This iCue Mini-documentary introduces the Spanish explorers Vasco Nunez del Balboa, Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro's, who ventured across the Atlantic two decades after Columbus's famous voyages. The Spanish often used savage tactics to subdue Indian tribes and steal their wealth.
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The story of sugar's transformation from luxury product to ubiquitous commodity in the modern Western diet offers a rich vantage on transatlantic and world history. It also prods students and scholars to deeper consideration of the myriad social, cultural, and economic processes within which even the most seemingly banal substances can be enmeshed. Seminar participants will explore these connections and processes, with special attention to the Caribbean. The link between sugar cultivation and the transatlantic slave trade—and the enduring, intertwined legacies of both—will be an important area of discussion and analysis.
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 iCue Mini-Documentary describes the expansion of communist ideology after World War II, and western governments' fears of a domino effect as countries succumbed to communism. The Truman Doctrine called for action to contain the communist threat, by economic or military action, if necessary.
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The Cold War dominated the second half of the 20th century, but until recently the world had only an imperfect sense of what it was all about. Historians wrote about it, of necessity, from within the event they were seeking to describe, so that there was no way to know its outcome. And because only a few Western countries had begun to open their archives, these accounts could only reflect one side of the story. Cold War history, hence, was not normal history: it was both asymmetrical and incomplete. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent partial opening of Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives have revolutionized the field. Everything historians thought they knew is suddenly up for reconsideration, whether because of the new documents available to them, or as a consequence of knowing how it all came out. Even as this happens, though, the memories of those who lived through the Cold War are rapidly fading, and a new generation of students has no memory of it at all. This seminar will seek to integrate the latest scholarly research on Cold War history and the ways in which that subject is presented in the classroom. The seminar will use a variety of means: lectures, books, documents, video documentaries, and the resources of the worldwide web. There will also be ample opportunity for participants to learn from one another, and for the presenters to learn from the participants. It will be, in short, a week of total immersion in the lengthy, occasionally dangerous, and (almost) always intriguing history of the Cold War, filled with debate and new information.
In the second volume of his epic trilogy about the liberation of Europe in World War II, Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Atkinson tells the harrowing story of the campaigns in Sicily and Italy. Attendees at this event join author Rick Atkinson as he discusses his new book in the Liberation Trilogy, The Day of Battle. A book signing will follow.
How do societies integrate newcomers? In this workshop, participants will engage with stories of Muslim immigration to Europe and make connections to debates about difference in their own community. Among the many topics they will examine is the role of religion in public life. This workshop is specifically designed for high school teachers who are teaching the Facing History and Ourselves Semester Elective. In this one-day workshop, teachers will unite with other elective teachers to share best practices, discuss challenges, and celebrate triumphs. The agenda is designed to address both content and pedagogy.
How do societies integrate newcomers? In this workshop, participants will engage with stories of Muslim immigration to Europe and make connections to debates about difference in our own community. Among the many topics they will examine is the role of religion in public life.
"World War II was the most destructive conflict in the history of the world, affecting nearly everyone who was alive at the time, as well as the generations that followed. This seminar will examine the causes, course, and consequences of the war, both in the European and Asian/Pacific theaters, as well as on the American homefront. While it will emphasize the role that the United States played in the conflict, it will not ignore those aspects of the war in which Americans were not directly involved, such as the early war years (1939-41), and the genocidal conflict between Germany and the Soviet Union."
"Alexis de Tocqueville's 'Democracy in America' is the best study of America to be written by a foreigner. It examines government, religion, the races, private associations, literature, the family, and much else, all the while contrasting democratic America with old aristocratic Europe. This course will examine as much of the book as we can, focusing especially on Tocqueville's account of the love of equality (and its dangers) and his prescriptions for the preservation of liberty."