From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"Among all bilateral relations in today's world, the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China is arguably the most important and dynamic.

The development of U.S.-China relations is tumultuous. Early in the twentieth century, America's 'Open Door' policy, allegedly designed to help prevent China from being divided up by foreign powers, was followed by a nationwide anti-American boycott movement in China. In the Second World War, China and the United States were allies. Yet only four years after the war's end, they entered a total confrontation that would last more than two decades. During the Cold War, both of the only two major 'hot wars' that America was involved occurred in East Asia—first in Korea and then in Vietnam—mainly for containing Communist China's 'expansionist ambitions.' When U.S.-China relations reached the low ebb, a rapprochement between Beijing and Washington happened in the early 1970s, changing the two countries from bitter enemies to quasi 'strategic partners' while, at the same time, transforming the orientation and essence of the global Cold War. Since the end of the Cold War, the 'U.S.-China partnership' has encountered serious challenges as many in America have difficulty in comprehending the implications of China's continuous rise as a prominent world power.

This course begins with reviewing the encounters between the U.S. and China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It explores the confrontation and cooperation between the two countries during the Cold War by focusing on such key cases as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Taiwan Question, and the Chinese-American Rapprochement. It concludes with identifying the opportunities and challenges facing the U.S. and China in the twenty-first century. The basic aim of the course is to help the participants develop a better understanding of how nations with different values, cultural-historical backgrounds, political institutions, and levels of economic development may coexist in today's world."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"This seminar will focus on markets, corruption and mass immigration in the Gilded Age. We will look at the rise of the modern corporation and the first great age of modern technology in the United States. Topics include Edison and the World's Fair, the Penny Press, Mass Culture, Advertising, and the Expansion of the State."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"The financial crisis and the ensuing economic recession of 2007-09 serve to remind us that such crises and downturns have been recurring events in American history. They have occurred on average once every fifteen to twenty years since 1789. In this seminar we will study the causes of some major financial crises—those of 1792, 1837-39, 1873, 1893-95, 1907, 1929-33, 1989-90, and 2007-09—and will explore the social, political, and economic consequences of the crises. We will discuss the typical pattern of most of the crises, differences among them, and issues such as whether legislative and regulatory responses to a crisis make subsequent crises more or less likely. Participants will visit the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street to gain a better understanding of the complexities of our financial system, how it developed over two centuries, and how periodically it has crashed on the rocks of excessive risk taking and speculation."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"The Progressive Era marked the modernization of the American state, the expansion of citizenship, the ascendancy of 'big business,' the transformation of American liberalism, and the development of a social politics. It was also the moment when the United States assumed the role of a world power, culminating in its participation in World War I and its role in negotiating the ambitious but flawed treaty that ended it. Taking exception to interpretations of the era that see 'American exceptionalism,' this seminar will explore the era and its reforms (and their limits) in the context of the larger global response to industrialization and urbanization under conditions of unregulated capitalism."

From the American Bar Association:

"The institute will provide teachers with the training and resources to engage students in the history of landmark federal cases. This year's institute will study trials under the Sedition Act of 1798, Ex parte Merryman and debates on habeas corpus during the Civil War, and a trial of bootleggers during Prohibition. Faculty will include David Cole of the Georgetown Law School, Saul Cornell of Fordham University, Linda Greenhouse of Yale Law School and formerly Supreme Court reporter for the New York Times, and Michael Vorenberg of Brown University. Teachers will also visit the Supreme Court and the U.S. Courthouse for the District of Columbia."

From Indiana University's website:

"Our NEH summer institute will enhance your teaching curriculum with respect to modern American social movements in a number of ways. Most fundamentally, the institute will help you understand the pivotal role that social movements have played in changing public policy in the United States over the last century. Moreover, the institute will acquaint you with the latest scholarship on these three social movements—labor, civil rights, and feminism—which you are unlikely to have encountered in your teacher training. Recent historical scholarship reveals at least three general ways to enhance these topics for your secondary school students. First, historians now emphasize the diversity and complexity of each of these movements. In each case, a variety of sometimes conflicting organizations, perspectives, and leaders made up each movement. And yet teaching tends to focus only on the dominant current within each movement. Second, the interconnections between these three movements have received renewed attention. Historians are finding more and more ways in which these movements cross-fertilized each other, but the connections are often missed by teachers. For instance, recent scholarship on Betty Friedan, the central founder of the National Organization for Women has found that her work for CIO unions like the United Electrical Workers during the 1940s was a formative experience for the development of her feminist ideas. Third, social movement scholarship has taken note of the extent to which each of these movements faced organized resistance. It is easy for young people today to forget that as reasonable as Martin Luther King, Jr. may seem to us today, in his own day he was viewed as a dangerous agitator."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"This seminar explores the rise of Jim Crow in the United States and tracks it forward to its modern post-civil rights manifestations. Seminar participants will work with a range of primary sources to interpret the shifting social, economic, political, psychological, and cultural trauma associated with this set of racial practices. Close attention will be paid to the effects of Jim Crow on both sides of the color line."

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 First Division Museum website:

"Learn how your school can participate in a unique service learning project supporting World War I education and the restoration of the World War I Memorial in Washington D.C. Foundation officers and service learning expert Mike Mangan will explain the service learning project. Educators from Creekwood Middle School in Humble, Texas will report on the highly successful pilot program they ran in 2008 which is now the national model."

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

From the National Humanities Center website:

"'How did the ethnically and culturally diverse urban environment of early twentieth-century America find its way into art? How did artists see the new immigrants who flooded into American cities from 1890 on? What kinds of visual languages did they draw on in approaching a subject that had been generally off limits to painters of the previous generation—the urban poor? This workshop will look at how the Ash Can artists built on older visual and art historical traditions, while also considering what was new about their work. It will also consider the subject matter they shared with the popular culture of early twentieth-century films, graphic journalism, and cartooning. Using a variety of perspectives, this workshop will consider the role of the visual in exploring the defining challenges of a pluralistic urban democracy in the new century."