This seminar explores how an economically and politically powerless racial minority wrested dramatic change from a determined and entrenched white majority in the American South. It will examine the changing nature of protest from the 1940s to the 1950s; the roles of Martin Luther King, Jr., local movements, and women; and the relative importance of violence and nonviolence. Participants will discuss how they can use the experiences of schoolchildren, teachers, and students in the crises of the 1950s and 1960s to bring home the realities of the Civil Rights Movement in the classroom. Topics include the Little Rock Nine and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations.

Thomas Jefferson is best known as the author of the American Declaration of Independence. Beginning with the imperial crisis that led to the separation and union of 13 British colonies in North America, this course will focus on Jefferson's political thought and career in order to gain a broad perspective on the founding of the United States and its early history. Professors Peter Onuf and Frank Cogliano will emphasize the geopolitical context of the revolutionaries' bold efforts to establish republican governments and federal union. Jefferson and his patriot colleagues were acutely aware of the world historical significance of their revolution and therefore profoundly anxious about its ultimate outcome and legacy. By exploring the rich canon of his writings participants will seek to understand better what the Revolution meant for Jefferson and Jefferson meant for the Revolution. Major themes will include federalism, foreign policy, constitutionalism and party politics, and race and slavery.

Abraham Lincoln will stand at the center of the seminar, though less as a biographical subject than as a prism for exploring key aspects of his age. The themes and topics to be addressed include slavery and the Old South; the abolitionist impulse and the broadening antislavery movement; party political realignment and the sectional crisis of the 1850s; evangelicalism and politics; the election of 1860, the secession of the Lower South, and the coming of war; wartime leadership, political and military; the Civil War 'home front'; emancipation; the elements of Confederate defeat and Union victory; and the meaning of the war for American nationalism.

This seminar focuses on the era of the American Civil War and especially on the revolutionary transformation of social and political life in that critical period of U.S. history. Using an array of historical documents as well as lectures, discussions, and (possibly) visits to historical sites, seminar members will analyze the way a war of unprecedented scope drove a process of state building and slave emancipation that reconfigured the nation and remade the terms of political membership in it. Starting with the Supreme Court's decision in the Dred Scott case in 1857 and ending with the constitutional amendments of the postwar period, the seminar will take up the key events and developments in the Union and the Confederacy, including secession, the destruction of slavery (on plantations and in the law), African-American enlistment, and popular politics North and South. By focusing throughout on the racial and gender terms of citizenship, the seminar makes clear what changed—and what did not—in American political life, while conveying a sense of the epic drama by which the United States was remade in the vortex of war.

The present age is one of globalization characterized in part by rapid developments in technology and information systems. But information and technology have often been powerful forces for historical change. This institute will place the current information and technological revolutions in world-historical perspective through a set of case studies drawn from different cultures and contexts from antiquity to the present day. In examining the effects of information and technology on political, economic, and social development, the institute will explore several major themes, including writing and print/information technology; science and society; technology and warfare; and empire and the diffusion and consolidation of knowledge. Presented by professors from the University of California, Berkeley's History Department, and organized around the Content Standards for California Public Schools, these case studies will provide a number of useful tools and strategies for teaching information and technology in world history.