History Curricula for High School Teachers

Dr. Timothy J. Crimmins, Professor of History and Director of the Center for Neighborhood and Metropolitan Studies at Georgia State University, received a National Education Association grant to create curricula for high school history teachers concerning African American history in the city of Atlanta.

He hired Laura Drummond, his former G.R.A., to research and develop curricula on the following subjects:  Booker T. Washington and the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition; histories of the historical black colleges of Atlanta; W. E. B. Du Bois and The Georgia Negro Exhibit in Paris; and an introduction to the 1960-1961 student protests in Atlanta, led by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   For the first project, Laura researched Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech, its coverage in the local and national press, later criticisms of the speech, and its effects on race relations in the United States.  She also investigated the Exposition, which was held in what today is Atlanta’s Piedmont Park.  Laura created a GIS map showing the 1895 Sanborn map of the Exposition overlaid on a modern aerial photograph, with interactive links to the map that display both historic and modern images.

Image, above:  Overlay map is from the Sanborn Map Company; detail from the Index Sheet, Piedmont Park, Cotton States International Exposition Co., Atlanta, Ga., 1895; University of Georgia Libraries Map Collection, Athens, Ga., presented in the Digital Library of Georgia.

Image, top right:  Booker Taliaferro Washington, between 1880-90, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

Image, lower right:  The Auditorium Building at the Cotton States and International Exhibit, from Walter Gerard Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated (Atlanta, GA:  The Illustrator Company, 1896).