This year sees the publication of a wealth of important new literature on America in the 19th century. This abundance of excellent new contributions to the scholarship on these important years is an exciting opportunity to revisit what we all think we know about America in the 19th century, and to rethink what our students need to know. This event will focus on teaching topics with the Civil War as the chronological fulcrum.

Topics include The Technological Revolution, Teaching about Abraham Lincoln, Women in the Civil War, Teaching Military History, and Postwar Reconstruction.

Applications are welcome from social studies and history teachers, curriculum supervisors and junior college faculty. Free room and board and selected stipends are offered.

"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 non-violence. 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 9 and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations."

"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 non-violence. 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 9 and their teachers in 1957, students and sit-ins, and the use of schoolchildren in the 1963 Birmingham demonstrations."

"To celebrate Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, NARA archivist Reginald Washington will give a presentation on marriage records among the Freedmen’s Bureau records."

"To celebrate Black History Month and Valentine’s Day, NARA archivist Reginald Washington will give a presentation on marriage records among the Freedmen’s Bureau records."

This institute, led by Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar of Binghamton University, will focus on the creation of the "Declaration of Sentiments" signed by delegates to the first women's rights convention, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York. It will also examine the document's "influence throughout American history and provide teachers with concrete strategies for preparing their students for the MCAS examinations."

"Movements for women’s equality and gender justice have transformed American society over the past few generations. Nancy Cott will focus this seminar on the varied branches of feminism. After reviewing the suffrage campaign and opportunities for women during World War II, the seminar will explore convergences and conflicts among women’s groups, both feminist and conservative, emerging after 1960. Topics include the formation of the National Organization for Women, radical feminism, African American and Chicana feminism, reproductive rights advocacy, the women’s health movement, Roe v. Wade and its opponents, the women’s rights revolution in law, and the campaigns for and against the Equal Rights Amendment."

"Professors Kenneth Jackson and Karen Markoe explore one of the most exciting and important periods in American history: the quarter-century between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. Lectures focus on the rise of machine politics, the transportation revolution, the development of new social elites, the changing role of women, the literary figures who helped define the age, housing for the rich and poor, and an examination of the city at the center of the Gilded Age, New York."

"This seminar will consider two different American Revolutions. One was the struggle for American self-determination. The second was the ongoing struggle for liberty and equality enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. The seminar will consider the ideological, economic, social and political causes of the War for Independence. It will also consider the war as a political, military, and social struggle. This course will discuss critical steps made during and after the war for liberty and equality: the abolition of slavery in the North, enhancement of women's role and enfranchisement of unpropertied white men. Since New York figured as a critical field of conflict in both American Revolutions, we will take advantage of our location in New York to visit some of the most important Revolutionary sites."