"With the 150th anniversary of the Lincoln Douglas Debates this year, it is important to review the debates for a Senate campaign in one state that reached national attention and gave Abraham Lincoln national recognition. This workshop will examine how debates between candidates have changed from thorough, thoughtful, and civilized debates to the negative, critical, and personal-attack debates of the present. Educators will focus on the art of the debate and how to present to their students a debate forum using the Lincoln-Douglas Debates as a guide for persuasion, information, and presentation."

"With a presidential election just around the corner, this workshop will focus on how presidents are packaged according to the most winnable personality, prepared in minute detail for every public appearance, and promoted as viable candidates and chief executive. Educators will look at examples and methods of how presidential image has been portrayed in the public sphere from George W. to George W. The evolution of presidential campaigns will be examined by comparing and contrasting early, short, and inexpensively-run campaigns to the grueling more than year-long marathons and multi-million dollar campaigns of the present. Educators will also examine the art of campaign buttons, banners, and broadsides of the past to the fire-side chats of FDR, the television ads, sound bites, and Internet of today."

This institute, led by Manisha Sinha of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, will focus on the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech and its "influence throughout American history and provide teachers with concrete strategies for preparing their students for the MCAS examinations."

"This course will examine military aspects of the war, as well as political developments during it, including the political history of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. The course also examines the post-war Amendments and the Reconstruction era."

"This course will examine military aspects of the war, as well as political developments during it, including the political history of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. The course also examines the post-war Amendments and the Reconstruction era."

"What perhaps more than anything else distinguished the Revolution and Founding from European experience was the American transformation of the idea of a social contract from theory to practice. By focusing on the role of the social contract this seminar can shed new light on the old question, 'Was the American Revolution a revolution?' The enormous importance of the idea of a social contract in America after the revolutionary era can be tracked by studying, among other developments, the land reform movement or the uses of the Declaration of Independence, down to Martin Luther King's famous 'I Have A Dream' speech of 1963." Will use primary sources to examine the effects of the American Revolution and the U.S. concept of a social contract, including the Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the English Declaration of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.

"Leading American scholars Harold Holzer and Robert F. Engs offer two perspectives on the Emancipation Proclamation, considered the most important document of arguably one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history."