Social Movements in Modern America: Labor, Civil Rights, and Feminism

Description

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."

Contact name
Dr. Barbara Truesdell
Contact email
Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Endowment for the Arts, Indiana University
Phone number
8128552856
Target Audience
9-12
Start Date
Cost
Free; $2,700 stipend
Course Credit
"Upon successful completion of the summer institute “Social Movements in Modern America: Labor, Civil Rights, and Feminism,” you will earn professional development points (PDPs or CEUs) according to the guidelines of your own school districts."
Duration
Three weeks
End Date

The Great Depression and World War II

Description

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"Professor David Kennedy examines the experience of the American people in the Great Depression and World War II. Lecture topics include the origins and impact of the Great Depression; the nature and legacy of the New Deal; the military and diplomatic dimensions of American participation in World War II; and the war's impact on American society. Special attention will be given to the historical debate about the Depression's causes; America and the Holocaust; the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans; and the use of atomic bombs against Japan."

Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Phone number
6463669666
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free, $400 stipend
Course Credit
"The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is proud to announce its agreement with Adams State College to offer three hours of graduate credit in American history to participating seminar teachers. Teachers are required to submit a reflection paper and a copy of one primary source activity completed during or immediately after the seminar."
Duration
Five days
End Date

Picturing America in the 1930s: Reading Farm Security Administration Photographs

Description

From the National Humanities Center website:

"The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency founded to combat rural poverty. While it spent millions of dollars between 1935 and 1946 to improve the lives of poor farmers, it is remembered today for its documentary photography program. The photographs of rural America taken by FSA photographers in the 1930s have assumed iconic status and have come to define the look of the Great Depression. What can they teach about America in the 1930s? What can they tell us about the truth of documentary photography? How can we read them as images?"

Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
National Humanities Center
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
$35
Course Credit
"The National Humanities Center programs are eligible for recertification credit."
Duration
One hour and a half

Middle Passages: A Shared History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Liverpool, England

Description

From the Gilder Lehrman website:

"Ten teachers from the United States will join twenty teachers from the United Kingdom and Ghana to study the history and legacies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade under the direction of professors from the United Kingdom and the United States. The seminar will cover the history of African-European contact, the nature of African societies in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, the slave trading practices in Africa, the impact of the slave trade on regions of Africa, the character of the coastal trade in the forts and castles, the experience of the Middle Passage, and the numbers and experience of African arrivals in the Americas. Participants will be introduced to major scholarship as well as to the new online Transatlantic Slave Trade Database."

Registration Deadline
Sponsoring Organization
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Phone number
6463669666
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free, $500 travel stipend
Course Credit
"The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is proud to announce its agreement with Adams State College to offer three hours of graduate credit in American history to participating seminar teachers. Teachers are required to submit a reflection paper and a copy of one primary source activity completed during or immediately after the seminar."
Duration
One week
End Date

Mad Money

Description

This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the virtual chaos of the banking system of early 19th-century America, with thousands of different banknotes in circulation across the country.

This feature is no longer available.

The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989

Description

From the TeachingAmericanHistory.org:

"This seminar will examine the challenge Ronald Reagan posed to the modern liberal tradition in America, especially in its Progressive, New Deal, and Great Society forms. The sources and circumstances of Reagan's political philosophy will be surveyed, along with an assessment of where he succeeded and failed to attain his objectives, and areas where a full verdict is more difficult to reach. The unity of Reagan's domestic and foreign policy will be explained and analyzed.

The morning session will cover Reagan's domestic policy, especially his four-part economic policy, but also his initiatives in legal and constitutional reform, family policy, and his attempts to revitalize federalism.

The afternoon session will survey the three phases of Reagan's foreign policy: the first-term arms buildup and tough diplomacy, followed by a transitional period while Soviet leadership turned over, and culminating in four dramatic summit meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev that set the stage for the surprising and rapid end of the Cold War. Foreign policy conflicts on the periphery, especially in Central America and the Middle East, will be surveyed, culminating in the Iran-Contra disaster of Reagan's second term. The changing assessment and legacy of Reagan since his presidency will be surveyed, with an eye especially to the question of what aspects of Reaganism remain salient today, and which have been superseded by post-Cold War circumstances. "

Sponsoring Organization
TeachingAmericanHistory.org
Target Audience
K-12
Start Date
Cost
Free
Course Credit
"Offered for CEU credit at no charge." "One semester credit hour from Ashland University is available for participants who attend three of the four seminars during the year," for $172.
Duration
Four hours

A People's History of Chicago, 1880-1960

Description

From the Newberry Library website:

"This course will explore the social history of Chicago in the years between the Great Fire of 1871 and the modern Civil Rights Movement. Our core texts will be works of historical fiction, including selections from Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, and Richard Wright's Native Son. Using these as windows into the city's vibrant past, we will investigate the changing texture of everyday life amidst vast social, political, and economic change."

Contact email
Sponsoring Organization
Newberry Library
Phone number
312-255-3700
Target Audience
General public
Start Date
Cost
$170
Duration
Six weeks
End Date

Nation at the Crossroads: Rediscovering the Federal Writer's Project

Description

From the Colorado Rural Partnership website:

"Join your colleagues for this three-day institute to investigate how today's paths meet at the crossroads of life 75 years ago. Using New Deal Arts programs as the context, you will gain new insights into Depression-era America and comparison to today's economic and cultural conditions; in-depth knowledge of primary sources from the Library of Congress website as well as local treasures; plus teaching strategies and resources to add to your toolkit. If you teach arts, humanities or social sciences-related classes at any grade level, or are looking for ways to enhance literacy in any subject area, you'll want to be a part of this institute!"

Note: "As an advanced level Teaching with Primary Sources program, this institute requires completion of the Essentials Exploration foundational workshop."

Contact email
Sponsoring Organization
Library of Congress; University of North Colorado
Phone number
970-351-1555
Target Audience
Colorado educators
Start Date
Cost
"Free of charge to Colorado educators"
Duration
Three days
End Date

Economic Forces in American History

Description

This cross-curricular program helps teachers incorporate economic reasoning into their high school American history courses. Program instructors provide economic explanations of pivotal historical events. Participants learn interactive teaching strategies that incorporate the actual circumstances of historical periods of study.

Contact email
Sponsoring Organization
Foundation for Teaching Economics
Phone number
530-757-4630
Target Audience
High school
Start Date
Course Credit
Two semester hours of graduate credit in education available.
Duration
Four days
End Date