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."

Many teachers now understand that video games (and other technology) can help encourage high levels of learning. Attendees at this workshop will find out what Steven Johnson, John Beck, Marc Prensky, and James Paul Gee are saying about the use of video games as teaching and learning tools. There are plenty of resources to help educators begin to integrate PlayStation, XBox, GameCube, PC games, and other types of video games into the classroom.

From 1919 to 1929, Langston Hughes noted, "Harlem was in vogue." Black painters and sculptors joined writers and musicians in an artistic outpouring that established Harlem as the international capital of African American culture. Participants will study the evolution of the Harlem Renaissance through the music of Duke Ellington and Ethel Waters, the art of painter Archibald Motley and sculptor Augusta Savage, and the literary works of Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jean Toomer, among others.

If you know why (or would like to know why) "I'm thinking it over" is the funniest thing Jack Benny ever said, this class is for you. Participants will travel through the hilarious shows from the golden age of radio: Charlie McCarthy to Jack Benny, A Date with Judy to The Great Gildersleeve. See why the humor has never been equaled in these sidesplitting chapters from a bygone era.

Although big bands, solo vocalists, and jazz soloists dominated the swing era (1920s–1950s), there existed a simultaneous stream of music from small ensembles, vocal and instrumental. Participants will listen to singing groups such as the Andrews Sisters, Ink Spots, and Modernaires. We will hear instrumental combos such as the Benny Goodman Sextet, Modern Jazz Quartet, and the George Shearing Quintet. Finally, participants will sample the folksong revival of the 1950s. No musical training is necessary.

Bob Dylan created some of the most significant music of the late 20th century and influenced generations of listeners. Yet Dylan found much of his inspiration not in contemporary music but in the music and folk customs of the past. This course will explore the links between Dylan and the ballad tradition. It will examine his influences, listen to his music, and offer close readings of his expansive songbook.

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.