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.

Linda B. Osborne discusses her book for young people, Traveling the Freedom Road: From Slavery and the Civil War Through Reconstruction, which draws on the Library of Congress collections of former slave interviews to convey the aspirations, sorrows, courage, and hopes of ordinary people living through this period. Osborne mined the Federal Writers' Project slave narratives and materials in the Library's Manuscript, Prints and Photographs, Rare Book and Special Collections, and Geography and Map divisions for this work that focuses on the experiences of African American children. More than 80 archival images complement the text. Major events covered include the rise of the domestic slave trade, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Republican Congress' Reconstruction policies. From Charles Cowley, an enslaved child who had no shoes with which to walk through the snow, to Richard Slaughter, who enlisted in the Union Army at 17, this book reveals the personal hardships and courageous endurance of black youth in 19th-century America.

Participants in this course will examine African American history in the contexts of United States, North Carolina, and world history. They will begin by connecting the experiences of African Americans in early U.S. history to the histories and cultures of the African communities of their ancestors and will follow those cultural connections between Africa and the United States throughout the course.

Course topics include African Americans in the colonies and the early Republic, the Middle Passage, American slavery and the experiences of free African Americans in the antebellum period, the abolition movement, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, and the experiences of African Americans during World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II. Throughout the course, participants will discuss African American activism through churches, political organizations, and communities and discover African American culture through art, music, and other cultural forms.

Participants in this workshop will travel throughout the Delta as they visit sites where significant events occurred. They will discuss and learn about issues involving civil rights and political leadership, immigrants' experiences in the Delta, the Blues, the great migration, agriculture, and the Mississippi River, among other things. They will sample Delta foods, visit local museums, and listen to the Blues. Field trips will roam as far as Greenville, Greenwood, and Memphis, with stops in between.

No specifics available.

A new interactive online exhibit from the California Council for the Humanities (CCH)—"We Are California"—will explore the history and stories of those who have immigrated or migrated to California. A new partnership between the Council and the California History-Social Science Project (CHSSP) will help to bring this exciting resource to the classroom. The topic of these workshops will be "The Era of Great Internal Migrations to California" between World War I and World War II. It will discuss, contrast, and analyze the experiences of Dust Bowl migrants to California, Mexicans, and Mexican Americans.

This workshop will examine the questions "What did it mean to be enslaved in the United States?," "How did the enslaved respond to bondage?," "How did labor shape their daily lives?," "In what ways did the enslaved resist bondage?," and "How did the enslaved maintain their identities?"

The Center's online resource workshops give high school teachers of U.S. history and American literature a deeper understanding of their subject matter. They introduce teachers to fresh texts and critical perspectives and help teachers integrate them into their lessons. Led by distinguished scholars and running 60 to 90 minutes, they are conducted through lecture and discussion using conferencing software. A resource workshop identifies central themes within a topic and explores ways to teach them through the close analysis of primary texts, including works of art, and the use of discussion questions. Texts are drawn from anthologies in the Center's Toolbox Library. To participate, all that is needed is a computer with an internet connection, a speaker, and a microphone.

This workshop addresses the questions "In what ways is Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives a document of progressive reform?," "What does How the Other Half Lives tell us about urbanization and immigration?," and "How does Riis use photography in How the Other Half Lives?"

The Center's online resource workshops give high school teachers of U.S. history and American literature a deeper understanding of their subject matter. They introduce teachers to fresh texts and critical perspectives and help teachers integrate them into their lessons. Led by distinguished scholars and running 60 to 90 minutes, they are conducted through lecture and discussion using conferencing software. A resource workshop identifies central themes within a topic and explores ways to teach them through the close analysis of primary texts, including works of art, and the use of discussion questions. Texts are drawn from anthologies in the Center's Toolbox Library. To participate, all that is needed is a computer with an internet connection, a speaker, and a microphone.