Bob Dylan created some of the most significant music of the late 20th century and influenced generations of listeners. Yet Dylan found much of his inspiration not in contemporary music but in the music and folk customs of the past. This course will explore the links between Dylan and the ballad tradition. It will examine his influences, listen to his music, and offer close readings of his expansive songbook.

ChicagoAncestors.org is a free website where visitors can find and share historical information about Chicago. Are you researching the history of a neighborhood? Looking for the church where your great-grandparents got married? Interested in mapping the places where your ancestors lived? This workshop can help. Participants will learn how to use the tools available on this popular interactive website and find out how they can contribute to the growing amount of historical data available online to Chicago researchers.

Much has been written about the history of Chicago and the land of the living. This course will provide material about Chicago's Necropoli, the land of the dead. Through lecture and slide presentations, participants will discuss the role of cemeteries in early Chicago history, ethnic cemeteries, and mourning practices. The final session will take place at the home of the instructor for an overview of the paraphernalia of funeral homes and cemeteries.

The United States is often described as a "melting pot" of ethnic groups or as a "nation of immigrants." Though most of us could easily find references to this melting pot in popular culture today, few realize that the concept has a long and contested history. In this two-day seminar, participants will explore primary sources from the past two centuries that describe the nation as a melting pot or as a "crucible" where the fusion of different national cultures will occur. Through close readings, they will consider how the meaning of the melting pot has changed over time and how it has informed debates about what it means to be an American. Even as they take a long view of the melting pot in American history, they will pay particular attention to the early 20th century and to debates about restricting the flow of immigrants to the United States.

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.

The Middle East has been a central focus of American foreign policy since the end of World War II. This seminar will examine the strategic significance of the region, its internal dynamics, and the basic outlines of American foreign policy over the past few decades. While the first half of the seminar will concentrate on the historical context of the region, the second half will turn to the future. Participants will look at the various challenges facing the new President̬such as Iran, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and the various options open to him.

Viewed as everything from an extension of frontier ideology to the expression of counter culture, the road narrative genre has been an enduring and popular American cultural form. Whether mainstream or marginal, road narratives feature a protagonist (or pair) who embraces the geographical freedom represented by the automobile in order to attain a range of other mobilities—from the psychological and sexual to the social and economic. In this seminar, participants will examine this genre in relation to an American ideology of both spatial and social mobility. Beginning with the first transcontinental road novel, published in 1912, participants will look at a range of texts that feature protagonists whose identities vary in relation to class, gender, and race in order to understand how road narratives illuminate an issue of mobility central to their larger historical and cultural moments. To enhance our discussion of the primary sources, participants will view a selection of maps, advertisements, and photographs from the Newberry collections related to road travel.

Attendees at this lecture will join two Chicago-area archivists, a public historian, and an historian of women in a conversation about collecting, preserving, accessing, and using papers of African Americans and women. Following 10–15 minute presentations by the speakers, drawn from their own projects and institution's missions, they will engage in a panel discussion with each other and audience members on what local research institutions and community organizations are doing to collect and make accessible manuscripts and other primary sources that will fuel future historical narratives.

This workshop will be structured to enhance teacher knowledge of Abraham Lincoln's significance in American history and will include pedagogical skills. It will include morning lectures by Thomas Krannawitter, of Hillsdale College and author of Vindicating Lincoln, and afternoon sessions, by John Rodahl of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, devoted to strategies for lesson planning, classroom activities, and student engagement.

This forum, designed for secondary, pre-service, and community college educators, explores the content, methodologies, and rationales for teaching the history of the Holocaust; increases teachers' knowledge of the Holocaust; and examines contemporary issues associated with this history.