From the National Humanities Center website:

"This seminar will approach American history after World War II as a history of social movements. The first session will explore the black freedom movement with an eye to new scholarly interpretations of a 'long civil rights movement' reaching back to the New Deal and beyond the 1970s and including the North and West as well as the South. The second session will examine the women's movement and the conservative movement for insight into the relationships among various movements. It will conclude with a discussion of how viewing the era from 1945 to 1990 as an era of social movements can bring new coherence to the recent past."

Participants in this workshop will travel throughout the Delta as they visit sites where significant events occurred. They will discuss and learn about issues involving civil rights and political leadership, immigrants' experiences in the Delta, the Blues, the great migration, agriculture, and the Mississippi River, among other things. They will sample Delta foods, visit local museums, and listen to the Blues. Field trips will roam as far as Greenville, Greenwood, and Memphis, with stops in between.

The Cold War dominated the second half of the 20th century, but until recently the world had only an imperfect sense of what it was all about. Historians wrote about it, of necessity, from within the event they were seeking to describe, so that there was no way to know its outcome. And because only a few Western countries had begun to open their archives, these accounts could only reflect one side of the story. Cold War history, hence, was not normal history: it was both asymmetrical and incomplete. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent partial opening of Soviet, Eastern European, and Chinese archives have revolutionized the field. Everything historians thought they knew is suddenly up for reconsideration, whether because of the new documents available to them, or as a consequence of knowing how it all came out. Even as this happens, though, the memories of those who lived through the Cold War are rapidly fading, and a new generation of students has no memory of it at all. This seminar will seek to integrate the latest scholarly research on Cold War history and the ways in which that subject is presented in the classroom. The seminar will use a variety of means: lectures, books, documents, video documentaries, and the resources of the worldwide web. There will also be ample opportunity for participants to learn from one another, and for the presenters to learn from the participants. It will be, in short, a week of total immersion in the lengthy, occasionally dangerous, and (almost) always intriguing history of the Cold War, filled with debate and new information.

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."

From the Newberry Library website:

"[This conference] will support teachers in the development of lessons using images from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Picturing America program.

Conferences will feature presentations by distinguished scholars and sharing of resources in workshop formats. We will use the Newberry Library’s collections as well as a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago and a walking tour of Chicago’s Loop to model ways for teachers to use local resources in their own communities."

From the Newberry Library website:

"[This conference] will support teachers in the development of lessons using images from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Picturing America program.

Conferences will feature presentations by distinguished scholars and sharing of resources in workshop formats. We will use the Newberry Library's collections as well as a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago and a walking tour of Chicago's Loop to model ways for teachers to use local resources in their own communities."