From a President Lincoln's Cottage email:

"This FREE event invites educators to explore Lincoln's country home and workplace where he spent one quarter of his presidency and thought through his ideas on the Civil War and emancipation and to discover the array of hands-on, engaging programs the Civil War Washington Museum Consortium has to offer for students in Kindergarten through Twelfth grade!"

From the Colgate University website:

In this institute, participants will "discover how black and white Americans put their lives on the line toward establishing universal American freedom through the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement. . . .[They] will read and discuss significant primary documents and key interpretations, listen to some of the nation's leading experts on the Underground Railroad and Abolitionism, spend evenings watching apposite films and enjoy the facilities of the beautiful Colgate campus during the best season."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"During the 1850s, the United States was a nation of foreboding and hope. An irresolvable conflict between North and South seemed to be approaching, along with periodic hopes that the divide could somehow be bridged and conflict forestalled. At the start of the decade, the nation's eloquent orators were led by John C. Calhoun and Daniel Webster; ten years later, a new voice had been added to public discourse: that of Abraham Lincoln. Literary artists—including Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—addressed the issues of slavery, regional autonomy, and federal power both directly and obliquely in poetry and prose. In this seminar we will explore this ominous yet hopeful era, with the aim of understanding the political and moral issues that drove Americans apart, and how the literature of the period can help us understand why."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"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."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"When Americans are asked to rank their presidents, Abraham Lincoln almost always comes out at the top. But why? Sometimes, the reason is that he freed the slaves . . . or that he saved the Union . . . or that he was a great war president . . . or that he was a master of words. All of these are true, but these truths don't get at the man behind these truths. Although Lincoln had next-to-nothing in the way of formal education, he possessed a natural intellectual curiosity, a voracious appetite for reading, and a passion for ideas. He was a lawyer, a politician, a fixer. But he was more than just a lawyer, a politician, or a fixer. Lincoln's curiosity . . . his reading . . . his ideas . . . led him into the vortex of the great clashes of ideas in the nineteenth century about religion, politics, Romanticism, race, and slavery. In this seminar, we will see how Lincoln was shaped by three important issues in his day:

• The clash of religion and the Enlightenment
• The offense of slavery
• The fight for the survival of democracy

This seminar will be an exploration of Lincoln's mind—of the great intellectual problems he faced, of the books he read, of the ideas he defended, and of the kind of democracy he thought was worth saving. And at the end, we will come to know Lincoln, not just as the greatest of presidents, but as a man of great ideas as well."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"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 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, we 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 in the 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."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"The American South plays a central role in American history, from the first permanent English colony through the election of 2008. This course will focus on key episodes when Southern history and the history of the nation intersected at particularly important points: the emergence and spread of slavery, the founding, the Civil War, the creation of segregation, and the civil rights struggle. The course will be taught in Richmond, Virginia, a city rich in museums and historic sites that we will use to explore the subjects addressed in the seminar."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"The American Revolution did more than secure independence for thirteen American colonies—it gave antislavery organizing a moral legitimacy it had never had before. In Britain by the early nineteenth century, opposing the slave system could serve as a mark of virtue rather than evidence of eccentricity. The first emancipation schemes depended on efforts to strengthen the role of the imperial state in an era of weakening overseas authority, and the abolitionist movement as a whole derived its power from a profound yearning for moral worth in the aftermath of British defeat and American independence. This course will consider the disparate strands of the British Atlantic world and bring into focus shifting developments in the abolitionist movement."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in December 1865 abolished slavery in the United States, formally, officially, and legally. A century and a half after emancipation, however, the question of slavery still roils the waters of American life. This seminar, led by Ira Berlin, will view the development of chattel bondage in mainland North America from the perspective of the larger Atlantic world. Topics include the nature of the slave trade, the distinction between societies with slaves and slave societies, the evolution of plantation slavery, the transforming face of the Age of Revolutions, the remaking of slavery in the nineteenth century, and the current debate about the meaning of slavery for American life."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History website:

"Thomas Jefferson is best known as the author of the American Declaration of Independence. Beginning with the imperial crisis that led to the separation of the thirteen colonies from Great Britain and their union as a confederation, 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 international 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 better understand 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."