Teachers of all levels and settings are invited to join Spertus Museum educators to tour the new exhibition "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund" and participate in an interactive printmaking workshop with Master Printer Thomas Lucas.

Participants in this workshop will learn about the 1890s immigration experience on the Near West Side of Chicago through compelling historical fiction narratives and visits to Hull-House and the Taylor Street and Prairie Avenue neighborhoods. Based on the Museum's collection, these stories form the core of the Great Chicago Stories website, an award-winning educational resource.

Participants in this workshop will learn about the 1890s immigration experience on the Near West Side of Chicago through compelling historical fiction narratives. Based on the Museum's collection, these stories form the core of the Great Chicago Stories website, an award-winning educational resource.

The United States is often described as a "melting pot" of ethnic groups or as a "nation of immigrants." Though most of us could easily find references to this melting pot in popular culture today, few realize that the concept has a long and contested history. In this two-day seminar, participants will explore primary sources from the past two centuries that describe the nation as a melting pot or as a "crucible" where the fusion of different national cultures will occur. Through close readings, they will consider how the meaning of the melting pot has changed over time and how it has informed debates about what it means to be an American. Even as they take a long view of the melting pot in American history, they will pay particular attention to the early 20th century and to debates about restricting the flow of immigrants to the United States.

Constructed around an online "toolbox" of texts and documents collected at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, participants in this seminar will discuss four themes that are central to the Gilded Age: City and Country, focusing on Arcadian mythology, urban realism, and nostalgia; Citizens and Others, especially immigrants, African Americans, and children; Work and Leisure, especially craft, industrialization, and consumerism; and Politics and the State, including party culture, populism, and progressivism. Within each thematic unit, participants will be searching for characteristic sensibilities of the age, as manifest in public life, literature, and/or the arts. Across the discussions, they will try to identify those documents, questions, and exercises that might best enliven their own classrooms.