Participants in this workshop will learn about the 1890s immigration experience on the Near West Side of Chicago through compelling historical fiction narratives. Based on the Museum's collection, these stories form the core of the Great Chicago Stories website, an award-winning educational resource.

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.

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 course will discover American Indian history in the United States from the earliest evidence of human habitation through first contact with Europeans, conflicts in the West, World War II and other key events in 20th-century U.S. history, the American Indian rights movement, and into the present day.

Archaeological finds, traditional stories, the writings of early European explorers, government documents and treaties, oral histories, photographs, the arts, newspaper articles, and more will enrich exploration of key issues in Native American history nationwide.

The course will proceed chronologically. Within each topical module participants will have the opportunity to choose from several different geographically grouped assignments, allowing them to customize their own learning experience based on their interests, the demands of the curriculum, and their own priorities for teaching American Indian history.

For example, in any given unit, they may choose to focus on the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Plains, the Northeast, or the Southeast. They may either follow one geographical track throughout the course or mix up their selections to allow for a broader view of American Indian history.

Too often, students view Civil Rights in isolation—they do not understand the rich historical background of African American history or the legacies of the movement in the more recent past. They often know some of the major civil rights figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks, but they do not grasp the complexities of civil rights leadership, or the experience of the movement's foot soldiers—the students in SNCC, the freedom riders, or the everyday people who marched, boycotted, protested, and volunteered to make the movement happen. This course will try to explore the movement from all of these perspectives using, where possible, firsthand accounts from the people who lived this important history.

The instructor will assume that the main historical outlines of the movement are familiar to K–12 teachers—instead of recounting that basic history, participants will spend much of the time delving into lesser-studied events of the movement and the primary sources that will allow them to explore their own ideas about the movement and its meanings in detail.

This course will allow for the opportunity for deep historical analysis and interpretation using primary sources. The best way to learn history is by doing history. Participants will tackle documents, images, newspaper accounts, artistic expressions, film, and other sources. By doing so, they will develop their own arguments and ideas about the movement, and help future students do the same. Many of the resources participants will use have been recently added to the internet and they should be exciting additions to the course, and to historical scholarship more broadly. As participants mine these sources, they will hopefully enjoy the historical process and also get some great ideas for classroom activities for their students.

The instructor has selected websites and multimedia resources that will give participating teachers access to literally thousands of documents including newspaper accounts, oral history interviews, government documents, photographs, works of art, film clips, and more. Participants will have the opportunity to analyze these sources through engaging activities to create a lesson plan for classroom use; to receive individualized, constructive feedback and answers to content-oriented questions from a well-versed instructor; and to join other teachers from across the state in lively online discussions throughout the course.

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.

This all-day Lincoln symposium celebrates the 148th anniversary of Lincoln's first inauguration and features six award-winning scholars: William Lee Miller, on presidential morality during the Lincoln administration; James M. McPherson, on Lincoln as commander-in-chief; Douglas L. Wilson, on Lincoln and the power of words; Lucas Morel, on Lincoln and race; Harold Holzer, on Lincoln as President-elect; and Elizabeth D. Leonard, on Lincoln and justice.

These seminars are offered to encourage teachers to seriously examine significant events in American history in light of the principles of the American founding, and also to encourage the use of primary source materials in the classroom. The seminars, which include both lecture and discussion, are taught by leading scholars in their field from throughout the nation.