From the Florida Humanities Council website:

"Daily life in Eatonville was recounted in Hurston's first fieldwork as an anthropologist. Her best known folklore collection, Mules and Men (1935), included black music, games, oral lore, and religious practices reflective of her early life growing up in Eatonville. Hurston's ethnographic study of her racial heritage influenced several Harlem Renaissance writers, and later such contemporary authors as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison.

"Eatonville provides a fascinating vantage point for examining black life and social structures in the South after the Civil War. To paraphrase Hurston, how did these self-governed Negro towns differ from the 'black back-side of some white-folks' town?' Is it merely coincidental that this historic town brought forth one of America's most fascinating and provocative writers, a writer who provides us with a new perspective on race?

"These weeklong seminars will bring together a distinguished team of humanities scholars who will provide an interdisciplinary exploration of Hurston's life and work. They include a literary scholar who has written extensively on Hurston; a folklorist who wrote the application that placed Eatonville on the Historic Register; a Hurston biographer; the director of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress, where most of Hurston's folklife collection resides; and a colleague of Hurston's in the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Participants will examine Hurston's accomplishments within the context of the historical and cultural development of the Eatonville community. They will grapple with compelling questions about how this unique black enclave fueled Hurston's appreciation of folk culture, inspired her literary works, created her racial identity, and formed her sometimes controversial views on race."

From the Washington University website:

This institute will "offer participants an exciting opportunity to learn about one of the most extraordinary cultural periods in American history. This institute will teach you about the complex urban world that black Americans made between World War I and World War II, during the years of the Great Migration out of the south."

From the University of Kansas website:

Participants in this institute will engage in a "conversation that not only looks at why Wright was so influential during his lifetime, but more importantly why he matters to us today. We will take a closer look—and get a fuller sense of—Wright's world, that America that he knew and wrote about. How we can find ways of connecting his world and ours for our students, we will ask, as we focus on Wright's three major books: Uncle Tom's Children (1938), Native Son (1940), and Black Boy (1945). This will be a rare opportunity to read, research, write and create as you participate actively in the Institute's seminars, discussion groups and workshops and build lasting relationships with other teachers and Wright specialists."

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 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."