The Achelis and Bodman Foundation Supports Multimedia Digital Exhibit on NYC's Experience with the American Revolution

The Achelis and Bodman Foundation has awarded The Gotham Center $50,000 to create a multimedia digital exhibit on New York City’s forgotten but central role in the American Revolution. The project will use audio, video, image, and text to recount the events leading up to the War for Independence, the British occupation, and the city’s early days as the new republic’s first capital. This will be the only learning resource of its kind, highlighting the many respects in which Gotham served as the central location of the war. It will be designed for use in self-guided walking tours, classroom instruction, and home-based learning.

This exhibit will also provide the foundation of a much larger project the Gotham Center is developing — a web-based smartphone app exploring this history in much greater scope and detail. That project will expand to the outer boroughs and wider metropolitan region, and use interactive mapping, animation, CGI, augmented/virtual/extended reality, and other high-value technology to recreate in virtual space and organize existing sites to create, for the first time, a ‘freedom trail’ in New York, in advance of the American Revolution’s 250th anniversary.

The project is a partnership between the Gotham Center, the Office of Academic Initiatives and Strategic Innovation at CUNY's Graduate Center, and co-founder Ted Knudsen, formerly of Bain Consulting and Credit Suisse.