As New York City, and the world at large, take unprecedented steps to slow the spread of COVID-19, I find myself thinking about the generations of women who’ve faced moments of national crisis. Over the last year, I’ve spent my time researching and writing the Settler Colonialism and Revolution, 1692-1783 unit of Women & the…

The Women & the American Story (WAMS) team is working every day to bring women’s narratives out of the archive and into the classroom. Since going live last March, the free curriculum website has been visited 55,614 times by users from all 50 states and 122 countries. But the party is just getting started: two…

The Salem Witch trials occupy a large space in the American imagination. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to Hocus Pocus, Arthur Miller to American Horror Story, American pop culture is saturated in retellings of this horrifying episode in colonial history. It is easy to feel like we’ve long known everything there is to know about it….

Women’s history didn’t take a summer holiday! In July, we hosted American Women in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, a NEH Summer Institute for K-12 Educators. Thirty teachers from across the country braved heat-index warnings to spend three weeks at the New-York Historical Society learning about women in wartime. Rethinking women’s participation in times of…

One of the best parts of working on Women & the American Story (a.k.a. WAMS, our curriculum guide in women’s history) is stumbling upon documents that can (and should!) be easily integrated into the standard US history curriculum. My most recent find of this nature is Anne Hulton’s letter describing the Battle of Lexington and…