Teacher Appreciation Evening 2009
The Florida Holocaust Museum hosts an evening for teachers, with special guest speakers, tours, and educational materials.
The Florida Holocaust Museum hosts an evening for teachers, with special guest speakers, tours, and educational materials.
Teachers of all levels and settings are invited to join Spertus Museum educators to tour the new exhibition "A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund" and participate in an interactive printmaking workshop with Master Printer Thomas Lucas.
Participants in this workshop will learn about the 1890s immigration experience on the Near West Side of Chicago through compelling historical fiction narratives and visits to Hull-House and the Taylor Street and Prairie Avenue neighborhoods. Based on the Museum's collection, these stories form the core of the Great Chicago Stories website, an award-winning educational resource.
Participants in this workshop will learn about the 1890s immigration experience on the Near West Side of Chicago through compelling historical fiction narratives. Based on the Museum's collection, these stories form the core of the Great Chicago Stories website, an award-winning educational resource.
Much has been written about the history of Chicago and the land of the living. This course will provide material about Chicago's Necropoli, the land of the dead. Through lecture and slide presentations, participants will discuss the role of cemeteries in early Chicago history, ethnic cemeteries, and mourning practices. The final session will take place at the home of the instructor for an overview of the paraphernalia of funeral homes and cemeteries.
The United States is often described as a "melting pot" of ethnic groups or as a "nation of immigrants." Though most of us could easily find references to this melting pot in popular culture today, few realize that the concept has a long and contested history. In this two-day seminar, participants will explore primary sources from the past two centuries that describe the nation as a melting pot or as a "crucible" where the fusion of different national cultures will occur. Through close readings, they will consider how the meaning of the melting pot has changed over time and how it has informed debates about what it means to be an American. Even as they take a long view of the melting pot in American history, they will pay particular attention to the early 20th century and to debates about restricting the flow of immigrants to the United States.
Constructed around an online "toolbox" of texts and documents collected at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, participants in this seminar will discuss four themes that are central to the Gilded Age: City and Country, focusing on Arcadian mythology, urban realism, and nostalgia; Citizens and Others, especially immigrants, African Americans, and children; Work and Leisure, especially craft, industrialization, and consumerism; and Politics and the State, including party culture, populism, and progressivism. Within each thematic unit, participants will be searching for characteristic sensibilities of the age, as manifest in public life, literature, and/or the arts. Across the discussions, they will try to identify those documents, questions, and exercises that might best enliven their own classrooms.
Viewed as everything from an extension of frontier ideology to the expression of counter culture, the road narrative genre has been an enduring and popular American cultural form. Whether mainstream or marginal, road narratives feature a protagonist (or pair) who embraces the geographical freedom represented by the automobile in order to attain a range of other mobilities—from the psychological and sexual to the social and economic. In this seminar, participants will examine this genre in relation to an American ideology of both spatial and social mobility. Beginning with the first transcontinental road novel, published in 1912, participants will look at a range of texts that feature protagonists whose identities vary in relation to class, gender, and race in order to understand how road narratives illuminate an issue of mobility central to their larger historical and cultural moments. To enhance our discussion of the primary sources, participants will view a selection of maps, advertisements, and photographs from the Newberry collections related to road travel.
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.
In cooperation with the College of Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is sponsoring a one-day teacher workshop, free of charge, to classroom, pre-service teachers, and community college educators of language arts and social studies, though all disciplines are welcomed.