Digital Commons Network^™

Why The History Of Cuny Matters: Using The Cuny Digital History Archive To Teach Cuny’S Past, Stephen Brier

Publications and Research

This article describes the newly launched CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA), a project of the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the CUNY Graduate Center. The CDHA is designed to provide open, online access to a rich array of digitized historical sources that detail the important history of the City University of New York (CUNY). The article reviews that history, focusing on the postwar expansion of the city’s tuition free municipal college system and the subsequent birth of the CUNY system in 1961. CUNY’s growth helped launch a student-led fight for open admissions at various CUNY campuses …

How History As Mystery Reveals Historical Thinking: A Look At Two Accounts Of Finding Typhoid Mary, Myra Zarnowski, Susan Turkel

Publications and Research

While the words clue, evidence, and detective might not be the first words you associate with history, the idea of history as a mystery to be solved by historian-detectives has a substantial and lively past. That is because the analogy of a historian to a detective solving a mystery is a strong one. Both historians and detectives try to answer the same question: What happened? Both work with evidence from the past to create a plausible narrative using only fragments left behind. Both engage in inferencing as a means of learning from evidence. Both are problem solvers.

In this article, …

Looking Forward, Looking Back: Collective Memory And Neighborhood Identity In Two Urban Parks, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

Collective memory and narratives of local history shape the ways people imagine a neighborhood’s present situation and future development, processes that reflect tensions related to identity and struggles over resources. Using an urban culturalist lens and a focus on collective representations of place, I compare two nearby New York parks to uncover why, despite many similarities, they support different patterns of meaning making and use. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews, and secondary analysis, I show that multi-vocal and fragmented contexts of collective memory help explain the uneven nature of gentrification processes, with one park serving as its cultural fulcrum while …

Student Debt Disproportionally Affects Blacks., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

College student debt, now topping one trillion

dollars, is one of the most severe issues affecting

higher education. But if that amount (higher than

Americans’ combined credit card debt) sounds scandalous,

the problem is compounded by the fact that

it is affecting disproportionally people of color.

In a report published by the Brookings Institute

last October titled “Black-white disparity in student

loan debt more than triples after graduation,” its

authors found that by the moment they earn their bachelor’s

degrees, black college graduates owe $7,400

more on average than their white peers. And the

problem becomes even more acute over …

T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars Of Wisdom And The Erotics Of Literary History: Straddling Epic., Václav Paris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Ritualization Of Ethno-Nationalism: A Textual Analysis Of A Hungarian Corpus Christi Procession, Lisa Pope Fischer

Publications and Research

Observing a Corpus Christi procession in post-socialist Hungary, this article uses a textual analysis to explore how the ritual mirrors post-socialist trends that affirm Hungarian identity. This article serves to both document an interesting ritual procession but also view it in light of growing ethno-nationalism that both unites a community yet also shows exclusion of others. It is like a mirror at a microcosmic level that reflects a kind of ritualization of ethno-nationalism.