Project Information

Partners

Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES)

Area Cooperative Educational Services (ACES) is the Regional Educational Service Center for the twenty-six school districts in south central Connecticut. The purpose of ACES is to improve public education by addressing pressing school needs through collaboration with local school districts and our state Department of Education. Local school districts appoint a representative to the ACES Governing Board and work collectively to set a strategic direction for the organization based on the educational needs of the region. Currently, ACES main priorities are: increasing equity and educational opportunities for underserved students; addressing the needs of students with disabilities; and delivering professional development and school improvement services to teachers and administrators.

Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

The Gilder Lehrman Center, a part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, is dedicated to the investigation and dissemination of knowledge concerning all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave system and its destruction. The Center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the founding of the modern world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events.

As we enter the decade and a half of the 150th anniversaries of the sectional crisis and Civil War, the Gilder Lehrman Center has made a vital contribution to our understanding of slavery and its role in the development of the modern world. While slavery has usually been viewed as an anachronism, a kind of throwback to antiquity, the Center is especially interested in the ways that the Atlantic slave system anticipated the assembly line, a mass consumer culture, and various features of the multinational corporate economy in which we now live. This change in vantage point should help us look at and come to terms with various forms of coerced labor today.

While the promotion of scholarly research is the Center’s primary focus, the education of the general public is essential to the success of the Center’s scholarly mission. Since its founding the Gilder Lehrman Center has worked with school systems, public television stations, museums, historical societies and other related institutions to bridge the divide between scholarly and public knowledge. Through Summer Institutes, professional development workshops, and Teaching American History partnerships, the Center has worked with public school teachers and students to enhance their understanding of slavery and the resistance to slavery, its abolition, and its legacy.