March 4, 2012
This Week’s Agenda: Castle Garden and Oscar Handlin
The Castle Garden Emigrant Depot ca. 1871
This week, our two class sessions will meet in the Tanger Auditorium on the first floor of the Library (it is behind the reference desk to the right).
Tuesday: I will be giving a talk on the subject of my dissertation, the Castle Garden Emigrant Depot and the authority that ran it, the New York State Board of the Commissioners of Emigration. Castle Garden was the precursor to Ellis Island, processing roughly eight million immigrants at the southern tip of Manhattan from 1855 to 1890. Other sections of “Peopling of New York” have been invited.
Thursday: We will be back in the Tanger for a roundtable discussing the work of Oscar Handlin. The event is part of a one-day conference celebrating the life and work of Handlin, who earned his undergraduate degree from Brooklyn College. Handlin just passed away in September 2011 at age 95 (you can read his New York Times obit here). This conference also marks the fact that Handlin donated his papers to the Brooklyn College Library. One of the discussants will be Yale historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, author of the “More Trans-, Less National” essay from which we read excerpts at the start of the course. I strongly recommend attending other conference sessions if possible, and I have inquired about whether or not I can take you all to the lunch event at 12:30pm (I hope to have word back on that by Monday). You can check out the schedule of the day’s events here and a flyer with even more detail here.
Essay Assignment: I have uploaded the guidelines for the third paper in the right-hand column under “Course Documents.” Please note that the due date is Tuesday, March 20th, but I want you to hand in a thesis paragraph a week before (Tuesday, March 13).
Web Discussion of Readings: Since we will not have a traditional class meeting this week, we will be relying heavily on the web forum to raise issues about this week’s readings. I will need “volunteers” to write the lead questions for each day’s readings. The “volunteers” will be from among folks who have not written them yet; see my email for further details. As of Sunday morning, I have not been able to upload the optional reading for Thursday (the “City of Immigrants” chapter from Gotham), but will do so later today.
Final Web Project: Please note that the class needs to come up with five or six goals for the tentatively titled “Brooklyn College Immigration Project” by Thursday. These need to be finalized and emailed to me by some point on that evening at the latest. I’m glad to see that you have begun to hash things out on the forum, but it seems as if you have considerably more work to do. I will try to add my two cents in the conversation over the next day or two, but please note that I leave it to you all to build consensus among yourselves.
