As Americans in the eighteenth century became wealthier, they developed a taste for such consumer goods as silver tea pots, fine cloth, and expensive furniture. This workshop will explore what they bought, why they bought it, how these purchases changed their image of themselves, and finally, how they led to the American Revolution.

In the first two centuries after 1492, most colonies in the New World failed. This workshop explores why. We will read accounts of failures and successes and discuss what happened. How much did colonizers' expectations have to do with success or failure? Were the desires and power of local Indians the most important factors? How large a role did weather and climate play? Was luck the deciding factor? Should we be surprised that any succeeded?

In a speech that lasted barely three minutes but that has since become a touchstone of American democracy, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the site of a decisive battle in which nearly 8,000 Confederate and Union soldiers had been killed and more than 30,000 wounded. Why has the "Gettysburg Address" achieved almost scriptural status for American culture? What, in Lincoln's view, was at stake in the battle and the larger war for which it proved to be the turning point? How can we account for the majesty and precision of Lincoln's language? We will discuss these and other questions through a close reading of the speech and consideration of the context in which Lincoln delivered it.

The Civil War destroyed the institution of slavery and transformed the United States socially, politically, economically, and artistically. Not only did the subject inspire some of the nation's best painters, sculptors, photographers, and illustrators, it also changed the face of town and countryside as monuments to soldiers and statesmen of the Civil War era spread across the landscape. This workshop will pay close attention not only to the imagery of battle but also to the social and political issues which shaped the image of the war and which in many respects continue to shape us today. How did artists come to grips with the new realities of warfare and the unprecedented scale of death it caused? How did the new media of that era (especially photography) change the way that war was represented and understood? What insights did artists offer into the social and political changes happening both on the homefront and battlefront? Did the memorialization of the war in public art create new understandings of the conflict or perpetuate old myths?

The Cult of Domesticity was a societal ideal promoted especially during the mid- and late nineteenth century. It provided a behavioral handbook, a "code," for middle-class white women in America that served as a way to value, to judge, and to control how they would both see themselves and be understood by others. Women who questioned the social, economic, and artistic limitations that this code imposed learned to challenge it from within the "sphere" of influence that it prescribed. This workshop will explore how the cult of domesticity constrained women, and how some women transformed it into a tool of empowerment.

"Then, thenceforward, and forever free." Few public documents contain words more stirring than those from the Emancipation Proclamation. The process of Emancipation was momentous, tumultuous, exhilarating, and chaotic. Spirits soared and hopes were crushed as nearly four million black Southerners made the transition from slavery to freedom. How did they actually experience emancipation? What did they hope freedom would mean? How did they pursue it, and what obstacles did they face as they attempted to claim and secure freedom for themselves and their families? You will find some interesting answers to those questions in the remarkable photographs, letters, and eye witness accounts that we will discuss in this workshop.

How did the ethnically and culturally diverse urban environment of early twentieth-century America find its way into art? How did artists see the new immigrants who flooded into American cities from 1890 on? What kinds of visual languages did they draw on in approaching a subject that had been generally off limits to painters of the previous generation—the urban poor? This workshop will look at how the Ash Can artists built on older visual and art historical traditions, while also considering what was new about their work. It will also consider the subject matter they shared with the popular culture of early twentieth-century films, graphic journalism, and cartooning. Using a variety of perspectives, this workshop will consider the role of the visual in exploring the defining challenges of a pluralistic urban democracy in the new century.

A growing number of historians now look at the Civil Rights Movement not just as something that happened in the 1960s, but as a historical process that spanned decades beginning in the World War II years or even earlier. While the African American freedom struggle is most remembered for its stirring sit-ins and other dramatic clashes to dismantle segregation in public accommodations and to win the vote, it has long had a strong economic and political focus, too. Among the topics the workshop will tackle are how and when the movement began; what demands it placed before the nation; the organizations that came into being and their strategies; how the movement changed between the 1930s and 1970s; and how the movement changed America.