Category: Uncategorized

Children Bear the Cost of War in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza

Children Bear the Cost of War in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza

by Alan Singer, Hofstra University

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/10/2/2274375/-Children-Bear-the-Cost-of-War-in-Ukraine-Sudan-and-Gaza?_=2024-10-02T18:27:44.000-07:00

Children Bear the Cost of War in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza Millions of children are suffering from severe physical, mental, and emotional, trauma, impacted by continuing wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza. They have lost family members, fled from their homes, and seen friends and siblings wounded or killed. The… www.dailykos.com

Millions of children are suffering from severe physical, mental, and emotional, trauma, impacted by continuing wars in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza.  They have lost family members, fled from their homes, and seen friends and siblings wounded or killed. The effects of mental and emotional trauma like PTSD, depression, and anxiety can last for decades and my never subside. According to UNICEF, more than half of Ukraine’s children were displaced in the first months alone following the Russian invasion in February 2022, about 500 were killed, and over 1,000 were injured by the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities.

The latest civil war in Sudan, starting in April 2023, has placed 24 million children at risk of exposure to brutality and human rights violations. According to UNICEF, 3.7 million Sudanese children are acutely malnourished, including over 700,000 suffering from severe acute malnutrition. Schools and hospitals stopped functioning meaning children are denied an education and a vast majority of the population lacks basic health care. There are reports of children being killed, subjected to sexual violence as a weapon of war, and forced to serve as child soldiers.

UNICEF spokesperson James Elder, an Australian, describes Gaza as “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child and day after day, that brutal reality is reinforced.” UNICEF estimates that over 850,000 Palestinian children lost their homes and were forced to relocate, sometimes multiple times. Over 20,000 children have lost either one or both parents. More than 14,000 children have died in Israeli attacks, but the mortality figure may be higher because of deaths from starvation and disease.

Ulrike Julia Wendt, an emergency child protection coordinator with the International Rescue Committee and a member of the German Parliament, estimates that “There are about 1.2 million children who are in need of mental health and psychosocial support. This basically means nearly all Gaza’s children.” Based on her own visits to Gaza, she reports that Palestinian children are having nightmares and wetting their beds because of stress, noise, crowding, and constant change.

Another casualty of the war in Gaza is the education system. Following the Hamas assault on Israeli on October 7, 2023, Israel responded with a massive bombing campaign and a military invasion, forcing the closing of all schools. More than 800 schools were bombed or destroyed by the Israeli Airforce during the first five months of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian students have had no formal education for the past year or a safe place to spend the day. Many end up in the street sifting through ruble trying to find things to sell that will help support their families.

The 18-member UN Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) accuses Israel of severe breaches of the 1989 global treaty protecting children’s rights that Israel signed. It argues that Israel’s military actions in Gaza are having a catastrophic impact on children and are among the worst violations in recent history. Bragi Gudbrandsson of Iceland, vice chair of the committee, describes “the outrageous death of children” in Gaza as “almost historically unique.” Israel attended United Nations hearings in Geneva, Switzerland in September on its actions in Gaza where its representatives claimed Israel respected international humanitarian law and that the Children’s Rights treaty did not apply in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli public views very managed coverage of events in Gaza on television and reads similarly edited reports in its press so it is largely unaware of the depth of the trauma suffered by Palestinian children. Reports focus on military operations, the negotiating demands of the Netanyahu government, and concern with Israeli hostages held by Hamas.

Israeli psychologists report Israeli children are suffering childhood trauma following from the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, that resulted in over 1,200 deaths and hundreds of hostages. Despite disruptions caused by continuing air raid alerts and fear that the small country could be overrun, life for Jewish children in most of Israel has not been interrupted in the way it is in Ukraine, Sudan, and Gaza and Israeli mental health professionals, with support from the government and non-profit organizations, have been able to provide children with needed counseling and support.

Land of the Oneidas

Land of the Oneidas

By Daniel Koch

The central part of New York State, the homeland of the Oneida Haudenosaunee people, helped shape American history. This book tells the story of the land and the people who made their homes there from its earliest habitation to the present day. It examines this region’s impact on the making of America, from its strategic importance in the Revolution and Early Republic to its symbolic significance now to a nation grappling with challenges rooted deep in its history. The book shows that in central New York—perhaps more than in any other region in the United States—the past has never remained neatly in the past. Land of the Oneidas is the first book in eighty years that tells the history of this region as it changed from century to century and into our own time.

We Have A Civics Education Crisis – And Deep Divisions on How to Solve It

We Have A Civics Education Crisis — And Deep Divisions on How To Solve It

Glenn C. Altschuler and David Wippman

Reprinted with permission from Made in History, The Washington Post

According to the most recent analysis by the National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 13 percent of eighth graders are proficient in U.S. history — down from a peak of 18 percent in 2014. A mere 22 percent of those students are proficient in civics, the first decline since the test began in 1998.

Adults fare little better. Less than half of those surveyed could name the three branches of government (1 in 4 could not name any). Nor did they know that a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling becomes the law of the land.

Yet, even as Americans across the political spectrum believe that more civic awareness could help heal the country’s divides, only seven states require a full year of civics education.

The belief that an educated citizenry is the best protection for democracy is as old as the Republic. As George Washington asked in the founding era: “What species of knowledge” is more important than “the science of government?”

Yet, U.S. history and civics curriculums have long been attacked from the political right as insufficiently patriotic and from the left as woefully incomplete and discriminatory. In short, Americans have never agreed about what should be taught when it comes to our nation’s history and government. And as this latest round of test scores suggests, that has real implications for schoolchildren.

How to teach American history and civics was not initially an issue of national debate or concern. At the nation’s founding, most Americans received little or no formal schooling, but learned instead from family, work and church.

That began to change with the adoption of universal, state-funded education. By the 1840s, education reformers like Horace Mann argued that publicly supported schools could help to create “disciplined, judicious, republican citizens” by “teaching the basic mechanics of government and imbuing students with loyalty to America and her democratic ideals.”

To protect public schools from “the tempest of political strife,” fears spurred in part by the arrivals of immigrants, Mann insisted civics be presented in a nonpartisan, nonsectarian manner — even as he and his allies, consciously or not, imbued their own values into this supposedly neutral curriculum. Civics was taught through study, memorization and recitation of patriotic speeches and foundational texts, such as the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. These exercises were paired with readings from the King James Bible “that exemplified the Protestant ethic.”

Unsurprisingly, controversies arose. Abolitionists complained that the nonpartisanship required the exclusion of anti-slavery principles. Roman Catholic leaders attacked non-sectarianism as a stealth imposition of Protestantism, prompting “school wars” that led to the creation of the Catholic parochial school system.

In the North, some native-born critics feared that the 9 million immigrants arriving in their port cities between 1880 and 1917 — predominantly non-English-speaking Catholics and Jews from Southern and Eastern Europe — lacked the instincts and training to qualify as citizens. “Americanizers” sought to prepare the children of these “new immigrants” for citizenship through instruction in English, basic civics and a history that celebrated the country’s political institutions, downplayed its shortcomings and implanted in them “the Anglo-Saxon conception of righteousness, law and order, and popular government.” Eager to become citizens, most immigrants did not object. But some resisted the effacing of their linguistic, cultural and religious heritage.

During World War I, former president Theodore Roosevelt demanded that schools discontinue instruction in the German language and declared that “there is no room in this country for hyphenated Americans.” In New York, state legislators banned textbooks containing material “disloyal to the United States.” In response, nascent cultural pluralists proposed that the metaphor for “transnational America” should not be a melting pot, but a “symphony orchestra,” where “each ethnic group is the natural instrument.”

After the nation took stock of the blood and treasure expended in war, isolationist sentiment took root alongside an anti-communist red scare, overriding pluralist sentiment in the 1920s. Congress implemented strict quotas in 1924 that dramatically reduced immigration, especially from the non-English-speaking world.

World War II accelerated a backlash against progressive educators like John Dewey who, during the Great Depression in the 1930s, advocated that students “critically examine” the nation’s institutions and economic inequality. Instead, with America at war again by the end of 1941, politicians demanded that teachers promote “an abiding love of American institutions.”

In the Cold War that followed, elected officials again used the nation’s schools as a space to pit the virtues of U.S. democracy against the evils of communism — this time to an even greater degree than before. Congress created the “Zeal for American Democracy” program in 1947, which encouraged educators in public schools to exalt U.S. democracy, while glossing over McCarthy-era violations of free speech and freedom of association.

Throughout the century following the Civil War, teachers instructed White students in the South that the conflict was a struggle over states’ rights, fought by gallant Confederate soldiers. They learned that during the brief period of Reconstruction after the war, corrupt northern carpetbaggers and formerly enslaved men now eligible to vote drove basic civic and governmental institutions into the ground — and that race mixing was contrary to the law of man and God. As late as 1961, an Alabama textbook maintained that “slavery was the earliest form of social security in the United States.”

But the civil rights and women’s and gay and lesbian rights movements, as well as opposition to the Vietnam War, called into question the dominant vision of U.S. civics and history that had long prevailed in American classrooms. Demands for immigrants to assimilate were recast by underrepresented racial and ethnic groups as “cultural imperialism,” as questions increasingly arose about the desirability of building a common civic culture. Advocates created a pluralist, multicultural curriculum that featured voices seldom before included in history and civics curriculums, such as Frederick Douglass’s oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” and the proceedings of the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention.

A conservative movement soon grew in opposition, with activists warning that “secular humanism” was creeping into schools and usurping religious, traditional family-centered values taught at home. The fact that the Supreme Court had outlawed school-sponsored prayer in public schools in 1962 — seen as a potential antidote to this trend — only fueled their ire.

By the 1980s, opponents began decrying multicultural education and ethnic studies as “political correctness,” and in 1992, they successfully derailed an attempt to establish national history standards and adopt the voluntary guidelines developed by dozens of civic organizations and educators. Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment of the Humanities from 1986-1992, derided these efforts as a politicized, “grim and gloomy portrayal” of American history, focused excessively on women, ethnic and racial groups. The standards were rejected by the U.S. Senate in a 99-1 vote.

At the beginning of this century, concerns about American economic competitiveness prompted a renewed focus on reading and math under President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and then on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) subjects under President Barack Obama’s Educate to Innovate campaign. Both came at the expense of civics, history and related subjects.

As political polarization in the United States escalated, President Donald Trump denounced the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which put enslavement and discrimination at the center of the history of the United States. Trump claimed that such efforts taught children “to hate their own country.” He established the Advisory 1776 Commission, which declared that U.S. history, when properly taught, reveals the United States to be “the most just and glorious country in all of human history.”

In 2021, in an attempt to bridge these divides, over 300 experts with diverse political views recommended new guidelines for civics education. Their Roadmap To Educating for American Democracy calls for treating disagreement “as a feature, not a bug of democracy,” and an account of U.S. history “that is honest about the wrongs of the past without falling into cynicism, and appreciative of the founding of the United States without tipping into adulation.” Supported by six former secretaries of education, Republicans and Democrats and over 120 civic organizations, it was attacked by conservatives, who distorted its purpose and content and gave it an “F+.”

The bipartisan Roadmap has gone nowhere, and many states are going their own way. This is unsurprising. Efforts to establish national history and civics guidelines have always been subjected to withering criticism — just as attempts to ignore contested aspects of our past to foster national unity have only produced partisan divisions.

Understanding this history may well be the most important civics lesson of all.

Street Smart: Chaos to Clarity

Street Smart

Book Review of Chaos to Clarity by Marci Hopkins

by Hank Bitten, NJCSS Executive Director

As a history educator I am more comfortable with writing book review about historical events and biographies than I am about the personal struggles and accomplishments of ordinary people. The story in From Chaos to Clarity might best be understood from the pen of a social studies teacher as one from continuity and change over time.

The private lives of our students are often hidden from the smiles in the classroom, demonstration of skills on a test, clothes, or the extracurricular activities they participate in. Many who are victims of what is called a ‘mental health crisis’ are savvy at disguising what is deep inside of them. Although someone in the school community is likely to be the first responder to a student in crisis, the role of the classroom teacher is critical. The realities of food insecurity, divorce, emphasis on perfection, feelings of guilt, contribute to stress, alienation, and frustration. Chaos to Clarity provides a perspective on the life of a child, high school teenager, college student, young professional and parent in upscale suburban communities. Let me begin a review of this insightful book with three points that changed my way of thinking about children and teenagers.

  1. Are educators contributing to the mental health crisis children are experiencing?  In my college psychology classes, we debated if nature or nurture had the greater influence on the development of children. I sided with the behaviorists and understood the implications of my classroom environment, emphasis on test scores, comments supporting perfection and excellence, and how I might be influencing the way students studied history and valued or feared homework. As a teacher, I was committed to changing behavior; especially how students understood government, immigration, civil rights, their carbon footprint, and much more.

As an educator I am committed personally and professionally to the wellbeing of my students. In fact, I took a pledge committing to in locos parentis when I received my license to teach. I operated in the absence of parents to protect my students from fights, two fires in schools, several medical emergencies, on their bus ride to school, and on overnight school trips within and outside the United States. 

After reflecting on the lessons in Chaos to Clarity, it was likely my body language, comments on tests, and hidden messages that could be perceived by students differently than my intention depending on their family and/or home environment. This message is clear and concise in the personal story of Marci Hopkins regarding divorce, alcoholism, anger, physical abuse, fear, anxiety, stress, and peer relationships. Teachers may not create stress for students but they are contributing to their stress with expectations of perfection, excellence, demanding assignments, preparation for college, and the inherent values of academic success as a desired and necessary path to a career. These are commendable values and are important to every child’s education. The messages in Chaos to Clarity provide insight into the importance of communicating them in a sensitive and encouraging voice that builds self-confidence rather than threatening it.

2. How is the school environment contributing to the mental health crisis children are experiencing?  The school environment begins in the home with breakfast and likely continues, especially with middle school and high school students into the evening or late into the night. Chaos to Clarity provides an understanding of the importance of nutrition, love, and self-confidence.

There are an increasing number of students who experience food insecurity, lack of sleep, parents who put their own needs before those of their children, and angry or disappointing comments about schoolwork and grades. The walk or ride to school may be lonely, impacted by bullying, and/or a time of personal reflection about unrealistic aspirations. The ride or walk home is likely more stressful because the experiences of five or more academic classrooms emphasizing content standards and cognitive thinking, only one activity-based period without instruction, and lunch may also contribute to a negative emotional health of children. The daily routine, placement levels for reading and math, assessments that are well-intentioned but poorly designed each have a way of sending negative messages to the brain, with a permanent impact. Unfortunately, even for the most academically successful students, unlocking the door to an empty home after more than seven hours in school is one of disappointment and an opportunity for supporting addictive behaviors with time spent before a digital monitor providing dopamine to the brain with the viewing of photos, videos, or playing games. Although none of this is intentional, it is consistent and inherent in our home, culture, and educational environment.

3. How are students contributing to their own mental health crisis? The personal story of Marci Hopkins is one of addiction to alcoholism that first appeared in high school and continued for two decades. It is a disease of the brain and one where the symptoms can be disguised. I often think of addictive behaviors as starting with a specific event when someone is introduced to nicotine, alcohol, harmful substances, or caffeine. Each person’s body reacts differently to chemicals making the signs difficult to see.

Chaos to Clarity provides a perspective on addiction that changed my perspective. The signs of how we escape from the harmful consequences of academic disappointment, losses in athletic and academic competitions, escape from angry and loud parents, binge streaming for entertainment, seeking emotional happiness from the people we influence through social media, or desire for sexual intimacy contribute negatively to a child’s mental health. Instead, parents, educators, and friends need to bring awareness to the dangers of an indulgence that is pursued to fill the emptiness of acceptance and self-confidence.

The personal story of Marci Hopkins continues into college, her first jobs, marriage, relocation, and family. Her story is a roller coaster of starts and stops, curves and wrong turns, and crises and resilience. Although the message in Chaos to Clarity emphasizes her personal journey through spiritual and emotional development, the point of this review is to learn from her experiences as a child and teenager that contributed to her addiction and personal crisis. The mental health crisis in our society is real and serious. It contributes to loss of employment, divorce, and fractured relationships. The people in crisis are our students, nephews and nieces, and neighbors. While our sociological environment encourages us to be a bystander, our dedication to in loco parentis requires us to be observant, mindful of how our voice and behaviors might be harmful, and to report symptoms to administrators, counselors, and mental health professionals in our schools as soon as is possible.

Are we able to teach children how to be “street smart” in a time of helicopter parents, artificial intelligence, and complacency in society? When one is ‘street smart’ they understand people, the behaviors of people, the ability to know who they can trust, how to overcome challenges and disappointments, and seizing opportunities. It is an intelligence that develops from perspective, diversity, and experiences. Although the first lessons of being ‘street smart’ should begin in the home, they are most likely first learned in kindergarten as children are placed in a community of classmates from diverse cultures, homes, incomes, abilities, and multi-sensory experiences. Being ‘street smart’ is also understanding and learning how to survive in an environment that is constantly changing, filled with violence, war, disease, and destructive behaviors, and a civilization facing the existential threat of a changing climate, collapse of institutions, and unprecedented poverty.

New York Local History: Yonkers Sculpture Garden

New York Local History: Yonkers Sculpture Garden

Source: https://westchestermagazine.com/things-to-do/arts-culture/yonkers-sculpture-garden-juneteenth/

For Juneteenth 2022, the City of Yonkers debuted a permanent art exhibit honoring the legacy of the nation’s first freed slaves. The Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden includes five life-size bronze sculptures created by artist Vinnie Bagwell depicting formerly enslaved Africans. The sculpture garden is located along the Yonkers Hudson River esplanade. According to Bagwell, “Public art sends a message about the values and priorities of a community. In the spirit of transformative justice for acts against the humanity of black people, I am grateful for those who supported this collective effort. The strongest aspect of the Enslaved Africans’ Rain Garden coming to fruition is that it begins to address the righting of so many wrongs by giving voice to the previously unheard via accessible art in a public place while connecting the goals of artistic and cultural opportunities to improving educational opportunities and economic development.”

In Yonkers, Philipse Manor Hall was the seat of the Philipsburg Manor, a colonial estate that covered more than 52,000 acres of Westchester land. The Philipse family was involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and probably as many as two-dozen enslaved African slaves worked and lived at the manor. The enslaved Africans were freed in 1799, one of the first large emancipations in the United States. New York State finally ended slavery in 1827.

The Freedom to Teach by the National Council for the Social Studies

This statement is from March 2022 and can be found at https://www.socialstudies.org/current-events-response/freedom-teach

Poster-Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1950s

School districts, the most active battlefield in the American culture wars today, are facing an unprecedented number of calls to remove books from schools and libraries, false claims about “obscenity” invading classrooms, the elimination of teaching about evolution and climate change, challenges to the need for making sense of and critiquing our world in the mathematics classrooms, and legislation redlining teaching about racism in American history. These actions are putting excessive and undue pressure on teachers, who are caught in the crossfire of larger political conflict, motivated by cultural shifts and stoked for political gain.

Teachers are being maligned as “harming” children and are subjected to constant scrutiny (and even direct surveillance) by many parents, school administrators, and activist groups. Some are afraid to offer their students award-winning books that may violate vaguely stated laws about teaching the history of racism or that may be misleadingly labeled as pornographic. As a result, teachers’ very ability to do their job is under threat.

In their zeal, activists of the current culture wars unfortunately treat teachers as if they are enemies. The truth is that teachers are uniquely important leaders who, in educating current and new generations of students, bear responsibility for this country’s future. They are trained professionals with one of the hardest and most demanding jobs, a job that requires deep commitment, but brings little financial reward.  

Teachers need our support; they need our trust; they need to have the freedom to exercise their professional judgment. And that freedom includes the freedom to decide what materials best suit their students in meeting the demands of the curriculum, the freedom to discuss disturbing parts of American history if and when they judge students are ready for it, and the freedom to determine how to help young people navigate the psychological and social challenges of growing up. In short, teachers need the freedom to prepare students to become future members of a democratic society who can engage in making responsible and informed contributions and decisions about our world.

The stakes are too high. We cannot let good teachers leave the field because they no longer have the freedom to do their job. We cannot let the education of our children and young adults become collateral damage in partisan political machination.

My Story: Annis Boudinot Stockton, November 1776

My Story: Annis Boudinot Stockton

Princeton, New Jersey, November, 1776

Annis Boudinot Stockton

How can it be that four short months ago, we were here at my home in Princeton, New Jersey, celebrating the Declaration of Independence? I am so proud of my husband, Richard Stockton, for representing New Jersey and signing his name alongside Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and other great Americans in declaring our independence from Great Britain.

My name is Annis Boudinot Stockton, and I am a patriot, a poet, and a mother of six children. The warmth in the air that day in July when we celebrated our independence has turned to a bitter cold this November as news spread that the British have taken New York City, and George Washington is retreating through New Jersey. I frequently correspond with George Washington, and I am sure that our Continental Army is in the very strongest of hands.

However, rumors abound that Washington has been pushed through Newark and New Brunswick and that he is on his way to Trenton, where he will cross the Delaware River to get to Pennsylvania. While I am hopeful he will reach the safety of Pennsylvania, I know that his retreat will bring the might of the British army and the bloodthirsty Hessians right here to Princeton. My beloved home, “Morven,” is a well-known gathering place for the intellectual elites of Princeton, and my husband signed the Declaration of Independence.

We are told that the British are only a couple of days away. My home and my children are in grave danger. I have written to my husband, but he is all the way in Baltimore, meeting with the Continental Congress. It is not our material wealth that I am worried about the British destroying. It is the intellectual wealth contained in the state papers and the collections of writings from the American Whig Society that are here at Morven.

What should Annis Boudinot Stockton do as the British close in on Princeton?

Be sure to provide reasoning for your response.

A. Remain in Princeton and defend her home and her children, even if it means putting her children in grave danger.

B. Stay in Princeton, but deny any involvement with the Revolutionary cause and implore the British for lenient treatment of her husband, Richard.

C. Immediately flee the area with her family for safety, leaving behind all her belongings, the state papers, and the papers of the American Whig Society.

D. Remain in Princeton for a few more hours to bury some of her belongings, the state papers, and the papers of the American Whig Society, but then flee the area as quickly as possible.

Annis Boudinot Stockton was a well-known poet in Revolutionary America and a prolific letter writer.

After making your decision above, complete one of the following tasks:

1. Write a poem about the retreat of the Continental Army through New Jersey and the difficult decision that was made for her family.

2. Write a letter to her husband, Richard Stockton, informing him of the decision made.

Below is a map detailing Washington’s retreat through New Jersey.

Use this map to answer the following two questions:

1. Do you think General Washington believed the Continental Army was safe once they crossed the Delaware River? Explain your answer.

2. After abandoning Princeton during the retreat through New Jersey, the Stockton family sought refuge in Monmouth County. Do you believe Monmouth County was safer than their hometown of Princeton? Why or Why not?

Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators

Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators

by Noreen Naseem Rodriguez and Kathy Swalwell

“In the wake of 2020, we need today’s young learners to be prepared to develop solutions to a host of entrenched and complex issues, including systemic racism, massive environmental problems, deep political divisions, and future pandemics that will severely test the effectiveness and equity of our health policies. What better place to start that preparation than with a social studies curriculum that enables elementary students to envision and build a better world? In this engaging guide two experienced social studies educators unpack the oppressions that so often characterize the elementary curriculum—normalization, idealization, heroification, and dramatization—and show how common pitfalls can be replaced with creative solutions. Whether you’re a classroom teacher, methods student, or curriculum coordinator, this is a book that can transform your understanding of the social studies disciplines and their power to disrupt the narratives that maintain current inequities.” Noreen Naseem Rodríguez is an Assistant Professor of Teacher Learning, Research, and Practice at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Katy Swalwellis Lead Equity Specialist for the Equity Literacy Institute and founder of Past Present Future Media & Consulting.

Cemeteries of Delaware County, New York: A Driving Tour

Cemeteries of Delaware County, New York: A Driving Tour

The Historical Society of Middletown, New York

New Kingston Valley Cemetery

New Kingston Valley Cemetery: Thompson Hollow Rd, ½ Mile North of Kingston

Park along the main road (though it is a busy stretch!) or drive through the iron gate to follow a loop road that exits through this same gate. The monument to Myron Faulkner, storekeeper, postmaster, news correspondent and unofficial “mayor” for many years, is straight ahead and to the left. At least two folks buried here met death by water: Revillow Haynes (on the left, near the stone wall) who in 1910 was strapped in a stream under an overturned wagonload of hay, and James Sanford (center rear), who was just seven years old when he drowned in the Mill Brook in 1867.As the road circles back around to the gate, note the stone to Lincoln Long, State Assemblyman and school superintendent; and, to your left in the front corner, Charles Halleck, who traveled the country as an opera singer and taught music at the general store here.

Sanford Cemetery: Delaware Co. Route 3 (New Kingston Rd) 1 Mile from NYS Route 28

Park in the grassy area take a leisurely stroll through this lovely cemetery where some of the earliest settlers in Middletown are buried. These include the Smiths, Sanfords and Waterburys who founded the Old Stone School in Dunraven. The central cemetery section contains some very old graves relocated from areas inundated by the Pepacton Reservoir. A few were carved by an itinerant stone carver nicknamed the “Coffin Man” for the coffins he would etch in the bottom of the headstones. Look for George Sands’ monument to see an example of his work. To the right of this section, meander towards the back under the trees to find the resting place of Thankful Van Benschoten, who started the commercial cauliflower growing industry in the Catskills in the 1890s.Facing the cemetery from the parking area, in the far left corner is the grave of Karl Amor, an Estonian war refugee who gained fame in the folk art world for his distinctive grapevine and reed baskets.

Halcottsville Cemetery: Back River Road, ½ Mile North of Halcottsville Off NYS Route 30

Watch for the cemetery sign on the left, and proceed through the open iron gate up the one-lane access road. Don’t be surprised if you startle a deer or a flock of wild turkeys when you break into the clearing at this secluded hilltop burial ground. Enter through the impressive stone wall and note the granite-and-iron enclosed plot of Isaac and Maria Weld Hewitt. Like John D. Hubbell, buried in the Kelly Corners Cemetery, Isaac led a congregation of the Old School (Primitive) Baptist Church which was once dominant in the area. Nearby is a marble monument to J. Foster Roberts, whose father established a homestead in Bragg Hollow in 1815.Look for monuments to David, Norman and George Kelly who in 1899 built the Round Barn just south of the hamlet. In the far left front corner of the cemetery is the grave of Virgil Meade, whose family ran the Round Barn farm for many years after the Kellys.

Margaretville Cemetery: Cemetery Rd, Just Off Main St. Margaretville

Park in the lot directly in front of the receiving vault. The driveway loop into this part of the cemetery is open from May 1 to Nov. 1. Foot entry at other times of the year is via the ramp in front of the vault. Note the old section to your right. Look upslope to see ALLABEN in white marble; Dr. Orson Allaben helped develop the village in the mid-1800s.Continue around the loop—in the center are the monuments of later entrepreneurs: Clarke Sanford (Catskill Mountain News), Sheldon Birdsall (Margaretville Telephone Company) and Lafayette Bussy (Bussy’s Store). Exit to the parking lot if driving, or, just before the exit, walk up the drive to your right that sweeps uphill and across the terraced hillside and into the oldest part of the cemetery. Look to the left of the driveway for the distinctive concrete bench where Pakatakan Art Colony artists J. Francis and Adah Murphy are buried. To the left of the driveway’s exit onto Cemetery Road is a section devoted to reinterments from Arena and other communities that were claimed for New York City’s Pepacton Reservoir in the 1950s.

Kelly Corners Cemetery: NYS Route 30, 3 Miles North of Margaretville (a/k/a Eureka Cemetery)

Park in front of the fence and enter on foot through either of two unlocked gates. The prominent monument near the right front memorializes John D. Hubbell, an elder in the Old School Baptist Church who established the cemetery, and members of the family whose homestead is nearby. Two rows behind the Hubbells, look for the monument to Jason Morse, who, with three brothers, marched off to the Civil War. The pink marble stone near the top of the central knoll, belongs to Grant and Lina Kelly who kept a popular boarding house near here for decades. The climb is steep but the view of the East Branch and mountains to the east from the top of this hill was a striking scene in the 2000 film “You can Count on Me” starring Mathew Broderick, Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney.

Bedell Cemetery: Little Redkill Road, 4 Miles from Main Street, Fleischmanns

Park along the road and enter through the gate with the arched sign overhead. You will be struck by the number of Kellys in this cemetery! Blishs, too. Seven monuments on a concrete wall one row from the rear of the cemetery memorialize Civil War veteran Silas Blish and family members. An especially poignant double stone remembers two of Chancy and Catharine Hicks’ daughters who died in 1861 and 1863, both at the age of two. Find them to the right of the entrance, about five rows from the road, in the middle of the old section. By far the longest inscription belongs to Bryan Burgin (1908-86), legendary state game warden (second row from the front, midway between the first and second gates). Find an unusual hand chiseled memorial set in 2002 in the shape of a large wrench in the top right corner of the cemetery.

Clovesville, B’nai Israel & Irish Cemeteries: Old NYS Route 28, 2 Miles West of Fleischmanns

Three distinct cemeteries can be accessed by turning onto dead-end Grocholl Road. Park in pull offs, or drive into the main Clovesville Cemetery entrance and park to the side (the nearby church parking lot is not cemetery property). Look up the bank to the right of the driveway to see a large stone for John and Delia Blish. John Blish sold land to the Fleischmanns distilling family who established a summer compound near the village that was later named for them. Note two unusual stones to the left of the roadway—a “white bronze” (zinc) monument to John and Rachel Munson beneath a square of four pine trees, and, in an enclosure on the knoll beyond, a concrete tree stump and bible inscribed to James and Mary Ostrum Richard. Closer to the church, look for the headstone of Samuel Todd, Revolutionary War veteran. Follow the driveway to the rear of the cemetery to find the entrance to B’nai Israel, the Jewish cemetery established in the 1920s.It is closed to visitors on Shabbat (Saturday). On other days, walk through the center gate and to the rise towards the rear of the cemetery. There you will find a large monument—Edelstein/Berg—the resting place of Gertrude Berg, aka “Molly Goldberg” of radio and TV fame, her parents and husband. Gertrude Berg got her start in show biz at her family’s Fleischmanns boarding house. Across Old Rte. 29 from the Clovesville Cemetery is a small burial ground where several Irish immigrants and their descendants are buried. Due to the poor condition and uneven terrain, it’s advisable to view it from the roadside. Many Irish came to the area in the mid-19th century to work in tanneries and mills. One who is buried here, Michael McCormack, who served in the Civil War along with two of his sons.

A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History

A Snapshot of the Public’s Views on History

Pete Burkholder and Dana Schaffer

Reprinted by permission from the American Historical Association

The teaching of history has become a political football in recent years, resulting in efforts by those on both ends of the political spectrum to regulate what appears in classrooms across the country. Lost in this legislation, grandstanding, and punditry is how the American public understands the past, a measurement that was last taken systematically by historians Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen in their 1998 landmark study, The Presence of the Past. For that reason, the AHA and Fairleigh Dickinson University, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, sought to take America’s historical pulse anew and assess the impact of the cultural changes over the intervening two decades.

In the fall of 2020, we conducted a national survey of 1,816 people using online probability panels. With approximately 40 questions, sometimes our poll results surprised us, but other times they confirmed what we had suspected. The following represents a sampling of what we learned, with the full data set available on the AHA website. 

First, our respondents had consistent views on what history is—and those views often ran counter to those of practicing historians. Whereas the latter group usually sees the field as one offering explanations about the past, two-thirds of our survey takers considered history to be little more than an assemblage of names, dates, and events. Little wonder, then, that disputes in the public sphere tend to focus on the “what” of history — particularly what parts of history are taught or not in schools — as opposed to how materials can be interpreted to offer better explanations of the past and present. And even though 62 percent of respondents agreed that what we know about the past should change over time, the primary driver for those changes was believed to be new facts coming to light. In sum, poll results show that, in the minds of our nation’s population, raw facts cast a very long shadow over the field of history and any dynamism therein.

We also learned that the places the public turned to most often for information about the past were not necessarily the sources it deemed most trustworthy. The top three go-to sources for historical knowledge were all in video format, thus being a microcosm of Americans’ general predilection for consuming information from screens. More traditional sources, such as museums, nonfiction books, and college courses, filled out the middle to lower ranks of this hierarchy. (Note that respondents were asked to report on their experiences reaching back to January 2019, so these results are not simply artifacts of the pandemic.) Perhaps this helps explain why 90 percent of survey takers felt that one can learn history anywhere, not just in school, and why 73 percent reported that it is easier to learn about the past when it is presented as entertainment.

But while the most frequently consulted sources of the past were those within easy reach, views were mixed on their reliability to convey accurate information. Whereas fictional films and television were the second-most-popular sources of history, they ranked near the bottom in terms of trustworthiness. Although museums were of only middling popularity, they took the top spot for historical dependability (similar to the results in Rosenzweig and Thelen’s original study). College history professors garnered a respectable fourth position as reliable informants, even though the nonfiction works they produce, let alone the courses they teach, were infrequently consulted by respondents. Similar inversions occurred for TV news, newspapers and newsmagazines, non-Wikipedia web search results, and DNA tests. Social media, the perennial bête noire of truth aficionados, turned out to be a neither popular nor trusted source of historical information.

Some much-welcome news is that the public sees clear value in the study of history, even relative to other fields. Rather than asking whether respondents thought learning history was important—a costless choice—we asked instead how essential history education is, relative to other fields such as engineering and business. The results were encouraging: 84 percent felt history was just as valuable as the professional programs. Moreover, those results held nearly constant across age groups, genders, education levels, races and ethnicities, political-party affiliations, and regions of the country. Much has been written in Perspectives on History about the dismal history-enrollment picture at colleges and universities. Although we acknowledge that work and even see it manifested in our teaching experiences, our survey results suggest this is not for want of society’s value of understanding the past.

To better understand this apparent appreciation for learning history, despite the decline in college enrollments, we gathered a tremendous amount of data on the public’s experiences with learning history at both the high school and college levels. Society’s predominantly facts-centric understanding of history is perhaps partially explained by our educational findings. At the high school level, over three-fourths of respondents reported that history courses were more about names, dates, and other facts than about asking questions about the past. Despite that, 68 percent said that their high school experiences made them want to learn more history. Even for college courses, 44 percent of respondents indicated a continued emphasis on factual material over inquiry, but this was a turnoff to fewer than one-fifth of them. Not all data were so sanguine. One particularly sobering finding was that 8 percent of respondents had no interest in learning about the past.

Whether respondents’ classroom experiences emphasized history as facts turns out to be an important leading indicator in people’s interest in the past. Some of our more interesting cross-tabulations correlated respondents’ conceptions of history with their interest in learning about foreign peoples and places. Only 17 percent of those who viewed history as facts showed great interest in such matters, while double that number of history-as-explanation respondents did. Those trends held steady, though to somewhat lesser degrees, for curiosity about the histories of people perceived as different and about events from over 500 years ago. If wider interests and greater empathy are desired outcomes of history education, then educators might need to rethink the content-mastery versus inquiry environments they foster.

Yet historical inquiry of any quality cannot proceed without content. We therefore provided a list of topics and asked which ones were perceived as being over- or underserved by historians. Such traditional subjects as men, politics, and government were most likely to be seen as receiving too much attention, but they were joined in that sentiment by LGBTQ history. Interestingly, LGBTQ history also ranked third in needing more attention, and it had the fewest respondents indicating historians’ interest devoted to it was about right. This topic’s perception as both over- and underserved suggests that LGBTQ history remains a polarizing area of inquiry in the public’s collective mind. Respondents also said the histories of women and racial or ethnic minorities were most in need of greater consideration.

Furthermore, over three-fourths of respondents, regardless of age group, education level, gender, geographic location, or political affiliation, said it was acceptable to make learners uncomfortable by teaching the harm some people have done to others. The clear call for more investigation of racial and ethnic subgroups, as well as the acceptance of teaching uncomfortable histories, undercuts putative justifications for recent legislative efforts to limit instruction on these topics.

We understand that public perceptions might not be supported by other objective measures, but we argue that those in the historical discipline benefit from the knowledge of such public attitudes. Moreover, findings from our survey hint that approaching polarizing topics as a form of inquiry as opposed to a body of facts is more likely to resonate with learners.

Surveys like ours have their limitations. They are snapshots in time, they cannot easily answer logical follow-up questions, and they might sometimes elicit responses that are more aspirational than reflective of reality. This is why we hope AHA members will both explore and build on our data, contextualizing results for topics of special interest, convening focus groups to put flesh on our findings, and starting conversations about better education and engagement with the public. Let the joy of inquiry begin.