Gilder Lehrman Institute

If you're completely confused about the title of this blog no worries. You probably have no idea what the Gilder Lehrman Institute is, and that's okay. For us history folks, it is an institute based out of New York City that has vast historical documents and artifacts in its collection, and an institute that believes in offering FREE seminars to teachers across the country on various topics in history. This is what brought me to NYC this week; way back in January I applied online for a seminar and voilá! A few months later I heard back that I got accepted...and accepted to a seminar in New York City about the Civil War and multimedia.

After a jam-packed week of lectures, projects, trips, tours, and lots of food, I am back in STL happy to be home with my boys and looking back at all the cool stuff we did this week.

The first night we realized we were staying across from the restaurant commonly seen in Seinfeld. That was cool.




We got to go on a walking tour of the Five Points neighborhood--the place the movie "Gangs of New York" was based off of. It was awesome, got to see a lot of the places where notorious gang fights took place and where the NY draft riots happened during the Civil War. A lot of the "stuff" has been hidden or torn down, but we had a tour guide that showed us all around where a lot of the gang stuff use to be.










We got to visit Grant's Tomb, which was only a few blocks where we were staying at Barnard College--across from Columbia University.




The college--Barnard--where we were staying had some history itself too: it was the site of Malcolm X's last public speech before he was assassinated in 1965.




We got to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to tour the American wing and see some paintings and artifacts from the Civil War period we'd been talking about all week (the pics below are going to inspire me to wallpaper our living room similar to what they did...I'm sure Mike will LOVE that). If you haven't been to that museum, it's HUGE!!! and the times I've been (that was my 3rd) there it's always been jam-packed with people...this time was no exception. It was super crowded. But we had a good time and we got to check out the roof garden and enjoy the view from up there.













So our entire week came down to Friday when we had to share our video projects we created. This was taking the things we've learned this week and our prior interests with the Civil War and creating a 3-5 minute video about a topic in the Civil War. If you check out my previous post you can read about that and check out my video or check out the video HERE...any feedback is welcomed :)

Overall it was a fabulous week...got to meet some cool people and see some stuff in NYC I haven't seen before. We're a good lookin' group, aren't we?!




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