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SUNY Geneseo

Local Colleges, Local History, Local History Teachers

April 24, 2022
by Peter Feinman

Teaching local history in a time of statewide tests is a perpetual challenge. It is easier to teach about when slavery was ended in Texas than it is when it ended in your own state. It is easier to teach about the Battle of Yorktown than it is what happened in the American Revolution in your state after July 4, 1776, save for possible major events like the Battle of Saratoga, Benedict Arnold, or maybe Rochambeau since he connects with Yorktown.

How is a teacher supposed to learn about local history anyway? For either graduate school credit or professional development credit?

Below are two attempts to deal with this challenge. Both are in the formative stage so it there is no way to know for sure what will happen. Although the two examples are from New York, they suggest what could be done in any state. Perhaps similar efforts are underway or already have been implemented in your state.

The Gardiner Foundation Semiquincentennial Student Fellowship Program

The Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, headquartered in Long Island, New York, is funding a student fellowship program through the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History at SUNY Geneseo, in upstate New York under the leadership of Professor Michael Oberg. The goal of the program is to cultivate community discussions and promote interest in local histories in the state related to the American Revolution and its legacy. Specifically it will do so by partnering 50 undergraduate student fellows and academic historians (mentors) from seven colleges and universities across the state with government appointed local historians (hosts) to produce exhibitions, a robust and enduring presence on various websites, including Geneseo’s Center’s website and a downloadable PDF in book form that documents the Fellows’ projects.

There are several critical points to note about this endeavor:

1. The funding provided is private.
2. The project was launched before New York State even has a functioning state commission for the American Revolution 250th.
3. The project is a statewide initiative.
4. The project draws on New York State’s unique but not enforced requirement for municipalities to have government appointed historians.
5. The project is intended to be local in nature.
6. The project has collaborative potential given that seven colleges, 50 students, and an unspecified number of localities will be involved. Therefore Prof. Oberg will have the opportunity to hold periodic conferences and workshops so everyone does not have to reinvent the wheel and even not participants in the project can learn what the various teams in the project are doing.
7. The project is replicable both within the state and in other states.

Both the Gardiner Foundation and Professor Oberg are to be commended for this program.

New York State History and Education Conference (NYSHEC) 
History Fights Back! – October 28-30, 2022 

I received an email from William S. Walker, Associate Professor of History, Cooperstown Graduate Program, SUNY Oneonta (william.walker@oneonta.edu) regarding promoting a new initiative being untaken by a different SUNY college. Also participating in the conference development are Gretchen Sorin, Oneonta, who has been speaking online during the COVID pandemic on the topic of “Driving while Black in America,” and Garet Livermore, who formerly had been active in running the annual New York State History Conference in Cooperstown, just up the road from Oneonta. The Gardiner Foundation also is a major contributor to this conference.

The email I received is:

You are invited to participate in the inaugural meeting of the New York State History and Education Conference, October 28-30, 2022, at SUNY Oneonta. Hear from and collaborate with historians, K-12 educators, museum professionals, librarians, archivists, documentary filmmakers, authors, and researchers both established and emerging as we navigate today’s challenging history landscape together. With the call for proposals coming soon, sign up for our mailing list to ensure you receive all the updates on this exciting opportunity to connect with colleagues from many sectors of New York State history.  

Theme Description: The theme for this first-ever New York State History and Education Conference is History Fights Back! Innovative, accessible, and inclusive history research and education have never been more relevant than in our current moment. Join educators, museum professionals, historians, and others as we use history to build a more just future, educating and empowering as many people as possible along the way!  

The New York State History and Education Conference has five guiding objectives:

1. Encourage collaboration across the history community (and beyond)
2. Connect K-12 educators and history professionals and provide resources for teaching the complex history of New York State, the nation, and the world 
3. Imagine a more diverse and inclusive history of New York State 
4. Deliberately amplify Indigenous voices 
5. Challenge traditional conference structures to be livelier and more welcoming 

Open to: Any history practitioner, professional, teacher, student, or enthusiast. 
Sign up for our mailing list:  https://href.li/?https://forms.gle/Bx7pRdcA8XGUHyLm6 
Visit our website: https://nystate-history.com/

Presented by SUNY Oneonta and the Cooperstown Graduate Program, with generous support from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation and Humanities New York, and in collaboration with New York State History Day.

Notice that the term “education” has been added to the term ‘history” in the conference title. There used to be an annual regional teacher program in the fall held at Cooperstown.

Full disclosure: In addition to attending some of these annual programs, I also led IHARE teacherhostels where Cooperstown was a stop sometimes for an entire weekend. We visited the historic sites in the area among other activities. As you can see by the dating of the conference, such events have to be scheduled off-season to avoid the peak rates.

This initiative has the potential to fill a void created when the New York State Historical Association (NYSHA) formally abandoned its leadership role in New York State history, a role it had informally abandoned even years earlier. That decision was a point of sore contention among academics and others. The turmoil was covered in a series of posts from 2017 and 2018.

History Professors Protest for Local and State History
November 26, 2017

NYSHA Responds to Advocacy for Local and State History Post
November 30, 2017

The NYSHA Saga Continues: Gone but Not Forgotten
December 7, 2017

The Battle over New York State and Local History Gets Ugly
January 19, 2018

Create the New York Association for State and Local History (NYASLH)
February 1, 2018

The result has been a void in history advocacy, a partial void in history conferences, and a void in connecting teachers and state and local history.

I hope that the two upstate SUNYs collaborate with each other. The American Revolution 250th is time specific but will last many years. I do hope that Michael Oberg presents at the Oneonta conference in October and his project is a yearly participant in it.

I also hope that out of the conference will come an institutional framework to develop and promote history advocacy in the state in partnership with the Association of Public Historians of New York State (APHNYS), the Museum Association of New York State (MANY), Greater Hudson Heritage Network (GHHN), and the newly-named Long Island Historical Societies also funded by Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation. History advocacy needs to be done on a state basis and not limited to individual history organizations lobbying for individual action for their individual site. Typically, that is not what happens now.

Speaking of the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation, I have met Kathy Curran, its executive director, and talked to her about the void in state history leadership. And she does receive my posts. So I like to think I may have played small role in the Long Island foundation taking on statewide activities. The Gardiner family and their descendants have owned Gardiner’s Island since 1639, obtained as part of a royal grant from King Charles I of England. Robert David Lion Gardiner was, until his death in August 2004, the 16th Lord of the Manor of Gardiner’s Island, NY. In recent years, the Foundation has expanded beyond its Islip-Suffolk-Long-Island focus to now address the history concerns of the state. Thank you.

Creating History Education Partnerships: Three Case Studies

March 21, 2019
by Peter Feinman
The SUNY Geneseo History department (Josie Kwani/associate photo editor, The Lamron)

From time to time, I have become aware of different history educations partnerships which have been created. These examples demonstrate what people at the grass roots level can accomplish. Two recent examples appeared in the newsletters of historical organizations which I receive. The third was via an email about attending a conference. Unfortunately I am not able to attend all the history-related conferences I might like to attend especially when it involves traveling meaning overnight stays. When I become aware of these partnerships one thing I do do is to suggest to the creators of such partnerships that they share them a local, state, or regional conferences both for history and social studies.

Case Study #1: Clinton County Historical Association/SUNY Plattsburgh

After reading in the newsletter about a college intern project, I contacted Helen Nerska,
Director, Clinton County Historical Association and received the following (edited) reply.

The Clinton County Historical Association has been working with SUNY Plattsburgh for many years. The interns have been from Museum Studies (a minor), History (a major), and Anthropology (a major). We have many examples of the significant contributions students have made to CCHA through the Internship Program. The relationship with the college has made a dramatic difference in how our mainly volunteer staffed museum has been able to move forward documenting our collections.

The benefits of having interns extend beyond their time here and our not limited to our site. They have set up exhibits at SUNY Plattsburgh based on what they learned at CCHA. They have presented their work as well. Two have shared their project findings with our membership and the public. One set up a new system to track our slide collection (this was major to us!).

The feedback from the participating students has been positive. At times, interns have returned with their parents to show them where they worked and what projects they were involved with. The interns stay in touch with us either just to say ‘hi’ or to do some volunteer work. There are organizational benefits as well. One joined the CCHA Board. Another is now working part-time as a collections assistant. There are more examples but these pop out to me because they are the most recent.

And additionally – we have a special relationship with Archaeology Professor Justin Lowry (and the two previous professors) with respect to our extensive Native American Collection and the availability of an actual Native American camp site for student hands-on study. We are also working with the local community college – Clinton Community College- to set up an internship program.

Outside of the internship relationship, we work with Gender and Women’s Studies, specifically on the County’s suffrage story. We will soon be publishing that Story which will include essays by four students from the 2017 class. We work with Special Collections insuring that any duplicate documents we might have in our collection are offered to them first.

This list of projects accomplished by these students is extensive and I am trying to keep this short – but I do agree our success story and how others can make it happen should/could be shared at a Museum Association of New York (MANY Conference). We provide the students with a valuable experience and they in turn help us, a small budget volunteer based organization, get our large collection (started in 1945) documented. Julie Dowd and I are hosting a Coffee Talk at the MANY conference this year (April 2019) to share with other small museums what can be done with little money and little or no staff. The internship program will be discussed with this group. And we expect to get some good ideas from others!

Case Study #2 Athena History Club (Middle School)

After reading about this history club in the Greece Historical Society & Museum newsletter, I contacted President Bill Sauers about it. He passed my message on to Andrea Brunette, the middle school social studies teacher and we spoke on the phone about this club. Needless-to-say, I was intrigued precisely because it was a middle school activity. [For a blog on a defunct high school program see Bring the Yorkers Back to New York. Imagine if there were statewide programs like that today!]

The school district has 12 7th grade classes located in two buildings. So once again, the project is not a district or even schoolwide program but one due to the passion and initiative of the teacher who spearheaded it. She does have the support of her principal.

The club is an afterschool activity which I did not realize at first from the newsletter itself. The initial activity involves the Greece Historical Society & Museum which is in walking distance from the school. The students meet with Bill Sauers and conduct research at the museum on local history.

The club also goes on bus trips. So far the Athena History Club has managed to obtain funding from local donors. These trips can go outside the local limits to the nearby city of Rochester. The students have one meeting prior to each field trip to outline what will be visited and what will be learned. The visits can include historic sites, civics related sites, and meeting with restorers at history preservation sites.

The questions one has to ask are why aren’t the other teachers also doing this and what would happen to the club if Andrea Brunette retired since it is not part of the curriculum? Still it is great to see middle school students visiting their local historical society, learning about local history, and visiting historic sites at the nearest major city. Wouldn’t it be great if all middle school students had such experiences?

Case Study #3 College Convenes Local History Conference

I learned about the third example via an email. Michael Oberg, a history professor at SUNY Geneseo initiated a one-day local history conference. As reported in the college paper Geneseo to host conference convening New York state’s local historians [thank you Google for facilitating this research]:

Distinguished professor of history Michael Oberg is pioneering a conference and initiative that is the first of its kind in New York state. The initiative works to link up local historians with students so they can work together on projects about local history.

Oberg specifies in his blog that the state is required to have hundreds of local historians within specific towns, but they are often passed over and not utilized for the valuable knowledge they have. Oberg is referring here to the requirement in New York State for municipalities to have an historian. That subject has been the topic of a number of posts over the years.

Municipal Historians (November 8, 2011)
The Leadership Role of Municipal Historians (January 24, 2013)
The State of Municipal Historians in New York (October 7, 2014)
The State of the Municipal Historian (May 19, 2015)
A Call for Municipal Historian Reform in NYS (June 4, 2015)
County Clerks/County Historians: A Match Made in Albany? (December 18, 2016)
County and Borough Historians Institute (September 12, 2017)
History Agenda for the New Year (January 6, 2019).

This year is the centennial of the regulation which is often ignored or minimized. Imagine if as part of the centennial there were conferences like this one throughout the state.

In this instance, someone from the academic side recognized a history resource that was being overlooked: the local historians. Oberg said (Geneseo to host conference convening New York state’s local historians):

That reality has become increasingly clear to me over the course of this past year, as I began to survey the public history landscape in New York State. It is a shame. The academic history community has largely ignored local historians. As I began to meet local historians and talk with them, it struck me that we in the academy could be doing so much more and that we had overlooked an extraordinarily valuable community of historians doing extraordinarily valuable work.

Two specific action items related to the initiative are:

1. Internships for college students with the local historians to incorporate local history into their education

The conference brought together the potential interns, the college students, and the potential hosts, the historical societies, historical museums, and municipal historians. A panel was held to discuss how to make this internship program work. State historian Devin Lander participated as a panelist.

The college student response was positive. History adolescent education major junior Simon Goslin, expressed excitement for the program.

I’d say it’s a win-win for everyone involved, local histories are often neglected in the grand scheme of things by any of the higher academic fields. I know personally, I’ve done a little bit of local history in my town and I had a great time. It’s a really good way to have a community connection to the work you do. It’s a great way to network with people if you’re going to be looking for a job in the future, if you’re going to be looking for a career, as a historian, as a museum curator, as anybody who has a part in that.

To no surprise, Goslin added that his last contact with local and state history was in 4th grade.

2. Incorporating local history into the K-12 curriculum.

How to accomplish this goal will prove daunting. It will require action by the State Education Department both for the curriculum changes and the training/certification of teachers. It then will require new classes at the colleges possibly at both the undergraduate and graduate level. It also will have to occur at least in New York where there is no history advocacy organization to provide a venue to push for such changes. The closest such actions so far are in behalf of historic preservation and state parks (ignoring state historic sites) as reported in previous advocacy blogs. MANY has led the effort to fund busing to museums of all types, zoos, and aquariums only to have that initiative vetoed by the Governor after it finally had been passed by both legislative chambers. Effecting curriculum change on behalf of state and local history will be a challenge. Just as middle school teacher Andrea Brunette initiated the middle school history club without it becoming part of the curriculum or adopted by the other 12 teachers in the school district, so Oberg is one professor at one of over 60 SUNY colleges in state. In theory, the SUNYs, CUNYs, and even private colleges could follow this example. That certainly would generate some grass roots support.

In the meantime, Oberg presses onward. This summer begins a new class, Local History Workshop. The goal of the course is to pair Geneseo’s students with a municipal historian or a local historical society to work collaboratively on a project or proposal that will engage the public. As Oberg said:

Together, we can do important work to educate New Yorkers about their state’s diverse and rich history. Students will benefit from the hands-on and high-impact learning experience work in a public history setting can provide, and local historians will benefit from the skills and the energy of our fine students will bring to their cities and towns.

In a recent email, Oberg wrote that the Geneseo Center for Local and Municipal History in the process of being created. May it be the first of many such centers.