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The United States has always been a nation of nations, or a population replenished by immigration from around the world.  Some of these migrations have been voluntary, such as those of most Europeans and Asians; others forced, such as that of enslaved Africans.  In the streets of American cities, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Eastern European, Latino, and Caribbean newcomers found their first residencies, first jobs, and first brushes with anti-foreign discrimination.  Under directors Alan Kraut and Ed Smith, you will explore America's gateway to opportunity--New York City. The Ethnic Experience in New York City, recently named the "most creative and innovative program" by the North American Association of Summer Sessions, uses New York City's people, infrastructure, and architecture as an historical text to explore the ethnic and racial settlement of Manhattan.  During your tour of NYC, you will observe the urban ethnic experience of European newcomers on Manhattan's Lower East Side, African-Americans in Harlem, and Latinos in Spanish Harlem.

For further information or to sign up, contact:
The Department of History
American University
4400 Massachusetts Ave., N.W., Washington, DC 20016
(202) 885-2401
Loye Howell, Admin. Assistant
E-mail: loye@american.edu

In 1965, Eugene Rodriguez, a gritty South Bronx politician whose storefront headquarters was once next door to Alan Kraut's childhood home, swaggered into Kraut's sophomore history class at Hunter College and snatched a textbook from a student's desk.  "You don't learn from this," he boomed, hoisting the volume against the wall of the classroom. "You learn from the people."

Although he hardly eschews books--he's written several himself--AU history professor Alan Kraut agrees that experiential learning is a powerful tool. For the past few summers, he and Ed Smith, director of AU's American Studies Program, have used the streets of Harlem, Spanish Harlem, and the Lower East Side as a classroom to explore the ethnic and racial settlement of Manhattan. After four nights of lectures on the AU campus, the class convenes in New York for an immersion in the sights, sounds, and smells that make New York a multiethnic Mecca. Last year, the week-long Ethnic Experience in New York City was named "most creative and innovative program" by the North American Association of Summer Sessions.

"You have to bring history to the people," says Kraut.

As it happens, Kraut himself is "the people," and the New York "ethnic experience" is his own. The grandson of Polish Jewish immigrants, he is one of the 100 million living Americans whose ancestors came through New York's Ellis Island. Driven by a passion for immigrant history, Kraut was instrumental in directing the restoration of Ellis Island, the most extensive restoration in American history. He also consulted on the development of the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side. Visitors to this tenement-turned-museum experience the cramped, impoverished living conditions of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants. Both sites are stops on the institute's tours.

If Kraut is exploring his roots, he is not alone. Each year, several students sign up in order to explore their connections to New York. In 1998, an 82-year-old retired city social worker signed on so she could revisit the communities she'd served decades earlier.  This year, Tony Glaudé, a New York-born Creole, wanted to explore the ethnic city where his father grew up. Though he has family living in Queens, graduate student Richard Mizelle, who is studying the great black migration to the north, was eager to tour Harlem with knowledgeable guides.

For others the institute is their first urban experience. "[Many students] are first generation suburbanites," says Ed Smith. "[They] think cities are dark places and are fearful of them." Smith, a third generation Washingtonian, is known for his dynamic tours of D.C. He and Kraut share a passion for getting suburbanites into the city, hoping to break down their fear, and instill instead an appreciation for the city's beat.

Recently they've encountered a new hurdle. "This is an Internet generation," says Smith. "They sit in their chairs, and everything comes to them." One student even unenrolled when she learned she'd have to visit the city to complete the class. But for some, like Andy Battle, the course is an eye-opener. Harlem was not as "slummy" as he expected. Standing in the shade of an old oak tree on prosperous Striver's Row, Battle concluded, "During the day, walking through, you realize it's just another neighborhood."

Neighborhood is what this course is about. Walking by the first headquarters of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), students learned about the Back to Africa movement. While nearby streets rang with the noise of children's games, the smell of barbeque wafting from makeshift steel drum cookers, and the banter of old men camped in folding chairs outside candy stores, brought home the lesson that this was not a museum tour.

In Spanish Harlem, where the rumbling El, the elevated train, splits neighborhoods in two, community gardens overflowed with peppers and sported "Free Puerto Rico" graffiti. Students saw for themselves the checkered architectural history of housing projects: the older ones imposing concrete towers, the newer ones clustered around green spaces, designed to encourage community cohesion.  "The streets and the buildings tell part of the story," says Kraut, noting how a synagogue-turned-Baptist church illustrates migration patterns. When the Jews prospered, they moved from the Lower East Side further north on Manhattan Island and a new ethnic group moved in.

The churches were essential to people's lives. "The Black church in New York was a kind of Ellis Island," says Smith, helping southern blacks shed unsophisticated country ways during the northward migration.  Today, the churches remain strong in people's lives. "We preach a social gospel here," Delaney Montgomery, an elder and historian at the Mother Zion A.M.E. church in Harlem, told the AU group. He took them to the parish gym where a martial arts class was underway and explained how the church had just paid a parishioner's monthly rent. Later, Smith observed that while professors "can blow people away with facts, you can't buy that kind of passion."

Source: American, Fall, 1999