The Lincoln and Mexico Project (LAMP), an educational and cultural project that has its central aim of improving the U.S.-Mexico relationship, is going great guns.
The initiative is based on the book “Abraham Lincoln and Mexico,” penned by historian and educator Michael Hogan, professor emeritus at the American School Foundation in Guadalajara.
The project seeks to integrate the story of Abraham Lincoln and Mexico into high school and university curricula around the world, as well as show how national histories have international implications that are often ignored.
LAMP is currently inviting people to serve on its International Advisory Council. This group represents a mix of educators, historians, history activists, students, and digital learning experts – all of whom have read Hogan’s book and support the LAMP goals.
Notes the LAMP website: the primary aim of the council is “to guide our efforts to inform people about historical connections between the United States and Mexico as a way to improve future relationships. We also hope that classroom discussions about U.S.-Mexican relations will lead to a generation of young people with more informed and productive perspectives about both nations.”
Recent additions to the council include international education consultant Janet Heinze, the former director of the Guadalajara American School; Heribert von Feilitzsch, the author of four books on role of the German secret service in Mexico and the United States; and Robert DiYanni, a professor of humanities at New York University and an instructional consultant in the NYU Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
In a recent review of Hogan’s book, DiYanni described the tome as an “important new study of U.S. expansionist policy in the mid-19 century that provides an illuminating and unvarnished account of United States imperialist ambitions vis-à-vis Mexico. [Hogan’s] book is a powerful indictment of and a necessary corrective to the frequently heard simplistic and self-serving nationalist claims of American exceptionalism. It is also a spirited defense against and rebuttal of simplistic thinking about Abraham Lincoln’s ideas about slavery, Mexico, and American hegemony.”
For more information about LAMP, see lincolnandmexicoproject.wordpress.com.