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."

From the National Humanities Center website:

"'How did the ethnically and culturally diverse urban environment of early twentieth-century America find its way into art? How did artists see the new immigrants who flooded into American cities from 1890 on? What kinds of visual languages did they draw on in approaching a subject that had been generally off limits to painters of the previous generation—the urban poor? This workshop will look at how the Ash Can artists built on older visual and art historical traditions, while also considering what was new about their work. It will also consider the subject matter they shared with the popular culture of early twentieth-century films, graphic journalism, and cartooning. Using a variety of perspectives, this workshop will consider the role of the visual in exploring the defining challenges of a pluralistic urban democracy in the new century."

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."

How did World War I affect politics in the United States? Why did the prestige and power of American business dramatically increase in the 1920s? What explains the remarkable cultural ferment of this period? What place did religious and spiritual values assume in the United States during the 1920s? How did concepts of citizenship and national identity change in the decade after World War I? How did women and African Americans struggle to advance social equality? How did modernizing and traditional forces clash during the decade?

This institute will explore these and other questions through history, literature, and art. Under the direction of leading scholars, participants will examine such issues as immigration, prohibition, radicalism, changing moral standards, and evolution to discover how the forces of modernity and traditionalism made the 1920s both liberating and repressive. Participants will assist National Humanities Center staff in identifying texts and defining lines of inquiry for a new addition to the Center's Toolbox Library, which provides online resources for teacher professional development and classroom instruction.