Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York. Sanborn Map Company, Sep, 1885. Map. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, .

For years and years I have been hauling out a piecemeal taped-composite photocopy of the Afton Historical Society's Sanborn Fire Insurance 1885 Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
I am delighted to report that it is online at the LOC along with similar maps from 1891 and 1897!

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
September 1885
https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05722_001/

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
July 1891
https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05722_002/

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Afton, Chenango County, New York.
March97
https://www.loc.gov/item/sanborn05722_003/

DDD on Map Warper

Art/History

I was flipping through our Picturing America posters and started reading about artist Jacob Lawrence’s series recounting the northward migration of blacks in the 1920s. He and his family were themselves part of that migration.

This Phillips Collection site hosts images of all 60 captioned panels that he painted. (He wrote the captions before he painted the works.) I believe the progression of captioned images might be a valuable teaching aid illustrating first-hand perspective of that moment in history or as a comparison to current migration issues. It might also inspire some alternative examples for students to demonstrate their understanding/perspective on history and current events.

Reflection piece

This article in the New York Times, How One Journalist's Death Provoked a Backlash That Thousands of Dead in Yemen Did Not is an "interpretive" piece that really provoked some reflection and that I think might provide an important discussion in the classroom. It describes the psychological experience of the "collapse of compassion"; how we are more susceptible to being galvanized by a single death than by the thousands of deaths in a natural or humanitarian disaster ("That is why news coverage of a famine or a flood will often highlight the story of one victim.").

It might be effective to take a short/long review of history and identify landmark events where such single deaths moved society to action. A dozen come to mind.

The article also talks about a "dynamic called common knowledge: A group becomes much likelier to act against a transgressor when each individual member knows that every other member knows about the transgression. This creates a perceived social pressure to act." This provides a strong rationale for supporting our school's efforts to develop strong small-group relationships with students to mitigate things like bullying.

What I learned at Open House this year

For Open House the past few years, I have had a slide show on our foyer flat-screen of Afton Senior Class trips; from 1931 to present. It is a pretty good conversation starter.

This year an alumnus from the Class of 1968 stepped in and said, "You won't have one of my class on a trip." Sure enough, there was only a photo of their class at school.

Turns out their Washington, D.C. trip was cancelled due to that tumultuous year. In between Martin Luther King, Jr. being assassinated in April and Robert Kennedy being shot in June, the the Southern Christian Leadership Conference staged it's "Poor People's March" and "Resurrection City" in Washington during May and June. That was enough to dissuade school official from letting the trip take place.

Not only another example of the reach of history extending to Afton, NY once again, but of libraries being a place of discovery and life-long learning.

Mapping our virtual proximities

"This map shows an index of connectedness, created using friendship links between pairs of 

anonymous Facebook users from a snapshot of the platform in April 2016." 

 

What a fascinating NYT article: How Connected Is Your Community to Everywhere Else in America?

The graphics speak volumes.

At its core, it illustrates a recent study that correlates who we connect with geographically on Facebook; and the implications of that:

In the millions of ties on Facebook that connect relatives, co-workers, classmates and friends, Americans are far more likely to know people nearby than in distant communities that share their politics or mirror their demographics. The dominant picture in data analyzed by economists at Facebook, Harvard, Princeton and New York University is not that like-minded places are linked; rather, people in counties close to one another are.

Even in the age of the internet, distance matters immensely in determining whom — and, and as a result, what — we know.

Coastal cities like New York, Washington, San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles do exhibit close ties to one another, showing that people in counties with similar incomes, education levels and voting patterns are more likely to be linked. But nationwide, the effect of such similarity is small. And the pull of regionalism is strong even for major cities. Brooklynites are still more likely to know someone on Facebook near Albany or Binghamton than in the Bay Area.

That we cling to physical nearness, even as technology offers us unlimited horizons, pricks some corner of the poet in me and urges me to think that we don't yet want to give up front porches, sidewalks, neighbors, and the realness of our brick & mortar communities.

Present!(tation)

The Duel by Judith St. George

 With a bow to the Fenimore Art Museum for the idea, we placed foot prints "10 paces apart" on the library floor to introduce students to our books about Hamilton and Burr.

Broadening the discussion

I thought this info-graphic story in the New York Times provided a good way to broaden the discussion with students following the shootings in Las Vegas by aligning the quantity of the killings in Las Vegas to gun deaths in selected U.S. cities; prompting discussions about the episodic nature of news consumers, the emphasis we place on cataclysmic human tragedy versus incremental tragedy, and context for issues like gun control, "black life matters," media responsibility, etc.

Comparisons

I have been an advocate of "making comparisons" as a tool for higher-level thinking when students engage in research projects. This month's Dig magazine reinforces that notion with its theme of parallel lives; comparing "different times, similar struggles" through the lives of two protagonists: Patrick Henry / Sojourner Truth,  Fulvia / Benazir Bhutto, etc.

What I learned is that this form was made famous nearly 2000 years ago by Plutarch in his Parallel Lives or Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans; the inspiration for this issue ... and for its continued use.

So how about end-of-the-semester Global Studies or U.S. History students reaching back into their year to draw some comparisons about "different times, similar struggles." That practice might help them identify similarities in future events.

WWI Exhibit

Installed our WWI Exhibit from the Afton Historical Society today. Here are few sneak previews of the April 17-21 show.

Pre-War preparations

Getting together our advertising for our World War I exhibit in the April: handbills, tabletops, postcards.

Historical Perspective from the State Department

Some concise pieces on the Milestones of U.S. Foreign Relations from the Office of the Historian at the U.S. State Department.

More about them from their web site:

"The Office of the Historian is staffed by professional historians who are experts in the history of U.S. foreign policy and the Department of State and possess unparalleled research experience in classified and unclassified government records. The Office’s historians work closely with other federal government history offices, the academic historical community, and specialists across the globe.

The Office of the Historian is responsible, under law, for the preparation and publication of the official documentary history of U.S. foreign policy in the Foreign Relations of the United States series.
In addition, the Office prepares policy-supportive historical studies for Department principals and other agencies. These studies provide essential background information, evaluate how and why policies evolved, identify precedents, and derive lessons learned. Department officers rely on institutional memory, collective wisdom, and personal experience to make decisions; rigorous historical analysis can sharpen, focus, and inform their choices. The Office of the Historian conducts an array of initiatives, ranging from briefing memos to multi-year research projects.
The Office of the Historian also promotes the declassification of documents to ensure a complete and accurate understanding of the past."

*Wanted to add some italics of my own, but I figure you had your red pencil out too.

Encore performance

Still one of the best and most chilling data-driven animations I have seen:

Election Day

We are hosting the Middle School's mock presidential election in the library today!

The Complex Fabric of the Holy City

This is one in a series of very short videos in support of "Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People Under Heaven," on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from September 26, 2016, through January 8, 2017. All of the videos, but especially this one, illustrate  the multilayered ethnic and religious density of Jerusalem. I am sharing these videos with our Global Studies teacher because of the integrity of their content and the brevity in which they communicate it.

The personal touch

Walked up this new history series (Primary Sources of the Abolitionist Movement) to the MS Social Studies teacher to introduce it to her and to leave it for her review. #actuallibrarian vs. #virtuallibrarian

Charles Decker Day

We are delighted that the Afton community will be celebrating Charles Decker Day on October 1st!

His legacy to our school and community include over twenty years worth of weekly newspaper articles which this library digitized and made available at the Internet Archive.

We look forward to being a part of his celebration.

American Panorama

The Digital Campus insert in the recent Chronicle of Higher Education features an article on "American Panorama," an evolving site that currently features four data-rich interactive maps: Canals: 1820-1860, Foreign-Born Populations: 1850-2010, Overland Trails: 1840-1860, and Forced Migrations of Enslaved Peoples: 1810-1860.

The  maps are supported with sidebars and additional graphs that feature statistics (yearly tonnage for specific cargos on canals!) and narratives that include primary source diaries. I think it is a strong site for high school students to explore, analyze, and develop questions from the provocative data.

Good graphic for discussion

Image from the NYT http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/26/us/race-of-american-power.html?_r=0

"The Faces of American Power," a good graphic from the New York Times to prompt discussion in US History class about minority representation in the U.S.

Revealing history through participation

 

An 1850s ad seeking the return of a runaway slave to a Maryland plantation. Credit Swann Auction Galleries

An article in the New York Times about emerging databases that are utilizing runaway slave ads, has led me to these two interesting learning opportunities:

The first is “Freedom on the Move” through Cornell University. It involves a crowd-sourcing opportunity to verify the accuracy of primary source ads and to tag them with relevant information; perhaps a high-school exercise with an element of community service.

The other is “Pretends to be Free” from Historic Hudson Valley. Students read a selection of runaway slave ads and the accompanying classroom activities include creating an illustration, writing an ad based on the description of a classmate, and discussions based on a close reading of the sources.

These opportunities strike me as adaptable for entire classes or as alternative opportunities for select students.