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.

In this seminar, participants will read three pieces that either take new approaches to Civil War history, or reflect critically on the ways that historians are addressing the period. Participants will be interested in exploring the innovative methodologies or theoretical approaches used by scholars to ask and answer new questions. Of particular concern for these readings will be issues of gender, memory-construction, and the persistent interest of scholars in the event.

Attendees at this lecture will join two Chicago-area archivists, a public historian, and an historian of women in a conversation about collecting, preserving, accessing, and using papers of African Americans and women. Following 10–15 minute presentations by the speakers, drawn from their own projects and institution's missions, they will engage in a panel discussion with each other and audience members on what local research institutions and community organizations are doing to collect and make accessible manuscripts and other primary sources that will fuel future historical narratives.

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.

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.

Participants in this online course will discover the wealth of web-based primary research and active learning resources available to social studies teachers of all grade levels. They will explore an array of primary and secondary resources including collections of original documents, vast reservoirs of secondary historical information, and online resources designed to support social studies teachers in curriculum development. They will consider effective research strategies and engage in critical analysis of web resources. In addition, they will learn to develop a personal collection of web-based resources for curricular use, as well as create preliminary plans to enhance a curriculum unit.