MCLA Blog

The latest edition of The Mind’s Eye is now online. This special issue of The Mind’s Eye includes selected papers from the national conference held in North Adams at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA) in September 2006 to showcase the 18-month K–12 curriculum-development project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), “The Shaping Role of Place in African-American Biography.”

Richard A. Courage, professor of English, Westchester Community College in New York, and Frances Jones-Sneed, professor of history at MCLA, codirected the project along with Roselle Chartock, professor of education at MCLA; Donald Pecor, instructor of history at MCLA and director of curriculum at Drury High School in North Adams; and Claudette Webster, curriculum specialist for elementary grades from Chatham, New York. There were also more than 20 local and national scholars who joined us. The project Web site can be viewed at www.mcla.edu/aab. An African-American trail guide, The African American Heritage of the Upper Housatonic Valley, edited by David Levinson, Rachel Fletcher, Frances Jones-Sneed, Bernard Drew and Elaine Gunn, will give you additional details about African-Americans in the area. Also, there is a Web site detailing the efforts of the Upper Housatonic African-American Trail at www.uhvafamtrail.org/.

We believe that the project can be emulated in any community in the country. The scholars’ papers use place as a model to discuss African-Americans in various communities. A full roster of presenters and their topics is given at the end of the journal.