another twenty three were injured. News organizations identified the dead as thirteen United States Americans, eight Mexicans, and one German citizen.  A deeper look, though, reveals that of the thirteen Americans killed, eleven were of Latinx descent. As a result, the El Paso Walmart shooting was the worst mass murder of Latino people in modern American history. 

The murderer has been identified as a white supremacist with a deep hatred of Latinos, someone who consumed white supremacist literature and wrote a manifesto at the time of the shooting. This is not a surprise, as in the last five years the United States also has suffered mass shootings of African Americans (Charleston, June 17, 2015) and Jews (October 27, 2018). In his manifesto, the shooter argued that Mexicans specifically, and Latinxs generally, are invading the United States, taking jobs away from U.S. citizens, and endangering the white majority populace. This rhetoric reveals anti-Latinx sentiments with roots deep in United States history. It also calls attention to the historical and continuous race-based and structural violence that affects minority communities in the U.S. and at the border.

Father McShane has suggested that the Fordham community commemorate and discuss these tragedies in November. For now, though, it is important to mourn the victims of August 3 and to remember how and why they died:

Andre Anchondo, 23

Jordan Anchondo, 24

Arturo Benavides, 60

Leonard Cipeda Campos, 41

Angelina Englisbee, 86

Maria Flores, 77

Raul Flores, 77

Guillermo Garcia, 36

Jorge Calvillo García, 61

Maribel Hernandez, 56

Adolfo Cerros Hernandez, 68

Alexander Gerhard Hoffman, 66

David Alvah Johnson, 63

Luis Alfonso Juarez, 90

Ivan Hilierto Manzano, 46

Gloria Irma Marquez

Elsa Mendoza Márquez, 57

Margie Reckard, 63

Sara Esther Regalado, 66

Javier Rodriguez, 15

María Eugenia Legarreta Rothe, 58

Teresa Sánchez de Freitas, 82

Juan Velázquez, 77

Father McShane asked the University Church to offer the Sunday (August 2) Mass on behalf of the victims and the El Paso community, an appropriate gesture for a community and a people very serious about their religious faith.

For our part, we mourn the dead and summon the living to reflect on what we can do to support our own communities.  The El Paso Museum of History will display a digital memorial in remembrance of August 3. The public can join virtually by submitting pictures and memories on Digital El Paso at http://www.digie.org. We invite you to take part and encourage everyone to become active in supporting some of those organizations working on behalf of our communities in El Paso, the Southwest, and in New York. We can best honor the dead by fighting for and supporting justice at home and around the nation: 

Local

Central American Legal Assistance: https://www.centralamericanlegal.info/

Latino Pride Center: http://www.latinopridecenter.org/
Casita Maria Center for Arts and Education https://www.casitamaria.org/ 

St. Jerome H.A.N.D.S Community Center: https://jeromehands.com/

Texas

In El Paso, Annunciation House, which has worked to house and support migrants and refugees on the border::  https://annunciationhouse.org/

Raices Texas: The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services  https://www.raicestexas.org/ways-to-give/donate/

Border Network for Human Rights: https://bnhr.org/about/history/

National

The Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights: https://www.theyoungcenter.org/

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network: https://ndlon.org/

United We Dream: https://unitedwedream.org/

In solidarity, 
David Myers and Stephanie Huezo (with help from William Hogue)

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