This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton's creation of a Bank of the United States, modeled after the Bank of England, where all federal deposits were held.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary introduces joint-stock companies, which financed the settlement of colonies in the New World. These private companies raised money by selling stock and eventually rewarding investors with the profits from American goods.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the colony of Jamestown's struggles to survive, as tense relations with local Indians erupt into the First and Second Anglo-Powhatan Wars of the early and mid-1600s.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes the establishment of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, in 1607. The first years were extremely difficult for the colonists, under the leadership of John Smith. Food was scarce and relations with the Native Americans were tense.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, after the Civil War, some southern blacks left farms for new jobs in factories, but quickly realized that working conditions were poor and the pay was worse.
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This iCue Mini-Documentary describes how, even though slavery is abolished after the Civil War, the system of share-cropping quickly emerged that kept blacks in a condition much like slavery.
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The America's Industrial Revolution workshop at the Henry Ford will draw together K12 educators with leading humanities scholars and museum staff for unique enrichment exercises centered on the impact of industrialization. The workshop is designed to encourage participant curiosity and deepen knowledge on the subject, engage participants with innovative methods of transmitting enthusiasm and content to students, and empower participants to use cultural resources to enliven the teaching and learning of history. Participants will explore the diverse ways that Americans experienced social change between the 1760s and the 1920s through lecture/discussions and by visiting with museum curators at 12 of the 80 historic sites interpreted in Greenfield Village, including Thomas Edison's Menlo Park Laboratory, Hermitage Plantation Slave Quarters, 1760s Daggett Farm, 1880s Firestone Farm, a railroad roundhouse, and a 19th-century grist mill. In addition, time is set aside each day for exploration of archival sources in the Benson Ford Research Center and to work on individual lesson plans for implementation back home. The week's activities will culminate with a visit to a related National Historic Landmark, the Ford Motor Company's Rouge Industrial Complex.
There is virtually no area of study that cannot shed light on the textile culture of North Carolina. Literature, music, science, economics, history, sociology, religion, and art help define and explain the rich history and changing culture of North Carolina textiles. Beginning in the 1880s, the textile industry built the "new south." Today, changes in this industry are helping to create another "new south." In this interdisciplinary seminar, participants will explore not only textile history but will also think about the role and importance of textiles. What the “product” was/is, how it is made and by whom, and where it is made have implications for the rapidly changing nature of textiles in North Carolina and the South.
The ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 abolished slavery in the United States, formally, officially, and legally. A century and a half after Emancipation, however, the question of slavery still roils the waters of American life. This seminar, led by Ira Berlin, will view the development of chattel bondage in mainland North America from the perspective of the larger Atlantic world. Topics include the nature of the slave trade, the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, the evolution of plantation slavery, the transforming face of the Age of Revolutions, the remaking of slavery in the 19th century, and the contemporary debate about the meaning of slavery for American life.
The purpose of this one-week summer seminar is to explore a pivotal period in American history. After the uneven prosperity of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s was a human catastrophe. But the economic crisis also led to dramatic social and cultural change as Americans reacted to hardship and adversity. Above all, the rise of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt reshaped the modern state in ways that remain controversial and at the historical core of political debates today.