BACKGROUND: The projects depicted on these web pages are all the outcomes of a Schools for a New Millennium Grant (ED-21751) funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities beginning in 2000.

RATIONALE: We believe that Community studies are the best way for students to gain a holistic sense of the role of history in understanding the world around them. Since the emergence in the 1970s of the “New Social History,” historians have increasingly focused on community studies as an important approach to understanding the past. As we moved further away from narratives constructed around great men and events and attempted to use history to tell the story of all people, local history assumed increasing significance as a way to construct these new narratives.

OBJECTIVES: The objectives of the project are

I. To improve social studies instruction for inner city schools in grades 6-8 by adopting “community in history” as a unifying focus emphasizing project-based learning

II. To increase the history expertise of current and future teachers and heighten understanding of communities as historically-grounded places;

III. To encourage and train students to be practicing historians of the world around them;

IV. To use technology to facilitate research, discussion, production, and distribution of new historical knowledge about community in history; and

V. To engage the larger community in a dialogue with the school about the community’s history and its future.