At this workshop, educators will be joined by immigration scholars and public health historians, visit related historic sites in New York City that vividly tell the story of immigration in the early part of the 20th century, and investigate Ellis Island's unrestored hospital buildings with an architectural historian to uncover their significance. This workshop will specifically address the impact of the 1891 immigration legislation mandating health as a criterion for admission to the U.S., precipitating construction of the U.S. Public Health Service hospital on Ellis Island to screen and treat arriving immigrants.

At this workshop, educators will be joined by immigration scholars and public health historians, visit related historic sites in New York City that vividly tell the story of immigration in the early part of the 20th century, and investigate Ellis Island's unrestored hospital buildings with an architectural historian to uncover their significance. This workshop will specifically address the impact of the 1891 immigration legislation mandating health as a criterion for admission to the U.S., precipitating construction of the U.S. Public Health Service hospital on Ellis Island to screen and treat arriving immigrants.

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; 10 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. This seminar 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 readers understand why.

The purpose of this one-week summer seminar is to explore a pivotal period in American history. After the uneven prosperity of the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s was a human catastrophe. But the economic crisis also led to dramatic social and cultural change as Americans reacted to hardship and adversity. Above all, the rise of the New Deal under Franklin Roosevelt reshaped the modern state in ways that remain controversial and at the historical core of political debates today.

A century and a quarter after it came to a close, Reconstruction remains a pivotal but much misunderstood era of American history. This one-week seminar will examine the history of Reconstruction, understood both as a specific period of the American past, which began during the Civil War, and as a prolonged and difficult process by which Americans sought to reunite the nation and come to terms with the destruction of slavery. In political terms, Reconstruction ended in 1877, when the federal government abandoned the idea of intervening in the South to protect the rights of black citizens. As a historical process it lasted to the turn of the century, until new systems of labor and race relations and a new political order were entrenched in the South. And in debates about racial equality, the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, affirmative action, and the responsibility of the federal government for defining and protecting the rights of citizens, issues central to Reconstruction remain part of our lives today. Reconstruction also offers an opportunity to consider the "politics of history:" how changing interpretations of the past are shaped by the world in which the historian lives and the assumptions he or she brings to the materials of history. During the course of the week, teachers will also annotate one or two documents from the Reconstruction period, for classroom use.