“Investigating Immigration, Industrialization, and Illness in 19th-Century America” is a summer 2016 institute intended for middle school to twelvth grade teachers. It is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by Immaculata University in partnership with the Penn Museum of Anthropology. The institute will be held on the campus of Immaculata University in Malvern, Pennsylvania, from July 11, 2016 to July 29, 2016. This institute will be an interdisciplinary immersion experience, exploring the history and science of the Duffy’s Cut story. Each participant will receive a stipend of $2,700 to help cover costs of participation such as travel and lodging.
The death by violence and cholera of fifty-seven Irish immigrant railroad workers at Duffy’s Cut in 1832 provides a micro-historical glimpse into broader macro-historical phenomena in early America: immigration patterns, the response to epidemic disease, railroads and the Industrial Revolution, nativism and what historian Alan Kraut has termed “the immigrant menace.”
Interdisciplinary perspectives from the fields of history, archaeology, forensics, genealogy, geology, folklore, and other fields will be employed in this institute to illuminate various aspects of American society in the Jacksonian era.
This institute will enable NEH Scholars to gain a firsthand understanding of the history, folklore, genealogy, geology, archaeology, forensic anthropology, and dentistry that enabled the project specialists to uncover the mysterious fate of the Irish work crew, which had been lost to folklore for 180 years. Scholars will be provided with hands-on opportunities for research into the actual historical sources on the event, archaeological dig experience at the Duffy’s Cut site, and instruction by the primary researchers in the Duffy’s Cut Project and other specialists on aspects of Duffy’s Cut.
All applications are due by March 1, 2016. To apply for the institute, click here.
For more information, click here.