This seminar will consider two different American Revolutions. One was the struggle for American self-determination. The second was the ongoing struggle for liberty and equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. Participants will consider the ideological, economic, social, and political causes of the War for Independence. They will also consider the war as a political, military, and social struggle. This course will discuss critical steps made during and after the war for liberty and equality: the abolition of slavery in the North, enhancement of women's roles, and enfranchisement of unpropertied white men. Since New York figured as a critical field of conflict in both American Revolutions, the seminar will take advantage of its location in New York to visit some of the most important Revolutionary sites.

The Minnesota Historical Society will help participants make their very own Discovery Boxes. Each educator will walk away with a teaching box, filled with props and primary sources related to Minnesota's fur trade. Participants will also brainstorm with fellow teachers and experience a hands-on fur trade lesson.

This professional development opportunity will bring Texas teachers together with leading scholars to explore important constitutional issues in our nation's history. The program offers teachers the opportunity to work with leading scholars of U.S. history, political science, and law and share strategies for teaching with primary sources.

This institute provides the opportunity to analyze and investigate the material culture and decorative arts of the early South. Each summer the institute focuses on one region of the early South, rotating its concentration from the Chesapeake to the Carolina Low Country to the southern Backcountry.

The 2009 Institute emphasizes the material culture of the early southern Backcountry, including the piedmont and western regions of Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, as well as Tennessee and Kentucky. The program curriculum includes lectures, discussions, work­shops, artifact studies, research projects, and study trips.

To mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet, the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, in collaboration with the Scottish government as part of its Homecoming Scotland 2009 celebration, presents a free public symposium on Burns's life and work, as well as his impact on America and American culture.

The Academy offers educators content and strategies for teaching the "Seven Principles of Constitutionalism" and the "U.S. Constitution in Time of Crisis." Important events and decisions concerning equality in American history will also be studied. A team of talented scholars and consultants will present information and lessons dealing with TAKS Objectives One and Four. A variety of demonstrated lessons will incorporate multi-use visuals, music, and interactive strategies.

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.

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.