From the National Humanities Center website:

"Reflecting on the Civil War in 1892, Walt Whitman concluded, 'The real war will never get in the books.' But Whitman did try to bring the real war into his poems. An anti-slavery Democrat, who dressed the wounds of both Northern and Southern soldiers, Whitman wrote poems that describe the circumstances of war—from the exuberant optimism of 1861 to the blood-soaked exhaustion of 1865. How did he interpret the slaughter and sacrifice of the Civil War? How can we bring students to the 'the real war' through his poems? This seminar is a collaboration between the National Humanities Center and public television's historical documentary film series American Experience. Participants will view the American Experience film Walt Whitman and explore how to use it in the classroom."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency founded to combat rural poverty. While it spent millions of dollars between 1935 and 1946 to improve the lives of poor farmers, it is remembered today for its documentary photography program. The photographs of rural America taken by FSA photographers in the 1930s have assumed iconic status and have come to define the look of the Great Depression. What can they teach about America in the 1930s? What can they tell us about the truth of documentary photography? How can we read them as images?"

From the National Humanities Center website:

"The United States marked its 100th anniversary in 1876 with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a birthday party that celebrated mechanical progress. But in late nineteenth-century America, progress did not simply mean generating more horsepower. It meant cleaning up cities, reforming government, improving the efficiency of workers, and professionalizing endeavors like playing baseball and studying history. The idea of progress reached into every corner of American life. How did Americans define progress at that time? How did progress manifest itself? And how did it shape America?"

From the National Humanities Center website:

"When we teach Reconstruction, we typically focus on the struggle to reunite the North and the South. But what of the West? What role did it play in national reunification? The late nineteenth century was the zenith of westward expansion. Western images dominated American culture. What did the wide-open spaces of the West represent to the Americans who were crowding into the cities of the Northeast? What did they represent to the ex-Confederates who resented the imposition of federal power in the South? How did the West shape the nation that emerged from the Civil War?"

From the National Humanities Center website:

"In one lesson plan after another Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois forever stand opposed. In the late nineteenth century both sought uplift for African Americans, but one believed it came through accommodation and manual training, while the other urged resistance and the liberal arts. Is that the entire story? Was Washington a narrow, uncreative booster of commercialism or a savvy politician who correctly read what late nineteenth-century America would afford its black citizens? Was Du Bois a heroic intellectual activist or a narrow elitist whose path to uplift was open only to the 'Talented Tenth'?"

From the Gilder Lehrman website:

"The Declaration of Independence of 1776 announced the entry of the United States onto the world stage and inaugurated a new genre of document that would be used by various groups in the following centuries to herald their arrival among "the Powers of the Earth." This seminar views the American Declaration from three global perspectives: first, by placing 1776 into the context of contemporary international and global connections; second, by examining the legacy of the Declaration in the century after 1776; and third, by analyzing other declarations of independence since 1776 for their debts to—and divergences from—the American model. The result should be an enriched understanding of the importance of the Declaration in world history, as well as a novel account of what was truly revolutionary about the American Revolution."

From the Gilder Lehrman website:

"Is the world of early America truly lost? For many Americans, perhaps most, it does seem that way. Our history is divided in half by the War of Independence—or, as we more typically call it, the Revolution. Only the second half seems real and tangible now. There is a second reason for the "lost-ness" of early America. Between now and then lies a crucial fault-line that includes far more than political change. Industrial growth and development—another kind of revolution—transformed much of the American people's experience, beginning around the start of the 19th century. The effects have been massively consequential for the shape and structures of work, for community life, for human demography, for values, manners, and taste. The Lost World of Early America will attempt a form of time travel back to the era before these twin revolutions. Participants will feel the element of remoteness, the sense of all that has been lost; yet they will also come to feel the threads of human connection between our own lives and those of our distant forebears."

From the Gilder Lehrman website:

"Ten teachers from the United States will join twenty teachers from the United Kingdom and Ghana to study the history and legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade under the direction of professors from the United Kingdom and the United States. The seminar will cover the history of African-European contact, the nature of African societies in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the slave trading practices in Africa, the impact of the slave trade on regions of Africa, the character of the coastal trade in the forts and castles, the experience of the Middle Passage, and the numbers and experience of African arrivals in the Americas. Participants will be introduced to major scholarship as well as to the new online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database."

From the Gilder Lehrman website:

"Between ca. 1500 and ca. 1800, the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean saw the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement of peoples, commodities, institutions, social practices, and cultural values. This seminar will explore the pan-Atlantic webs of association linking people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. The best Atlantic history is interactive and crosses borders. The hope is that we will enlarge our horizons by placing the standard early North American story in a larger framework."

From the Lincoln and New York website:

"N-YHS invites teachers to preview Lincoln and New York at our Teacher Open Houses. Lincoln and New York uses exciting artifacts, hand-written documents, and iconic images to demonstrate the surprisingly central role New York played in the Lincoln story and the leading player Lincoln became in New York.

Registration is free and includes entry to the exhibition, tours with our trained educators and education staff, curriculum materials and light refreshments. Teachers also will enjoy a 10% discount at the Museum Store."