From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"This seminar examines the era of the American Civil War, with emphasis on its origins, scope, and consequences. Through lectures, class discussion, examination of historical texts, and visits to historic sites, the instructors and participants will examine the central role of slavery, the ways in which military and civilian affairs intersected and influenced one another, the question of what the war left unresolved, and how Americans have remembered the conflict. In many ways, the issues that divided the nation during the Civil War era continue to resonate today. This seminar will seek to make those issues clear, while at the same time providing a sense of the drama and tragedy of this tumultuous period."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"High school and undergraduate survey courses on U.S. history before 1865 rightly treat the War of Independence and the Civil War as decisive events. Three other significant conflicts of the period, the French and Indian War, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War, rate mentions in the textbooks, but their events are usually treated cursorily, and their impacts are rarely considered, if they are mentioned at all. This seminar will demonstrate the powerfully ironic significance of these less well-known imperial wars by exploring the linkages between them and the far more familiar revolutionary civil wars that define this period in American history. For in fact the decisive victory of Britain and its colonists in the French and Indian War brought on the collapse of the British empire, just twelve years after the triumphal Peace of Paris (1763); the similarly decisive victory of the United States over Mexico, confirmed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), precipitated the crises that led, in thirteen years' time, to the disintegration of the Union. The War of 1812, usually seen as having ended indecisively with the Treaty of Utrecht (1815), not only decided the fate of native peoples east of the Mississippi and lent a powerful impetus to the democratization of American electoral politics, but also created an ideological justification for warfare that endures in American political culture to the present day. Our exploration of these striking effects will, we hope, encourage the participants both to reconsider the dynamics of early American history and to re-think the contexts in which they discuss with their students the impact of warfare on the formation of the American Republic."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"Reflecting on the Civil War in 1892, Walt Whitman concluded, 'The real war will never get in the books.' But Whitman did try to bring the real war into his poems. An anti-slavery Democrat, who dressed the wounds of both Northern and Southern soldiers, Whitman wrote poems that describe the circumstances of war—from the exuberant optimism of 1861 to the blood-soaked exhaustion of 1865. How did he interpret the slaughter and sacrifice of the Civil War? How can we bring students to the 'the real war' through his poems? This seminar is a collaboration between the National Humanities Center and public television's historical documentary film series American Experience. Participants will view the American Experience film Walt Whitman and explore how to use it in the classroom."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"When we teach Reconstruction, we typically focus on the struggle to reunite the North and the South. But what of the West? What role did it play in national reunification? The late nineteenth century was the zenith of westward expansion. Western images dominated American culture. What did the wide-open spaces of the West represent to the Americans who were crowding into the cities of the Northeast? What did they represent to the ex-Confederates who resented the imposition of federal power in the South? How did the West shape the nation that emerged from the Civil War?"

From the National Humanities Center website:

"In one lesson plan after another Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois forever stand opposed. In the late nineteenth century both sought uplift for African Americans, but one believed it came through accommodation and manual training, while the other urged resistance and the liberal arts. Is that the entire story? Was Washington a narrow, uncreative booster of commercialism or a savvy politician who correctly read what late nineteenth-century America would afford its black citizens? Was Du Bois a heroic intellectual activist or a narrow elitist whose path to uplift was open only to the 'Talented Tenth'?"

From the Lincoln and New York website:

"N-YHS invites teachers to preview Lincoln and New York at our Teacher Open Houses. Lincoln and New York uses exciting artifacts, hand-written documents, and iconic images to demonstrate the surprisingly central role New York played in the Lincoln story and the leading player Lincoln became in New York.

Registration is free and includes entry to the exhibition, tours with our trained educators and education staff, curriculum materials and light refreshments. Teachers also will enjoy a 10% discount at the Museum Store."

From the First Division Museum website:

"Re-enactors portraying, soldiers and civilians will interact with Symposium participants and Cantigny visitors. See a Civil War cannon fire or watch a Civil War surgeon at work. The Commanding General's Mounted Color Guard from the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas, will drill. Fun, educational activities for children and adults alike will be available."

For more on the First Division Museum, see NHEC's Museums and Historic Sites listing.

From the National Humanities Center website:

"'Then, thenceforward, and forever free.' Few public documents contain words more stirring than those from the Emancipation Proclamation. The process of Emancipation was momentous, tumultuous, exhilarating, and chaotic. Spirits soared and hopes were crushed as nearly four million black Southerners made the transition from slavery to freedom. How did they actually experience emancipation? What did they hope freedom would mean? How did they pursue it, and what obstacles did they face as they attempted to claim and secure freedom for themselves and their families? You will find some interesting answers to those questions in the remarkable photographs, letters, and eye witness accounts that we will discuss in this workshop."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"The Cult of Domesticity was a societal ideal promoted especially during the mid- and late nineteenth century. It provided a behavioral handbook, a 'code,' for middle-class white women in America that served as a way to value, to judge, and to control how they would both see themselves and be understood by others. Women who questioned the social, economic, and artistic limitations that this code imposed learned to challenge it from within the 'sphere' of influence that it prescribed. This workshop will explore how the cult of domesticity constrained women, and how some women transformed it into a tool of empowerment."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"The Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery and transformed the United States socially, politically, economically, and artistically. Not only did the subject inspire some of the nation's best painters, sculptors, photographers, and illustrators, it also changed the face of town and countryside as monuments to soldiers and statesmen of the Civil War era spread across the landscape. This workshop will pay close attention not only to the imagery of battle but also to the social and political issues which shaped the image of the war and which in many respects continue to shape us today. How did artists come to grips with the new realities of warfare and the unprecedented scale of death it caused? How did the new media of that era (especially photography) change the way that war was represented and understood? What insights did artists offer into the social and political changes happening both on the homefront and battlefront? Did the memorialization of the war in public art create new understandings of the conflict or perpetuate old myths?"