This free weekend will feature “field trip” tours of Antietam and Harpers Ferry, focusing on techniques teachers can use to make a battlefield visit a central part of their Civil War curriculum.

Teachers will attend their choice of workshops on Friday and Sunday, covering a range of military and civilian topics. Past presenters of these workshops have included leading historians and educators, and topics have ranged from tactical military history to strategies for teaching the Civil War to struggling readers. These workshops are designed not only to impart specific information about the era but also a variety of pedagogical strategies to help teachers bring the Civil War to life in their classrooms.

This practical, hands-on workshop for secondary-level educators will focus on strategies and approaches that help students with nonfiction reading in the social studies. Eight organizational patterns of text structure will be examined, including description, cause and effect, compare / contrast, problem/solution, concept definition, sequence, proposition / support, and goal / action / outcome. Participants will identify and find examples of each in social studies texts, acquire and apply reading strategies appropriate for each type of text structure, and determine ways of using strategies in both instruction and assessment. In addition, participants will acquire and apply other strategies that help students unlock social studies content in the secondary classroom, including vocabulary strategies, anticipation guides, summarizing, synthesizing and evaluating information, making inferences, and making predictions. Participants are asked to bring a grade-level text to use during the workshop.

"To celebrate Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, NARA archivist Reginald Washington will give a presentation on marriage records among the Freedmen’s Bureau records."

"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 nineteenth century, and the contemporary debate about the meaning of slavery for American life."

"Between ca. 1500 and ca. 1800, the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean saw the creation, destruction, and re-creation of communities as a result of the movement of peoples, commodities, institutions, social practices, and cultural values. This seminar will explore the pan-Atlantic webs of association linking people, objects, and beliefs across and within the region. The best Atlantic history is interactive and crosses borders. The hope is that participants will enlarge their horizons by placing the standard early North American story in a larger framework."