In August 2024, the American Social History Project launched a new digital, expanded, and updated edition of Who Built America? Working People and the Nation’s History (WBA?), a history textbook with a focus on social and labor history. Available as an Open Educational Resource and intended for classroom use and general audiences, the new WBA? is supplemented by thousands of primary sources and teaching resources.

Join us in person (June 3rd, 2:30–4:00 pm) or online (June 5th, 11 am–12:30 pm) for a 90-minute workshop introducing WBA? to CUNY educators. Each session will explore the textbook’s unique features, including its extensive repository of primary sources and media-rich supplemental essays. We will demonstrate how WBA? can be effectively adopted across a range of courses—from composition classes and history surveys to electives that rely on historical inquiry or primary-source analysis. Participants will have dedicated time to identify materials that align with their syllabi, create engaging discussion prompts, or outline micro-assignments, and then share and discuss these ideas collectively.

Click here to register. If you have questions, please contact Stefano Morello at smorello@gradcenter.cuny.edu.

About the American Social History Project

Based at the CUNY Graduate Center, the American Social History Project has helped to change the ways that Americans learn history. For more than forty years, we’ve written books, produced documentaries, created digital and online programming, and organized activities that encourage people’s critical thinking about the past. We have also developed classroom resources and led professional development seminars that help teachers in New York City and across the nation to use new scholarship, technology, and methods to promote social history and the development of historical thinking skills in their classrooms. Informed by the latest scholarship, we make the past, and the lives of the working people and “ordinary” Americans who shaped it, vivid and meaningful.

 

 

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Stefano Morello 

Assistant Director for Digital Projects

American Social History Project / Center for Media and Learning

The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Room 7301.12