The National Humanities Center Announces Online Summer Seminars

The National Humanities Center is offering three online seminars for U.S. history and American literature teachers. These seminars were developed in collaboration with the NC Department of Public Instruction and address specific state curriculum standards.

Registration Deadline: May 22, 2009

Participants will receive a stipend of $100.

Each seminar may yield one CEU credit. Because the seminars are conducted online, they may qualify for technology credit in districts that award it. The Center will supply documentation of participation.

The seminars are conducted online through conferencing software. To participate, a teacher will need a computer with an internet connection, speakers, and a microphone. The Center will provide, for free, a headset with a built-in microphone.

For information about seminars available in June and July, please visit the North Carolina Summer Seminars General Information page.

Registration: North Carolina Schedule of Seminars

June Seminars

Defining A New Nation: 1789-1820
Seminar Leader: Scott Casper
National Humanities Center Fellow 2005-06
Professor of History, University of Nevada, Reno

Date: Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Time: 8:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
In the three decades after the American Revolution, the identity of the new nation remained far from settled. American writers and politicians asserted that the United States differed from Europe, but they disagreed about how. Did the American people possess a new “national character,” based on shared experience or a new environment? What policies and practices would best ensure the survival of the republican experiment? And how would a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” address the contradictions of its own inequalities? With selected primary sources from the new republic — in words and pictures — the seminar will explore these questions.

Moving America Left and Right: 1945-1990
Seminar Leader: Nancy MacLean
National Humanities Center Fellow 2008-09
Professor of History and African American Studies, Northwestern University

Date: Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Time: 8:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m
This seminar will approach American history after World War II as a history of social movements. The first session will explore the black freedom movement with an eye to new scholarly interpretations of a “long civil rights movement” reaching back to the New Deal and beyond the 1970s and including the North and West as well as the South. The second session will examine the women’s movement and the conservative movement for insight into the relationships among various movements. It will conclude with a discussion of how viewing the era from 1945 to 1990 as an era of social movements can bring new coherence to the recent past.

Immigration Then and Now: 1890-1920; 1964-2009
Seminar Leader: Gunther Peck
National Humanities Center Fellow 2001-02
Associate Professor of Public Policy and History, Duke University

Date: June 19, 2009
Time: 8:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
One of the most familiar truisms about the United States is that we are a “nation of immigrants.” Indeed, immigration and immigrants inform nearly every narrative of progress and possibility that Americans have told about themselves for more than a century, from individual stories of rags to riches to generational accounts of upward mobility and becoming American. And yet immigration today remains one of the most controversial political topics, generating intense conflicts over who or what is an American and who should have the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. In this seminar, we examine and compare two waves of immigration to the United States: the “new” immigration between 1890 and 1920, composed mainly of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and Japan; and contemporary immigration, post 1964, involving undocumented and legal migration from Southeast Asia, Mexico, Central America, and Africa. By exploring changes and continuities in immigration to the United States, we seek to historicize contemporary controversies and fears.