The National Humanities Center collaborates with partners, scholars, and subject matter experts to provide virtual courses that allow educators to explore a relevant topic in a collegial, self-paced environment. Participants actively engage with course materials and colleagues, expand their own knowledge, skills, and dispositions, and develop customized educational resources.
Abigail & John Adams: Exploring Early U.S. History Through the Life of an American Power Couple
Images: (1) Abigail Adams, 1800/1815, painted by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), National Gallery of Art; (2) Book cover of Abigail & John written by David Bruce Smith, illustrated by Clarice Smith; (3) John Adams, 1800/1815, painted by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), National Gallery of ArtIn 1776, Abigail Adams urged her husband John to “remember the ladies” by offering them legal protection, rather than leaving their fate in the hands of their husbands. This course follows Abigail Adams’s directive by exploring the lives of women and men during the late colonial period in British North America, the American Revolution, the early years of nation formation in the United States, and John Adams’s presidency. Abigail and John’s lived experiences and their involvement in public service provide a lens for examining the social and political changes that gripped the land now known as the United States during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This course builds on the book Abigail & John by David Bruce Smith (with illustrations by Clarice Smith) and is intended for elementary and middle school instructors.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Grateful American Foundation.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Course Details
Shimomura Crossing the Delaware by Roger Shimomura (2010), National Portrait GalleryCritical Media Literacy: Decoding Disinformation and Myths in the News
In this updated six-week online course, educators will critically examine the ever-changing role of print, broadcast, and digital media through a humanities lens. Participants will investigate how mass media has evolved, how its messages shape our citizenry, and how the issue of disinformation can be brought to life in a classroom setting. By using investigation, analysis, discussion, and reflection, participants will develop a classroom resource customized to their individual educational environments.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
Empowering Maptivists: Using Maps & Data to Examine Social Issues in the Humanities Classroom
Residential security map of Holyoke and part of the city of Chicopee, Mass from the Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center’s “Mapping Inequality” collectionMaps are instruments of power and can affect our understanding of issues and data depending on who is telling the story. It is our job as map consumers and educators to think critically about what maps are showing us (and what they aren’t). In Empowering Maptivists, course participants will explore the unique power of maps to make sense of the world around us. The course will provide clear pathways for helping students explore issues in their own communities and use spatial understanding to advocate for change.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
Flyer for Punk Percussion Protest (July 25, 1992)
The School of Athens (fresco 1511) by Raffaello Sanzio da UrbinoMedieval Africa and Africans
Detail from a modern reproduction of the map of West Africa in The Catalan Atlas (1375)Given the wide popularity of Eurocentric medieval fantasies, it has never been more important that we teach our students about the reality of the Middle Ages rather than the fictionalized fantasies with which they are accustomed. In order to examine Medieval Studies and expand the “Global Middle Ages” beyond the traditional boundaries of Western Europe, this course will concentrate on premodern Africa. While often overlooked, the civilizations that spanned the vast African continent produced great achievements, in conditions of relative parity with their European contemporaries, before the oceanic dominance of a few Western powers. This course will contextualize Medieval Africa in terms of its contemporary relationships with the medieval globe as well as its modern impact.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Medieval Academy of America in addition to the support of Boston University African Studies Center.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
“My Piece of the American Pie”: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary American Music
This course celebrates the diversity of American music through explorations of subjects like Afrofuturism, modern protest music from the Black Lives Matter movement and the immigration crisis, as well as music from the perspective of women and the Queer community. Course participants will explore issues of race, gender, and sexuality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America as they also learn practical ways to bring discussions of music into their classrooms by analyzing textual, sonic, and visual content. “My Piece of the American Pie” will feature videos from the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation’s collaboration with the CNN Soundtracks series.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Rock and Roll Forever Foundation.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
Understanding the Modern Middle East
Female protesters marching in Egypt during the Arab Spring.Far too often, the Middle East appears as doubly alien: out of place and out of time. A century of popular culture caricatures, at least two centuries of Orientalist representations, and decades of American military interventions, have all fed into the notion of the Middle East as a turmoil-laden, sectarian, and tribal premodern region. In this course, we will go beyond these stereotypes to look at the historical forces that shaped the region across the twentieth century to understand the complexities of its peoples and societies.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Duke–UNC Consortium for Middle East Studies.
Lead Scholar: Akram Khater, North Carolina State University (NHC Fellow, 2006–07)
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
People protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016.The Where of Why: GIS in the Humanities Classroom
Early use of spatial analysis by Dr. John Snow tracking London cholera cases in 1854.Often, when teaching about historical events, there is an over-emphasis on chronology without strong enough consideration given to geography. The use of geospatial technologies allows interactions of place, space, time, and scale to be more obvious, allowing students to develop the ability to answer not only “where?” but “why there?” “GIS in the Humanities Classroom” will introduce participants to the transformative power of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Over five weeks, the course will detail approaches to embedding geospatial technology in existing classroom instruction, as well as methods for using geography to enrich humanities narratives. By focusing on inquiry-based instruction, the course will provide insights into the ways that GIS tools contribute to a deeper understanding of humanities subjects.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the Virginia Geographic Alliance.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
Women of the Americas: Early Encounters and Entangled Histories
Image resources included in the New-York Historical Society’s Women & the American Story curriculum website: (1) Lienzo de Tlaxcala, Hernán Cortés and La Malinche meet Moctezuma II in Tenochtitlan, November 8, 1519. Facsimile (c. 1890) of Lienzo de Tlaxcala. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, the University of California, Berkeley. (2) “Artist’s rendering of Dorothy Angola.” Slavery in New York Curriculum Guide (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2005). (3) Johannes Vermeer, Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, ca. 1662. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Marquand Collection, Gift of Henry G. Marquand, 1889. (4) Baroness Anne-Marguerite-Henriette Hyde de Neuville, Oneida Family, 1807. New-York Historical Society.The history of European discovery, contact, and early settlement in the Americas is traditionally represented as a chain of great men. Students and the wider public are often familiar with the lives of few women beyond Martha Washington, Betsy Ross, and now the Schuyler sisters. This course disrupts narratives that focus exclusively on the history of men by exploring the lives of European, Indigenous, and African-descended women during the sixteenth through early eighteenth centuries. Women from a variety of backgrounds were integral to the development of Spanish, Dutch, English, and French colonial societies in North America. This course traces the lives of Indigenous interpreters, enslaved laborers, and women who traversed the Atlantic and carved a place for themselves in colonial legal, social, and economic systems. The history of the Americas cannot be understood without examining the experiences of these women.
This course has been designed with the generous support of the New-York Historical Society.
Professional Development Hours
Fall/Spring 6-week Course: 35&
Summer 1-week Course: 25
Course Details
“Young Oyster Shucker Standing on Mound of Shells in Biloxi, Mississippi,” by Lewis Hine (1911)
Example of mail fraud detected and flagged by U.S. Postal Service in 1906.About Our Instructors
Each course is developed with an established scholar in the field, who helps develop activities and provides resources for group discussions and individual research. Our goal is to facilitate a learning experience that will result in classroom-ready instructional materials. Our instructor pool is comprised of experienced, talented educators and scholars in humanities education.
Contact
For more information, email Education Programs Manager Mike Williams.