After expressing a strong interest in history and curricula building, my sixth grade teacher Mr. Robert Tam nominated me as the student representative for the Gilder Lehrman Student Advisory Council my freshman year. The Advisory Council is a group of delegates from all 50 states that meet to discuss how American history should be taught in K-12 education, and what the institute can do to stop the erasure of history that is happening in some states. The Gilder Lehrman Insitute has one of the biggest collections of primary documents from the Founding Era, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement. One of our goals was including these primary sources in the curriculum to show that women and other minorities were severely oppressed, and how they were able to gather support for their cause. Putting primary documents in the curriculum allows people to see that these abstract concepts-such as racism, inequality, and war-had real consequences. 

I expressed to the Council that unlike New York, our local government has very little funding to allocate to public libraries and limited resources to host a parade or a historian. In addition, I also explained that people in Hawai'i may be less enthusiastic about the signing of the Declaration of Independence because our state was not a part of that process, and it was also annexed during the Age of Imperialism. My goal for being a part of the Council was helping my peers understand that every state has different cultural and political backgrounds that affect how we approach history. The representative from Guam agreed with me that it would be inappropriate to have a parade or a celebration about the founding of the U.S in her home town, and a better alternative would be to increase awareness about U.S territories and how the native people in states like Hawai'i had to drastically alter their lives. 

Visit the GL Insitute of American History here!

In addition to being a member of the Student Advisory Council, I was selected as a summer research intern to sort through letters from the Civil War era and transcribe them. I learned from one of the historians that transcribing letters is an important part of gaining a holistic understanding of a historical event because letter show how ordinary people reacted to the event, and why it was important to them. It also gives us a deeper understanding about the consequences of those events and how it affected a diverse group of people.