We define our place-based, experiential humanities approach as inquiry- and research-based learning that empowers our students to connect the achievements and injustices of Lower Manhattan’s past to their own lived experiences in New York City and beyond. It is an approach defined by content–the layers of history in the place where we live and learn–as well as by method. Our teaching is rooted in the belief that learning about suppressed histories must move past traditional teaching models characterized by a one-way flow of information from teacher to student, or from a university to its neighboring communities.

The following resources have informed our approach. 

EXPERIENTIAL AND PLACE-BASED LEARNING

Baeza Ventura, Gabriela, et al. “A U.S. Latinx Digital Humanities Manifesto.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein, University of Minnesota Press, 2023, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/debates-in-the-digital-humanities-2023/section/6fe44fac-6bac-4f1d-bd92-a586833240dc#ch05.

Caswell, Michelle. Urgent Archives: Enacting Libratory Memory Work. Routledge, 2021.

Iacullo-Bird, Maria. “Undergraduate Research in the USA.” Cambridge Handbook of Undergraduate Research, eds. Harald A. Mieg, et. al. Cambridge University Press, 2022, 445-555.

Iacullo-Bird, Maria. “Revisiting the Arts and Humanities, Service Learning, Undergraduate Research and Creative Expression.” How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research With Undergraduates, eds. Iain Crawford et al. Council on Undergraduate Research, 2014, 82-93.

Keeptwo, Suzanne. We All Go Back to the Land: The Who, Why, and How of Land Acknowledgements, Brush Education, 2021.

Kreitz, Kelley. “Counter Mapping the Archival Record: Reflections on Recovering New York City’s Nineteenth-Century Spanish-Language Press.” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. 49.1 (2024), 175-189.

**Martinez, Aja Y. **Counterstory: The Rhetoric and Writing of Critical Race Theory. National Council of Teachers of English, 2020.

Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia, 2013.

Paperson, La. (Wayne, Yang). **A Third University is Possible: Uncovering the Decolonizing Ghost in the Colonizing Machine. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

Sobel, David. Place-Based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. Orion, 2004.

Risam, Roopika. New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy. Northwestern University Press, 2019.

LOWER MANHATTAN COUNTER HISTORIES

Alexander, Leslie M. African or American?: Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City, 1784-1861. University of Illinois Press, 2008.                                                                      

Anbinder, Tyler. City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. Houghton Mifflin, 2016.

Biondi, Martha. To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and Gay New York, 1890-1940. Basic Books, 1995. 

Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock. New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Duke University Press, 2014.                                                               

Freeman, Joshua. Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since WWII. The New Press, 2000.

Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Grumet, Robert S. The Munsee Indians: A History. Oklahoma UP,  2022.

Hämäläinen, Pekka. Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America. Liveright, 2022.

Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. U of Chicago Press, 2003.

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. Norton, 2020.

Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse. Racial Migrations. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Johnson, Erica. Cultural Memory, Memorials, and Reparative Writing. Palgrave, 2018.

Kreitz, Kelley. Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture and the Literary Imagination in the Age of Electricity. Forthcoming from NYU Press.

Kurlansky, Mark. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. Random House, 2007.

Lomas, Laura. Translating Empire: José Martí, Migrant Latino Subjects, and American Modernities. Duke University Press, 2008.

McAllister, Marvin. White People Do Not Know How to Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Colour. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Nayak, Meghana. Who is Worthy of Protection? Gender-Based Asylum and US Immigration Politics. Oxford University Press, 2015.

Pérez, Lisandro. Sugar, Cigars, and Revolution: The Making of Cuban New York. New York University Press, 2018.

Rothschild, Nan A. et al. *Buried Beneath the City: An Archaeological History of New York. *Columbia University Press, 2022. 

Sanderson, Eric W. Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City. Abrams, 2009.                                                

Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York City 1789-1860. University of Illinois Press, 1987. 

Stoler, Ann Laura. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense,

Princeton University Press. 2010.

Tchen, John Kuo Wei. New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776-1882. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Beacon Press, Rev. ed. 2015.

Welty, Emily. Occupying Political Science. Palgrave, 2012.

White, Shane. Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Harvard University Press, 2002.                                                                    

Wilentz, Sean. Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class,1788-1850. Oxford University Press, 1994.

HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS

Alfred, Taiaiake. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Bailey, Moya. Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance. New York University Press, 2021.

Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2008 (1958).

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Materiality in an Antiblack World. New York University Press, 2020.

**King, Tiffany Lethabo. **The Black Shoals. Duke University Press, 2019.

Lazo, Rodrigo, and Jesse Alemán, eds. *The Latino Nineteenth Century. NYU Press, 2016.

Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependence of Discourse. University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Munoz, Jose Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York University Press, 2009.

Mura, David. The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives. University of Minnesota, 2021.

Puar, Jasbir K. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Duke University Press, 2017.

Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake of Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

Wilderson, Frank B. Afropessimism. Liveright, 2021.