This institute invites educators from across the country to learn about Abraham Lincoln through the Library of Congress's primary and web-based materials. Participants will leave with strategies and materials they can use in their schools. The institute uses the Library's exhibition "With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition" as its foundation.

This institute invites educators from across the country to learn about Abraham Lincoln through the Library of Congress's primary and web-based materials. Participants will leave with strategies and materials they can use in their schools. The institute uses the Library's exhibition "With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition" as its foundation.

Like other citizens, U.S. Presidents attended elementary and secondary schools and then college. They went to classes; did their homework; joined clubs; participated in band, debate, and sports; worked on newspaper staffs; and ran for class office. The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum will host the National Archives traveling exhibit, "School House to White House: The Education of Presidents." Visitors journey back to the schooldays of the 20th-century presidents through photographs, archival materials, and museum objects revealing fascinating detail about the children who would one day grow up to be President of the United States. In conjunction with this exhibit, a teacher workshop will be held. Educators from four Presidential Libraries (Hoover, Truman, Eisenhower, and Clinton) will share information and teaching activities for use in the classroom.

Participants in this course will discover American Indian history in the United States from the earliest evidence of human habitation through first contact with Europeans, conflicts in the West, World War II and other key events in 20th-century U.S. history, the American Indian rights movement, and into the present day.

Archaeological finds, traditional stories, the writings of early European explorers, government documents and treaties, oral histories, photographs, the arts, newspaper articles, and more will enrich exploration of key issues in Native American history nationwide.

The course will proceed chronologically. Within each topical module participants will have the opportunity to choose from several different geographically grouped assignments, allowing them to customize their own learning experience based on their interests, the demands of the curriculum, and their own priorities for teaching American Indian history.

For example, in any given unit, they may choose to focus on the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, the Northeast, or the Southeast. They may either follow one geographical track throughout the course or mix up their selections to allow for a broader view of American Indian history.

Too often, students view Civil Rights in isolation—they do not understand the rich historical background of African American history or the legacies of the movement in the more recent past. They often know some of the major civil rights figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks, but they do not grasp the complexities of civil rights leadership, or the experience of the movement's foot soldiers—the students in SNCC, the freedom riders, or the everyday people who marched, boycotted, protested, and volunteered to make the movement happen. This course will try to explore the movement from all of these perspectives using, where possible, firsthand accounts from the people who lived this important history.

The instructor will assume that the main historical outlines of the movement are familiar to K–12 teachers—instead of recounting that basic history, participants will spend much of the time delving into lesser-studied events of the movement and the primary sources that will allow them to explore their own ideas about the movement and its meanings in detail.

This course will allow for the opportunity for deep historical analysis and interpretation using primary sources. The best way to learn history is by doing history. Participants will tackle documents, images, newspaper accounts, artistic expressions, film, and other sources. By doing so, they will develop their own arguments and ideas about the movement, and help future students do the same. Many of the resources participants will use have been recently added to the internet and they should be exciting additions to the course, and to historical scholarship more broadly. As participants mine these sources, they will hopefully enjoy the historical process and also get some great ideas for classroom activities for their students.

The instructor has selected websites and multimedia resources that will give participating teachers access to literally thousands of documents including newspaper accounts, oral history interviews, government documents, photographs, works of art, film clips, and more. Participants will have the opportunity to analyze these sources through engaging activities to create a lesson plan for classroom use; to receive individualized, constructive feedback and answers to content-oriented questions from a well-versed instructor; and to join other teachers from across the state in lively online discussions throughout the course.

Participants in this course will examine African American history in the contexts of United States, North Carolina, and world history. They will begin by connecting the experiences of African Americans in early U.S. history to the histories and cultures of the African communities of their ancestors and will follow those cultural connections between Africa and the United States throughout the course.

Course topics include African Americans in the colonies and the early Republic, the Middle Passage, American slavery and the experiences of free African Americans in the antebellum period, the abolition movement, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the experiences of African Americans during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Throughout the course, participants will discuss African American activism through churches, political organizations, and communities and discover African American culture through art, music, and other cultural forms.

Participants in this online course will discover the wealth of web-based primary research and active learning resources available to social studies teachers of all grade levels. They will explore an array of primary and secondary resources including collections of original documents, vast reservoirs of secondary historical information, and online resources designed to support social studies teachers in curriculum development. They will consider effective research strategies and engage in critical analysis of web resources. In addition, they will learn to develop a personal collection of web-based resources for curricular use, as well as create preliminary plans to enhance a curriculum unit.