This institute invites educators from across the country to learn about Abraham Lincoln through the Library of Congress's primary and web-based materials. Participants will leave with strategies and materials they can use in their schools. The institute uses the Library's exhibition "With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition" as its foundation.

Linda B. Osborne discusses her book for young people, Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War Through Reconstruction, which draws on the Library of Congress collections of former slave interviews to convey the aspirations, sorrows, courage, and hopes of ordinary people living through this period. Osborne mined the Federal Writers' Project slave narratives and materials in the Library's Manuscript, Prints and Photographs, Rare Book and Special Collections, and Geography and Map divisions for this work that focuses on the experiences of African American children. More than 80 archival images complement the text. Major events covered include the rise of the domestic slave trade, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republican Congress' Reconstruction policies. From Charles Cowley, an enslaved child who had no shoes with which to walk through the snow, to Richard Slaughter, who enlisted in the Union Army at 17, this book reveals the personal hardships and courageous endurance of black youth in 19th-century America.

Participants in this course will examine African American history in the contexts of United States, North Carolina, and world history. They will begin by connecting the experiences of African Americans in early U.S. history to the histories and cultures of the African communities of their ancestors and will follow those cultural connections between Africa and the United States throughout the course.

Course topics include African Americans in the colonies and the early Republic, the Middle Passage, American slavery and the experiences of free African Americans in the antebellum period, the abolition movement, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the experiences of African Americans during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Throughout the course, participants will discuss African American activism through churches, political organizations, and communities and discover African American culture through art, music, and other cultural forms.

Stratford Hall, the home of the Lees of Virginia and birthplace of Robert E. Lee, hosts its first symposium dedicated to the further study of General Robert E. Lee and various issues relating to the American Civil War. This program includes tours of the nearby Fredericksburg, Wilderness, and Spotsylvania Battlefields, some of the bloodiest combat of the Civil War.

Historians Peter Carmichael, Aaron Sheehan-Dean, and Elizabeth Brown Pryor will lead the group. The focus is on Robert E. Lee as a general, the use of primary documents in uncovering new dimensions to Civil War personalities, and the importance of the Fredericksburg and Overland Campaigns.

Scholarship on American art of the 18th and 19th centuries has proliferated dramatically in the last decade and yet very little has been written on the materials, methods, and settings of painting. This one-day event will delve into some of the workshops, studios, schoolrooms, and parlors where New Englanders of all kinds used a wide variety of materials, such as pencil and pigments on canvas, silk, glass, wood, and tin to create painted images and decorations for themselves, for sale, and for public display. Participants will learn about the daily lives of New England's diverse artists and artisans and the painted objects—from studio art to school girl art and painted decorative arts—that they produced and distributed between 1700 and 1850.

This workshop will be structured to enhance teacher knowledge of Abraham Lincoln's significance in American history and will include pedagogical skills. It will include morning lectures by Thomas Krannawitter, of Hillsdale College and author of Vindicating Lincoln, and afternoon sessions, by John Rodahl of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, devoted to strategies for lesson planning, classroom activities, and student engagement.

This all-day Lincoln symposium celebrates the 148th anniversary of Lincoln's first inauguration and features six award-winning scholars: William Lee Miller, on presidential morality during the Lincoln administration; James M. McPherson, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief; Douglas L. Wilson, on Lincoln and the power of words; Lucas Morel, on Lincoln and race; Harold Holzer, on Lincoln as President-elect; and Elizabeth D. Leonard, on Lincoln and justice.

Participants in this workshop will learn how to use artworks as primary sources in their classrooms to teach American history and critical thinking. This workshop brings together the best of the Young America and Westward Expansion eras featured in SAAM's school programs. Both activity ideas as preparation for a tour or as stand-alone classroom lessons will be covered.