During the 17th and 18th centuries, many "freethinking" Europeans embraced Deism, a theology that subjected religious truth to the authority of human reason. In colonial America, Deism found few adherents, but those who were attracted to it tended to be wealthy and educated, leaders in colonial society and politics. Today, debate swirls around the role Deism played in the founding of the nation. What was this "religion of nature"? How can we explain it to students? Who among the Founders were Deists? What influence did Deism have on the culture of the new nation?

In one lesson plan after another Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois forever stand opposed. In the late nineteenth century both sought uplift for African Americans, but one believed it came through accommodation and manual training, while the other urged resistance and the liberal arts. Is that the entire story? Was Washington a narrow, uncreative booster of commercialism or a savvy politician who correctly read what late nineteenth-century America would afford its black citizens? Was Du Bois a heroic intellectual activist or a narrow elitist whose path to uplift was open only to the "Talented Tenth"?

The United States marked its 100th anniversary in 1876 with the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, a birthday party that celebrated mechanical progress. But in late nineteenth-century America, progress did not simply mean generating more horsepower. It meant cleaning up cities, reforming government, improving the efficiency of workers, and professionalizing endeavors like playing baseball and studying history. The idea of progress reached into every corner of American life. How did Americans define progress at that time? How did progress manifest itself? And how did it shape America?

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was a New Deal agency founded to combat rural poverty. While it spent millions of dollars between 1935 and 1946 to improve the lives of poor farmers, it is remembered today for its documentary photography program. The photographs of rural America taken by FSA photographers in the 1930s have assumed iconic status and have come to define the look of the Great Depression. What can they teach about America in the 1930s? What can they tell us about the truth of documentary photography? How can we read them as images?

When we teach Reconstruction, we typically focus on the struggle to reunite the North and the South. But what of the West? What role did it play in national reunification? The late nineteenth century was the zenith of westward expansion. Western images dominated American culture. What did the wide-open spaces of the West represent to the Americans who were crowding into the cities of the Northeast? What did they represent to the ex-Confederates who resented the imposition of federal power in the South? How did the West shape the nation that emerged from the Civil War?

Walt Whitman's Civil War Poetry An American Experience Seminar

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Reflecting on the Civil War in 1892, Walt Whitman concluded, "The real war will never get in the books." But Whitman did try to bring the real war into his poems. An anti-slavery Democrat, who dressed the wounds of both Northern and Southern soldiers, Whitman wrote poems that describe the circumstances of war—from the exuberant optimism of 1861 to the blood-soaked exhaustion of 1865. How did he interpret the slaughter and sacrifice of the Civil War? How can we bring students to the "the real war" through his poems? This seminar is a collaboration between the National Humanities Center and public television's historical documentary film series American Experience. Participants will view the American Experience film Walt Whitman and explore how to use it in the classroom.

Hamilton's America-Jefferson's America An American Experience Seminar

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Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson offered distinct visions for the nation they were founding—one urban and industrial, the other rural and agrarian. In twenty-first-century America, a nation of cities and commerce, it is easy to think Hamilton won. But did he? How did the two visions clash in eighteenth-century America? What were their origins, and what have they meant for the United States? This seminar is a collaboration between the National Humanities Center and public television's historical documentary film series American Experience. Participants will view the American Experience film Alexander Hamilton and explore how to use it in the classroom.