From the National Gallery of Art website:

"This seminar will explore American art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, emphasizing the country's rich and diverse visual heritage. Instruction will focus on the Gallery's collection of American paintings, which are closely allied to European traditions of fine art.

Through lectures, gallery talks, discussion groups, and hands-on activities, participants will study portraiture, historical and commemorative art, scenes of everyday life, still life, and landscape, including works from the uniquely American Hudson River school. John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, Thomas Cole, George Catlin, Winslow Homer, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens are among the artists in the Gallery's collection whose work will be considered.

Supplementing the study of American paintings will be an examination of ceremonial and utilitarian art objects. Textiles, pottery, and furniture—including pieces created by enslaved and free blacks—will highlight regional preferences in design and material, while performance of Native American stories will emphasize the importance of the oral tradition across tribal boundaries.

The seminar highlights the social and cultural context of art and demonstrates interdisciplinary teaching strategies. Participants will explore connections to literature and music and visit other local cultural institutions. Activities are designed to meet teachers' personal and professional enrichment needs."

From the HistoryMakers website:

"The Institute will examine the entire breadth of African American political history from the period of the early American republic through the election of President Barack Obama. The Institute will cover a variety of topics, including: abolitionist and Afro-American politics during slavery, the temporary emergence and eventual suppression of a black political class after the Civil War, black political factions in the early 20th century, the role of trade unions in early civil rights activism, post-World War II urban politics, the Civil Rights movement, 1970s urban black politics, and the 'New Generation' of black politicians epitomized by such figures as President Barack Obama, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick."

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:

"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."

From the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History:

"The modern civil rights movement was the most important social protest movement of the twentieth century. The movement helped cultivate national leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Bayard Rustin and Fannie Lou Hamer. It was responsible for eradicating the American Apartheid system known as Jim Crow and it was the major reason for the passage of some of the most important laws in twentieth century America, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This explores the origins of the civil rights movement and its impact on America."

From Indiana University's website:

"Our NEH summer institute will enhance your teaching curriculum with respect to modern American social movements in a number of ways. Most fundamentally, the institute will help you understand the pivotal role that social movements have played in changing public policy in the United States over the last century. Moreover, the institute will acquaint you with the latest scholarship on these three social movements—labor, civil rights, and feminism—which you are unlikely to have encountered in your teacher training. Recent historical scholarship reveals at least three general ways to enhance these topics for your secondary school students. First, historians now emphasize the diversity and complexity of each of these movements. In each case, a variety of sometimes conflicting organizations, perspectives, and leaders made up each movement. And yet teaching tends to focus only on the dominant current within each movement. Second, the interconnections between these three movements have received renewed attention. Historians are finding more and more ways in which these movements cross-fertilized each other, but the connections are often missed by teachers. For instance, recent scholarship on Betty Friedan, the central founder of the National Organization for Women has found that her work for CIO unions like the United Electrical Workers during the 1940s was a formative experience for the development of her feminist ideas. Third, social movement scholarship has taken note of the extent to which each of these movements faced organized resistance. It is easy for young people today to forget that as reasonable as Martin Luther King, Jr. may seem to us today, in his own day he was viewed as a dangerous agitator."

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:

"This seminar explores the rise of Jim Crow in the United States and tracks it forward to its modern post-civil rights manifestations. Seminar participants will work with a range of primary sources to interpret the shifting social, economic, political, psychological, and cultural trauma associated with this set of racial practices. Close attention will be paid to the effects of Jim Crow on both sides of the color line."

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:

"This seminar explores the history of the American antislavery movement, from its institutional and ideological origins in the post-Revolutionary era to the eve of the Civil War. A particular focus of the course will be the historical reality and mythology of the Underground Railroad, understood through the lives, strategies, writings, and fate of black abolitionists."