This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and nonviolence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the Civil Rights Movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock Nine and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations.

Professors Kenneth Jackson and Karen Markoe explore one of the most exciting and important periods in American history: the quarter century between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. Lectures focus on the rise of machine politics, the transportation revolution, the development of new social elites, the changing role of women, the literary figures who helped define the age, housing for the rich and poor, and an examination of the city at the center of the Gilded Age, New York.

Across the country, an increasing number of teachers have discovered an exciting and innovative way to promote a love of history. Easy-to-use software (such as Microsoft's PhotoStory and Movie Maker, and Apple's iMovie) and extensive copyright-free online images (like those found on the Library of Congress's American Memory site) make it possible for students to create high-quality, Ken Burns-like videos combining narration, text, graphics, and historical images and music. Professor Mintz, a pioneer in the application of new technologies to history teaching and research, will lead teachers through the process of creating digital documentaries with their students.

From the Newberry Library website:

"[This conference] will support teachers in the development of lessons using images from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Picturing America program.

Conferences will feature presentations by distinguished scholars and sharing of resources in workshop formats. We will use the Newberry Library’s collections as well as a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago and a walking tour of Chicago’s Loop to model ways for teachers to use local resources in their own communities."

During the 1850s, the United States was a nation of foreboding and hope. An irresolvable conflict between North and South seemed to be approaching, along with periodic hopes that the divide could somehow be bridged and conflict forestalled. At the start of the decade, the nation's eloquent orators were led by John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster; 10 years later, a new voice had been added to public discourse: that of Abraham Lincoln. Literary artists—including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—addressed the issues of slavery, regional autonomy, and federal power both directly and obliquely in poetry and prose. This seminar will explore this ominous yet hopeful era, with the aim of understanding the political and moral issues that drove Americans apart, and how the literature of the period can help readers understand why.

The Gilder Lehrman Summer Seminars are designed to strengthen participants' commitment to high quality history teaching. Public, parochial, independent school teachers, and National Park Service rangers are eligible. These week-long seminars provide intellectual stimulation and a collaborative context for developing practical resources and strategies to take back to the classroom.

This seminar explores the history of the American antislavery movement, from its institutional and ideological origins in the post-Revolutionary era to the eve of the Civil War. A particular focus of the course will be the historical reality and mythology of the Underground Railroad, understood through the lives, strategies, writings, and fate of black abolitionists.

The ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 abolished slavery in the United States, formally, officially, and legally. A century and a half after Emancipation, however, the question of slavery still roils the waters of American life. This seminar, led by Ira Berlin, will view the development of chattel bondage in mainland North America from the perspective of the larger Atlantic world. Topics include the nature of the slave trade, the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, the evolution of plantation slavery, the transforming face of the Age of Revolutions, the remaking of slavery in the 19th century, and the contemporary debate about the meaning of slavery for American life.

Abraham Lincoln will stand at the center of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism.