This weeklong seminar will bring together a distinguished team of humanities scholars who will provide an interdisciplinary exploration of Zora Neale Hurston's life and work. Participants will examine Hurston's accomplishments within the context of the historical and cultural development of the Eatonville community. They will grapple with compelling questions about how this unique black enclave fueled Hurston's appreciation of folk culture, inspired her literary works, created her racial identity, and formed her sometimes controversial views on race.

This seminar examines legal segregation in the American South from its origin in the 1890s until its demise by the end of the 1960s through the autobiographical writings of the most prominent interpreters of the era, black and white, male and female. Participants will explore the reasons for segregation's rise and fall and its legal, social, and moral aspects.

From the Lyndon B. Johnson Museum and Library newsletter:

"The LBJ Library and Museum and Education Service Center, Region XIII will co-sponsor a symposium for high school teachers at the LBJ Library on July 13 and 14, 2009.

Twentieth Century Conflicts in U.S. History will feature

* Dr. Mark Lawrence, Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Lawrence is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam which won two awards from the American Historical Association: the Paul Birdsall Prize for European military and strategic history and the George Louis Beer Prize for European international history. He has also written several chapters and articles on the Vietnam War and other topics in U.S. diplomatic history. He is currently at work on a study of U.S. policymaking regarding Third World nationalism in the 1960s and a short history of the Vietnam War. He is also co-editor (with Fredrik Logevall of Cornell University) of The First Vietnam War: Colonial Conflict and Cold War Crisis, a volume of essays about the French war in Indochina.
* Additional speakers from the Fort Worth Regional Archives (World War I), Roosevelt Library (World War II), the Truman Library (World War II), the Eisenhower Library (Korea), the Kennedy Library (Cold War), the LBJ Library (Vietnam), the Ford Library (fall of Saigon), and the George H.W. Bush Library (the Gulf War).

Primary source materials will be featured in related topics.
Cost of the symposium is $50 and includes all materials, a CD/DVD of all primary sources, and breakfast and lunch for both days. Space is limited so register early.
Use the Workshop ID SU0915826 to register online."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"One of the most familiar truisms about the United States is that we are a 'nation of immigrants.' Indeed, immigration and immigrants inform nearly every narrative of progress and possibility that Americans have told about themselves for more than a century, from individual stories of rags to riches to generational accounts of upward mobility and becoming American. And yet, immigration today remains one of the most controversial political topics, generating intense conflicts over who or what is an American and who should have the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In this seminar, we examine and compare two waves of immigration to the United States: the 'new' immigration between 1890 and 1920, composed mainly of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Japan; and contemporary immigration, post 1964, involving undocumented and legal migration from Southeast Asia, Mexico, Central America, and Africa. By exploring changes and continuities in immigration to the United States, we seek to historicize contemporary controversies and fears."

Participants in this workshop will spend two days in the historic village of Plymouth Notch, Vermont, boyhood community of President Calvin Coolidge, exploring civic life and responsibilities through primary sources.