From the National Gallery of Art website:

"This seminar will explore American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the country's rich and diverse visual heritage. Instruction will focus on the Gallery's collection of American paintings, which are closely allied to European traditions of fine art.

Through lectures, gallery talks, discussion groups, and hands-on activities, participants will study portraiture, historical and commemorative art, scenes of everyday life, still life, and landscape, including works from the uniquely American Hudson River school. John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, Thomas Cole, George Catlin, Winslow Homer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are among the artists in the Gallery's collection whose work will be considered.

Supplementing the study of American paintings will be an examination of ceremonial and utilitarian art objects. Textiles, pottery, and furniture—including pieces created by enslaved and free blacks—will highlight regional preferences in design and material, while performance of Native American stories will emphasize the importance of the oral tradition across tribal boundaries.

The seminar highlights the social and cultural context of art and demonstrates interdisciplinary teaching strategies. Participants will explore connections to literature and music and visit other local cultural institutions. Activities are designed to meet teachers' personal and professional enrichment needs."

From the National Gallery of Art website:

"This seminar will explore American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the country's rich and diverse visual heritage. Instruction will focus on the Gallery's collection of American paintings, which are closely allied to European traditions of fine art.

Through lectures, gallery talks, discussion groups, and hands-on activities, participants will study portraiture, historical and commemorative art, scenes of everyday life, still life, and landscape, including works from the uniquely American Hudson River school. John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, Thomas Cole, George Catlin, Winslow Homer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are among the artists in the Gallery's collection whose work will be considered.

Supplementing the study of American paintings will be an examination of ceremonial and utilitarian art objects. Textiles, pottery, and furniture—including pieces created by enslaved and free blacks—will highlight regional preferences in design and material, while performance of Native American stories will emphasize the importance of the oral tradition across tribal boundaries.

The seminar highlights the social and cultural context of art and demonstrates interdisciplinary teaching strategies. Participants will explore connections to literature and music and visit other local cultural institutions. Activities are designed to meet teachers' personal and professional enrichment needs."

From a President Lincoln's Cottage email:

"This FREE event invites educators to explore Lincoln's country home and workplace where he spent one quarter of his presidency and thought through his ideas on the Civil War and emancipation and to discover the array of hands-on, engaging programs the Civil War Washington Museum Consortium has to offer for students in Kindergarten through Twelfth grade!"

From the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse website:

"We'll provide three weeks of intense, guided exploration into how Native American and Euro-American cultures have adapted to the Upper Mississippi River Valley over nearly fourteen millennia, and how we learn about such cultures through archaeology, the study of past human cultures from the remains they left behind."

From the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra website:

"A butcher's son, an instinctive democrat, the composer Antonin Dvořák was self-made. No other European musician of comparable eminence so dedicated himself to finding 'America.' Dvořák’s quest was both concentrated and varied. And Dvořák's embrace was warm: he loved folk music, popular dance and song. He thrilled to Manhattan's polyglot population and in Iowa equally savored what Willa Cather called 'the sadness of all flat lands.'

Jeannette Thurber, a visionary educator, had lured Dvořák from Bohemia to direct her National Conservator of Music. And she handed him a mandate: to help New World composers create a concert idiom Americans would recognize as their own. Dvořák—the proud member of a Hapsburg minority subject to prejudice and discrimination—was galvanized by African-Americans and Native Americas. 'It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness,' he told a New York reporter. 'The poor work hard; they study seriously.' And Dvořák predicted—his most famous, most controversial, most prophetic utterance—that the future music of the US would be based upon its 'Negro melodies.' In New York—then, as now, a city of immigrants—Dvořák's counsel was taken to heart. But in Brahmin Boston, Dvořák's view that black and 'red' Americans were representative was considered naive at best; Philip Hale, Boston's leading music critic, denounced him as a 'negrophile.'

There was a time when introducing young Americans to 'great music' meant venerating a pantheon of dead and distant Europeans. This is no longer done—but nothing has taken its place. The story of Dvořák's American sojourn, a vital and timely alternative, furnishes the subject matter for the Pittsburgh Symphony's NEH Summer Institute . . .

The instructors are nationally known scholars and educators. The schedule includes field trips and concerts, and culminating curricular projects. The curriculum ranges far afield from music to deal with such subjects as Buffalo Bill, immigration, the slave trade, The Song of Hiawatha, and Yellow Journalism. The core topic is the quest for American identity at the turn of the twentieth century."

From the HistoryMakers website:

"The Institute will examine the entire breadth of African American political history from the period of the early American republic through the election of President Barack Obama. The Institute will cover a variety of topics, including: abolitionist and Afro-American politics during slavery, the temporary emergence and eventual suppression of a black political class after the Civil War, black political factions in the early 20th century, the role of trade unions in early civil rights activism, post-World War II urban politics, the Civil Rights movement, 1970s urban black politics, and the 'New Generation' of black politicians epitomized by such figures as President Barack Obama, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick."

From the Colgate University website:

In this institute, participants will "discover how black and white Americans put their lives on the line toward establishing universal American freedom through the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement. . . .[They] will read and discuss significant primary documents and key interpretations, listen to some of the nation's leading experts on the Underground Railroad and Abolitionism, spend evenings watching apposite films and enjoy the facilities of the beautiful Colgate campus during the best season."

From the Amherst College website:

In this seminar, participants "shall read closely, and discuss at length, material ranging from such 'classics' as the Book of Job, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Thoreau on civil disobedience, to legal cases, literary treatments of punishment, and film. The range is broad, asking each of us to move out from our areas of specialization to see the subject of punishment through an interdisciplinary lens. Participation in the seminar demands no specialized training in law or jurisprudence."

From the San Diego State University website:

"The seminar will explore several key works by the political theorist, Hannah Arendt: Eichmann in Jerusalem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, and The Human Condition. These works shed light on the problem of evil and the use of terror in the contemporary age, and provide a philosophical perspective on current debates about the use of violence to settle political conflicts, about the conditions of democracy, and about the scope and importance of human rights."