The Many and the One: Religion, Pluralism, and American History

Description

From the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis website:

"This institute will support the studies of twenty-five talented teachers from across the nation as they join with nationally renowned scholars to explore how religion has shaped, and been shaped by, the American experience. The Institute directors, Philip Goff, Arthur Farnsley, and Rachel Wheeler, are all noted scholars in their field, whose work encompasses a wide range of subject matter and methodologies.

The Institute will enable participants from many different fields to develop new materials on American religion that can be incorporated into their current curricula. An English teacher introducing Uncle Tom's Cabin, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for instance, will be better prepared to discuss the nexus of religion and race in the context of nineteenth-century America. A civics teacher focusing on the origins of the American government will be able to incorporate discussion about the religion of the founders and the ways in which the First Amendment has shaped American society."

Contact name
Arthur Farnsley II
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis
Phone number
3172748409
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free; $2,700 stipend
Duration
Three weeks
End Date

Making the Wright Connection: Reading Native Son, Black Boy, and Uncle Tom's Children

Description

From the University of Kansas website:

Participants in this institute will engage in a "conversation that not only looks at why Wright was so influential during his lifetime, but more importantly why he matters to us today. We will take a closer look—and get a fuller sense of—Wright's world, that America that he knew and wrote about. How we can find ways of connecting his world and ours for our students, we will ask, as we focus on Wright's three major books: Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945). This will be a rare opportunity to read, research, write and create as you participate actively in the Institute's seminars, discussion groups and workshops and build lasting relationships with other teachers and Wright specialists."

Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, University of Kansas
Phone number
7858642565
Target Audience
Secondary
Start Date
Cost
Free; $2,100 stipend
Course Credit
"Teachers can gain professional development points, receiving one point for each hour of training."
Duration
Two weeks
End Date

Crosscurrents of American Art

Description

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."

Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Gallery of Art
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
$200
Course Credit
"One semester hour of graduate credit will be granted through the University of Virginia's School of Continuing and Professional Studies for successfully completed lessons. Credit fees total $258 for Virginia residents and $573 for out-of-state residents. A letter grade based on the curriculum project will be registered with the university."
Duration
Six days
End Date

Crosscurrents of American Art

Description

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."

Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Gallery of Art
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
$200
Course Credit
"One semester hour of graduate credit will be granted through the University of Virginia's School of Continuing and Professional Studies for successfully completed lessons. Credit fees total $258 for Virginia residents and $573 for out-of-state residents. A letter grade based on the curriculum project will be registered with the university."
Duration
Six days
End Date

An Evening for Educators at President Lincoln's Cottage

Description

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!"

Contact name
Talia Mosconi
Contact email
Sponsoring Organization
President Lincoln's Cottage at the Soldier's Home, Civil War Museum Consortium
Phone number
202-965-0400
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free
Contact Title
Education Director
Duration
Two hours

Exploring the Past: Archaeology in the Upper Mississippi River Valley

Description

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."

Contact name
Bonnie Jancik
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Phone number
6087856473
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free; $2700 stipend
Course Credit
"Ten Continuing Education Units (CEU) are available for those participating fully in the work of the Institute."
Duration
Three weeks
End Date

Dvorak in America

Description

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."

Contact name
Nicole Longevin-Burroughs
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Phone number
4123928991
Target Audience
Middle and high school
Start Date
Cost
Free; $2700 stipend
Course Credit
"All institute participants will receive a letter explaining the activities of the institute in some detail, and approximating the number of educational hours the institute represents."
Contact Title
Manager of Education and Community Programs
Duration
Three weeks
End Date

Cotton Culture in the South from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement

Description

From the Mercer University:

"The southern studies faculty of Mercer University will host an NEH institute for high school teachers on Cotton Culture in the U.S. South, 1865-1965.

The institute will allow twenty-two teachers of English, history, economics, government, geography, art, and music to learn about the complex social structures of the U.S. South in the crucial yet frequently misunderstood hundred years after the Civil War, a period that included both major social problems and amazing cultural development. An interdisciplinary panel of experts on the South will use the cultivation of cotton—the South's most significant economic product during this time—as a means to analyze and understand the region's history, geography, economics, politics, culture, and literature . . .

Macon, Georgia, about an hour's drive south of Atlanta, is an ideal location from which to study the history and culture of cotton. Nicknamed 'the market city,' it was once a center of cotton commerce and textile production. Workshops will meet on the campus of Mercer University in downtown Macon, and participants will also visit a nineteenth-century plantation, a working cotton farm, the Civil Rights historic district of Atlanta, and the cotton seaport in Savannah."

Contact name
Carmen Hicks
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, Mercer University
Phone number
4783012562
Target Audience
High school
Start Date
Cost
Free; $3900 stipend
Duration
Five weeks
End Date

African-American Political History

Description

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."

Contact name
Julieanna Richardson
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, The History Makers
Phone number
3126741900
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free; $3300 stipend
Contact Title
Director
Duration
Four weeks
End Date

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad in Upstate New York

Description

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."

Contact name
Graham Hodges
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Humanities, Colgate University
Phone number
3152287517
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free; $3300 stipend
Contact Title
Professor
Duration
Four weeks
End Date