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Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Collaboration with Saint David's School


Saint David's collaborates with leading institutions in the city and beyond for units of study. These partnerships, rooted in curricular goals and objectives, are long term, occurring over several sessions during a course of study. They augment and deepen boys' in-class learning.

Yesterday, we kicked off one of these signature collaborations: our Grade Six partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. During their learning of American history, the sixth graders will visit the Gilder Lehrman Collection, housed at the New-York Historical Society. There, they will be able to closely examine artifacts and original sources from among the more than 70,000 important historical documents housed in the Collection.

During yesterday morning's kick-off workshop for sixth graders and their parents, James Basker, President of the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University, led a discussion in our Otto-Bernstein Performing Arts Theatre about "Why Documents Matter."

Why are they important? After Mr. Basker posed the question to the boys, one sixth grader noted, "We keep these materials to contextualize where we are now compared to a past event." Another, posited that documents provide insight into what people were thinking at a given time. Mr. Basker reminded us that because they serve as a way to remember what has happened in the past, printed documents also give us strongly rooted memory, which is key to our identity.

The workshop continued with an examination of several documents in the Collection, such as Paul Revere's Boston Massacre, the Declaration of Independence, and a draft of the United States Constitution. Analysis of each resulted in some surprising, elucidating information.

A high point of this workshop was a discussion of Black Hours and Narrow Escapes, a new book published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute that features the World War II experience of Bombardier Robert L. Stone, father of Saint David's alumni Robert Lewis Stone Jr. '68 and Peter Lee Stone '69.

The book contains letters that Mr. Stone wrote home from the front as a way to maintain a connection to the cause for which he so bravely fought. His wife, Sheila, who was at the workshop, discovered the letters in a box after Bob died in 2009. As she noted in the book's introduction, it is her hope that the documents, "will bring you closer to Bob and how he felt during those crucial years when he and his fellow soldiers saved our democratic way of life."

History is made real when it is presented in the context of people or events we know or can relate to. The boys were fascinated and moved by the discussion of a Saint David's dad who fought in World War II, and by being able to see his handwritten letters. Documents matter.



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