In June 2008, Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and the Harpers Ferry Historical Association will host a one-week workshop that will enable 4th–12th grade teachers to walk in the footsteps of John Brown, John Cook, Shields Green, Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Heyward Shepherd, Fountain Beckham, and many others as they learn about events of national significance that have occurred in Harpers Ferry. Educators will get to interact with historians, curators, museum educators, and other professionals in the field. This institute will prepare teachers to use historic documents, artifacts, and images to enhance their teaching and to inspire students with the stories that make history come alive in the classroom and beyond.

This two-and-a-half day workshop will provide a varied program of lectures, demonstrations, collaborative work, and analysis of documents and works of art to introduce teachers to the holdings of the National Archives and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Workshop attendees will participate in and develop classroom activities that utilize both visual images and primary source documents as teaching tools in ways that sharpen students’ skills and enthusiasm for history, social studies, and the humanities. The content focus will be on Westward Expansion and the Civil War.

Drawing upon practitioners, scholars, and educators, the Summer Institute will examine the sources of global conflict and different approaches to peacemaking and peacebuilding in the current global environment, which presents unique challenges and opportunities for teachers striving to ready young people to take their places in an increasingly complex world.

"This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and non-violence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the civil rights movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock 9 and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations."

Abraham Lincoln will stand at the centre of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism.

"This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and non-violence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the civil rights movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock 9 and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations."

"Abraham Lincoln will stand at the centre of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism."

"To celebrate Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, NARA archivist Reginald Washington will give a presentation on marriage records among the Freedmen’s Bureau records."

"To celebrate Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, NARA archivist Reginald Washington will give a presentation on marriage records among the Freedmen’s Bureau records."