The BLACK & LATINO HISTORY PROJECT is committed to organizing professional development workshops and resources to support and extend Connecticut's high school course in Black and Latino History. The BLHP invites students, teachers, and academic and public history professionals to build a more inclusive history of the United States to better understand the struggles, setbacks, and victories that Black and Latinx people have encountered, and continue to encounter, as we strive to build “a more perfect union.”

The Black and Latino History Project will implement a series of workshops designed to help 6-12-grade Connecticut teachers incorporate Black and Latino history into the teaching of U.S. history. Over the course of three months per each of three thematic units, a cohort of historians and teachers will study the topic and resources related to it and workshop curricular ideas with each other. Upon conclusion, the group will present the topic and educational resources to a public audience of Connecticut teachers.

The BLHP is organized by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University, with generous support from CT Humanities, UCONN El Instituto, & the Anti-Racist Teaching & Learning Collective.

  • Dr. Fiona Vernal | Academic Advisor

    Dr. Fiona Vernal is the director of Engaged, Public, Oral and Community Histories (EPOCH) and Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. She has extensive teaching and research interests in African, Caribbean, and African Diaspora history. She holds a B.A. from Princeton and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Her current book project, Hartford Bound, examines African American, Puerto Rican, and West Indian migration to the Greater Hartford region through the lens of housing and socio-economic mobility.

  • Thomas Thurston | Project Organizer

    Thomas Thurston is the director of education and public outreach at the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University. He has developed history workshops for K-12 teachers for nearly twenty years, including international programs in the UK, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and South Africa. Mr. Thurston is a member of the Connecticut Coalition for History, the Amistad Committee, and Discovering Amistad.