We have finally gotten our site on the 1919 Bishops’ Program of Social Reconstruction site up.  The site has dozens of documents and photos, background information on the topic, readings lists, document-based questions, and suggestions for exercises.  For history teachers, there is a section on fitting the site into the curriculum in ways that fit with national history standards.  A complementary site on the Bishops’ Program is this one out of the Office of Social Justice in St. Paul Minneapolis:

http://www.osjspm.org/majordoc_us_bishops_statements_program_of_social_reconstruction.aspx

This Social Justice site offers great teaching resources that can be used in tandem with the primary document .pdfs and images on our own.

Clearly, getting the site up this late in the school year isn’t ideal for attracting educators and their students to use it, but this particular site will also be useful for researchers, since so many of the documents are unavailable elsewhere on the Web.  I’ll direct you to a real gem: here is a scrapbook depicting the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s founding years, (when it was still called the National Catholic War Council).  The album is a chronicle of the earliest organized activities of the War Council and offers a window on organized American Catholic life ca. 1919.  Sorry there are no captions, we know little about the activities depicted in most of the images. 

http://libraries.cua.edu/achrcua/bishops/slideshow.html

Your comments on the images, the new site, how it might be used in the classroom or conducting research, as well as on any of our American Catholic History Classroom sites are welcome! 

This entry was posted on Friday, May 2nd, 2008 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Catholic History, Reference & Instruction, University Archives. All comments will be reviewed before they appear on this site. Comments will not be published if they are inappropriate or conflict with the library's or university's mission.