university level
16-Week Freshman Seminar
“Frontiers of Global Catholicism in St. Louis” invites students to explore St. Louis as a crossroads of global Catholicism by working directly with local congregational archives of women religious and nearby museums. Centered on the question “How do we learn about the past?” this course introduces students to the discipline of history, the fundamentals archival research, and the global dimensions of Catholicism as they surface in local stories. Over the semester, students visit archives, analyze materials they encounter on site, and build their own digital exhibits that highlight the city’s connections to wider networks of empire, migration, and religious/political/social change.
Students will:
- Learn how historians interpret the past through archival collections, with a focus on women religious in St. Louis.
- Connect local case studies to global histories of Catholicism, colonialism, and cultural exchange.
- Practice reading, analyzing, and contextualizing primary sources for public-facing digital projects.
- Gain experience in collaborative, community-engaged research and digital storytelling.
Designed as a full-semester university course, “Frontiers of Global Catholicism in St. Louis” can also serve as a flexible model for educators who want to build their own classes around local archives—adapting its structure, assignments, and fieldwork approach to different institutions, communities, and topics.
3-Day Unit:
Civil Rights & Black Education in America
This three-day unit introduces students to key questions around race, segregation, and education in the United States from the end of the Civil War through the twentieth century. Using archival sources drawn from the Consolidated Archives of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, students examine how institutionalized segregation shaped educational access—and how Black communities navigated, challenged, and reshaped those structures over time. By centering a local case study of Catholic sisters and Black Catholic students in St. Louis, the unit highlights everyday lived experiences while situating them within broader national struggles for educational equality and civil rights.
Students will:
- Examine how Jim Crow segregation produced enduring educational inequalities in the post–Civil War United States.
- Analyze archival sources that present multiple perspectives.
- Use a St. Louis case study to connect local histories to national patterns of segregation and civil rights activism.
- Practice critical reading of primary sources and reflect on how archives preserve (and sometimes silence) different historical voices.
Designed as a focused three-day module, Civil Rights & Black Education in America can be easily integrated into undergraduate or advanced credit survey courses for highschoolers in U.S. history (such as U.S. History since 1865), as well as upper-level courses on race, religion, or gender. It also serves as a replicable teaching model for educators interested in incorporating local Catholic archival materials into established curricula.
Pairs with Digital Exhibit
