According to President Wilson’s August 1914 appeal to the American people, what were the challenges of neutrality for the United States as both a great power and an immigrant nation? From the beginning, American wartime neutrality became a contested proposition in need of continuous clarification. How did matters of transatlantic finance and trade test the … Continued
Works of art are rich primary documents that can enhance student understanding of American culture. This two-part seminar explores three American paintings to see what they can tell students about slavery, immigration, and the plight of the American farmer. In this second session, the seminar demonstrates how historical information can inform our understanding and interpretation … Continued
This seminar explores strategies suffragists adopted and arguments they made to obtain the vote for American women as political and cultural currents shifted throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How did the Second Great Awakening affect the suffrage movement? How did women’s battle for the vote relate to other reform movements like abolition, temperance, … Continued
Works of art are rich primary documents that can enhance student understanding of American culture. This two-part seminar, a collaboration between the North Carolina Museum of Art and the National Humanities Center, explores three American paintings — Christian Friedrich Mayr’s “”Kitchen Ball at White Sulphur Springs, Virginia”” (1838); Charles Felix Blauvelt’s “”A German Immigrant Inquiring … Continued
The study of 20th-century history provides us with an enigmatic contrast. Most casual American observers view the last century as a time of great technological and social progress. And doubtless, technological advances in medicine and transportation, social movements such as decolonization, civil rights and the women’s movement, and communications revolutions resulting in globalization improved human … Continued
In the first two decades of the 20th century, large numbers of African Americans exchanged rural, southern addresses for urban, northern ones. In a phenomenon later referred to as the Great Migration, these masses swelled the populations of cities such as Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. Driven by racial violence and dwindling options in … Continued
The New Negro Movement, better known as the Harlem Renaissance, was many things to many people: an effort to place African American issues on the national agenda; a moment in which African Americans exerted unprecedented influence on popular culture; a conscious drive to recast African American identity; a glorification of the African American folk temperament; … Continued
What were the causes and consequences of America’s involvement in World War I? This seminar seeks to address that question by tracing the nation’s movement from the neutrality of 1914 to the declaration of war in 1917. What forces moved us to war? What forces resisted that movement? And what impact did the War have … Continued
“This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” In Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, Frederick Douglass excoriated the nation for its hypocrisy, brutality, and arrogance in an Independence Day oration that still stings. What arguments did he make? What rhetorical skills did he display? How did he … Continued
African Americans emerged from Reconstruction in the 1870s with the protection of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. They took their places as free and increasingly successful citizens in the 1880s. During that decade in the South, African Americans voted, served on juries, won public office, pursued education, and improved their economic status. In response … Continued