Webinars Main Index

The National Humanities Center’s Education Programs provide teaching materials and instructional resources specifically designed for American history and literature teachers. Since 1984, it has been offering rigorous, content-based professional development programs for high school teachers.

Exploration & Colonization

  1. “Aliens” in the Empire: Diversity in the American Colonies
  2. Art and American Identity: 1690–1789
  3. The Consumer Revolution in Colonial America
  4. First Look: Interpreting Early European Artistic Renderings of the New World
  5. Native American-European Power Rivalries
  6. No Lords, Spiritual or Temporal: The First Great Awakening and the American Revolution
  7. Puritans in the New World
  8. The Real Pirates of the Caribbean
  9. Slavery in the Atlantic World
  10. Slavery in the Chesapeake
  11. Teaching the Slave Narrative: The Life of Olaudah Equiano
  12. Who Are These People: First Contacts between Native Americans and Europeans
  13. Why Some New World Colonies Succeeded and Others Failed

Revolution & Federalist Period

  1. African Americans and the American Revolution
  2. American Rebels in an Age of Atlantic Revolutions
  3. The American Revolution as Civil War
  4. The Common Sense of Paine’s Common Sense
  5. The Constitution
  6. Consumer Politics in the American Revolution
  7. Defining a New Nation: 1789–1820
  8. Deism and the Founding of the United States
  9. Hamilton’s America — Jefferson’s America
  10. The Idea of American Exceptionalism
  11. Imperial Crisis and Revolution in the Spanish Frontier of North America
  12. Jefferson and Slavery
  13. John Adams and the New Nation
  14. The Meaning of “The Star-Spangled Banner”
  15. Predicaments of the New Republic: America, 1789–1820
  16. Teaching The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
  17. Teaching the Constitution: A Close Reading Seminar.
  18. Was the American Revolution Avoidable?
  19. The Work of Slavery
  20. Your Revolution and Mine: Native Americans, African Americans in the American Revolution

Expansion

  1. Buffalo Bill, American Idol
  2. Building a Nation: Westward Expansion in the Early 19th Century
  3. The Causes and Consequences of Indian Removal
  4. Class in the Slave Narrative
  5. The Cult of Domesticity
  6. The Hudson River School
  7. “The Interests of the Many”: The Expansion of Democracy in the Jacksonian Era
  8. The Mormons and the Settlement of the West
  9. Teaching “Civil Disobedience”
  10. Teaching Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: A Close Reading Seminar
  11. Teaching Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in Context
  12. Teaching Emily Dickinson: A Close Reading Seminar
  13. Teaching Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
  14. Teaching “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: A Close Reading Seminar

Civil War & Reconstruction

  1. Big Houses and African Villages: The Plantation Melting Pot
  2. Civil War Home Fronts
  3. Civil War Art
  4. The Civil War in a Global Context
  5. Emancipation
  6. The Emergence of Jim Crow
  7. The Factory v. The Plantation
  8. For Union and Freedom: African Americans in the Civil War
  9. John Brown: Hero or Villian?
  10. Legacy of the Civil War
  11. Life on an Antebellum Plantation
  12. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
  13. Lincoln’s Presidency
  14. Making Sense of Battle: Journalism and Photography of the Civil War
  15. Meaning in Marble: Civil War Monuments and American Identity
  16. Pre- and Post-Civil War Slave Narratives
  17. Religious Roots of the Abolition Movement
  18. The Role of Medical Care in the Civil War: The Hospital and the Battlefield
  19. The Role of the West in the Reunification of the U.S. after the Civil War
  20. Southern Women in the Civil War
  21. Walt Whitman’s Civil War Poetry
  22. What Caused the Civil War?
  23. What Did Reconstruction Achieve?
  24. What It Meant to be Enslaved
  25. Winslow Homer’s Civil War Art

The Progressive Era & The Gilded Age

  1. African American Women and Race Relations: 1890-1920
  2. The American Business Revolution: Corporate Consolidation in the Nineteenth Century
  3. The Ashcan School
  4. Becoming American: Immigration and Assimilation in Late 19th Century America
  5. “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: Hawthorne’s Mad Scientists
  6. Blessings of Civilization: The Roots of American Imperialism
  7. The Consumer Economy of the 1920s and the Business of America
  8. The Car and the City: Popular Culture in the 1920s
  9. Economic Development of the West in the Late 19th Century
  10. The Idea of Progress in 19th-Century America
  11. Industrialism and Progressivism: Humanizing the Machine and Mechanizing the Human
  12. Jacob Riis and Progressive Reform
  13. The Meaning of the West in Late 19th Century America
  14. Opportunity Costs: The Perils and Profits of Assimilation
  15. Over There: Why America Entered WWI
  16. Religion and Reform in 19th-Century America
  17. Rethinking Booker T. and W.E.B.
  18. “Something to Marvel At”: Urban Life in America, 1880–1910
  19. Teaching “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  20. Teaching Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd”

Twentieth-Century America

  1. The 1950s and the Cold War
  2. The 1970s: The Lost Decade
  3. Art and the New Negro
  4. The Causes of the Great Depression
  5. Civil Rights Rhythm and Blues
  6. Community in African American Culture: 1917–1968
  7. The Crash of 1929
  8. Cuba and the Cold War: Beyond the Missile Crisis
  9. Do Dates Matter? Chronological Reasoning and Critical Thinking in World History
  10. FSA Photography and the 1930’s
  11. Gandhi and King on the March: The Power of Nonviolence
  12. The Great Migration
  13. The Great Migration, or Leaving My Troubles in Dixie
  14. Images of Asians in American Culture
  15. Imaging Civil Rights: Photography and the Movement
  16. The Impact of the Cold War on American Society
  17. In Search of the Civil Rights Movement
  18. Key Allied Decisions in WWII
  19. Literature and Essential Philosophical Questions
  20. Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine
  21. Moving America Left and Right: 1945–1990
  22. Nation, Race, and Genocide: Terror in the 20th Century
  23. New Lessons from the Cuban Missile Crisis
  24. The New Negro Movement in a Global Perspective
  25. Partisan Pictures: Art and Images in the Cold War
  26. Popular Perceptions of WWII
  27. The Power of Public Speaking
  28. Restoring Faith in Capitalism and Democracy after WWII: Up from the Rubble
  29. The Roots of the Counterculture
  30. The Scopes Trial and America’s Multiple Modernities
  31. Teaching William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying
  32. Teaching Flannery O’Connor
  33. Teaching In Our Time in Our Time
  34. Teaching Prohibition
  35. Teaching The Book Thief
  36. Teaching Richard Wright’s Black Boy
  37. Teaching Robert Frost: A Close Reading Seminar
  38. Teaching The Catcher in the Rye
  39. Teaching The Great Gatsby: A Close Reading Seminar
  40. Teaching Through Close Reading: Historical and Informational Texts
  41. Teaching Through Close Reading: Poetry & Fiction
  42. Teaching To Kill a Mockingbird
  43. Teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God
  44. The Woman Suffrage Movement
  45. The Vietnam War in Vietnamese History
  46. Witches and Communists: The Crucible and the Cold War
  47. World War I