Session Abstract

Bridging Cultures participants will give short visual presentations highlighting the way they are incorporating recent scholarship and resources in Atlantic History and Pacific History into their U.S. History and Comparative Americas survey courses.  Session presenters have been participating in the AHA's three year initiative "Bridging Cultures at Community Colleges: American History, Atlantic and Pacific."  They met for one week at the Huntington Library in January of 2013, where they engaged with scholars on the Pacific World and conducted their own research.  In January of 2014, they met for one week at the Library of Congress, where they worked with scholars on the Atlantic World and conducted their own research to incorporate into their classrooms.  In this "PechaKucha" session, the six presenters will show and discuss 20 slides for 20 seconds each (six minutes, 40 seconds per person) and discuss the ways they are bridging the Atlantic and the Pacific in their U.S. History and History of the Americas survey courses.  

            This panel will include presentations by: Shannon Bontrager (Georgia Highlands College), who will discuss American expansion in the Atlantic and the Pacific worlds by examining the national culture of death, burial, and commemoration that arose out of the United States' wars for empire in Cuba and in the Philippines; Jaime Cárdenas (Seattle Central Community College), who will discuss effective strategies for integrating Pacific maritime history with a survey of an American regional history; Vincent Clark (Johnson County Community College), who will demonstrate how he incorporates crucial links to the Atlantic and Pacific worlds in his U.S. history surveys, including African and Caribbean slavery, the China and whaling trades, and Chinese and Japanese immigration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Carlos A. Contreras (Grossmont College), will discuss the role of various commodities such as coffee, sugar, chocolate and guano and examine how they fueled various forms of un-free labor (from slavery to indentured servitude) in the Americas across the Atlantic and the Pacific; Allison Frickert-Murashige (Mt. San Antonio College), who will discuss strategies for framing early modern American and Global history within the larger context of climate change, disease, and other environmental factors; and Joy Schulz (Metropolitan Community College) who will discuss teaching Hawaiian History from a comparative perspective, including Pacific empires, U.S. international relations, and the maritime transfers of commodities, diseases and peoples.  This format will facilitate a robust discussion among panel members, peers, and the audience on different ways of incorporating Atlantic History and Pacific History into our classrooms.