2013 Fall Schedule
The Real Pirates of the Caribbean
Leader
Linda Rupert
Assistant Professor of History
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
Sporting tri-corner hats, eye patches, and colorful beards; bristling with swords and pistols; swilling grog, and saying “aargh” all the time, pirates today fall somewhere between adventurers and terrorists. It is hard to imagine these independent rogues as central to empire and trade, yet they were, especially in the Caribbean, where they shaped emerging colonial economies, societies, and cultures from the first arrival of Europeans in 1492 through the consolidation of the transatlantic trade systems and well into the eighteenth century. Who were they? How did they figure into the imperial designs of England, Spain, France, and the Netherlands? How did their roles change? Join us for treasure to share with your students.
Puritans in the New World
Leader
Christine Heyrman
Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble
Professor of American History, University of Delaware
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
In 1630 the Puritans brought their proud, driving faith to the New World. Within a few years their skill in self-government and their refusal to tolerate dissent created a remarkably unified colony, a “Bible Commonwealth.” What were their religious beliefs? How did they practice them? What appeal did their faith hold for believers, and how did it shape the social, familial, and gender order in seventeenth-century New England?
Slavery in the Chesapeake
Leader
John Coombs
Associate Professor of History
Hampden-Sydney College
About the Seminar
Slavery entered America through the Chesapeake when, in 1619, a Dutch warship delivered twenty and “odd Negroes” to the English settlement at Jamestown. Gradually, more “Negroes” were brought to the region, but throughout the seventeenth century their numbers remained small. Isolated on primitive plantations, they were given the most brutal and degrading work. Within a generation, however, plantation life had evolved to require household help and more skilled craftsmen. Larger, more stable communities of blacks arose in the Chesapeake and in them a distinctive subculture began to emerge, blending African and American traditions. But as black populations grew, the strictures that defined their lives became more formal and severe. In the 1660s Virginia and Maryland passed laws acknowledging that men, women, and children could live as slaves for life within their boundaries. In so doing they laid the legal foundations of slavery in the United States. How and why did slavery establish itself in the Chesapeake region? How did it evolve? And how did slavery there shape slavery everywhere in the colonies?
African Americans and the American Revolution
Leader
Alan Taylor
Distinguished Professor
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History
University of California, Davis
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
In 1775 the royal governor of Virginia offered to free all the slaves in his colony who joined the British army and fought against the American rebels. Few slaves took him up on his offer. What can we make of that fact? Did the enslaved want to fight for their freedom but simply found it too difficult or too dangerous to escape to British camps? Or did slaves in Virginia and perhaps elsewhere side with the Patriots in the hope that the Revolution’s promise of liberty and equality applied to them? What role did African Americans play in the American Revolution? And how did the Revolution, a war fought to end the colonies’ “enslavement” by Great Britain, force American to confront slavery in their midst? Using resources from the Library from Congress’s American Memory Timeline and the National Humanities Center’s teaching anthologies, this seminar will address these and other questions.
Teaching the Constitution: A Common Core Close Reading Seminar
Leader
Robert Ferguson
George Edward Woodberry Professor in Law, Literature, and Criticism
Columbia University Law School
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
The critic Stanley Crouch has called the Constitution “a blues document.” Others have described it as a great clockwork machine. Some see it as a living text; others assume its first rendition controls all of its meaning. Everyone puzzles over some of its language, yet everyone accepts it as an established plan of government as well as a set of absolutely controlling propositions. But does it, in any of these senses, tell a story? Why might it be important for the Constitution to be read like one? How do its various parts relate to one another? Why did so many consider it incomplete until a Bill of Rights was added in 1791? With that in mind, does it have a beginning, a middle, and an end? Does it now need internal revision? Join us to do a close reading of our founding document.
Class in the Slave Narrative
Leader
William L. Andrews
E. Maynard Adams Professor of English
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
About the Seminar
Slave narratives tell stories of oppression, identity, and survival. They also tell stories of class differences among the enslaved as well as caste differences between masters and the enslaved. This seminar will explore perceptions of class and caste in the narratives of people like Frederick Douglass, James W.C. Pennington, and Harriet Jacobs. It will examine the self-consciousness about class and the class status they and their families held in the South before they ever gained their freedom, and it will look at class-inflected comments these writers made about life in the North. Join us for a fresh and illuminating approach to the slave narrative.
The Creation of the Market Economy: America’s Second Revolution
Leader
Timothy H. Breen
William Smith Mason Professor of American History
Northwestern University
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
The Revolution of 1776 secured America’s independence. Forty years later a second revolution determined its economic destiny. In a battle between land, one of history’s most traditional forces, and the market, one of history’s most dynamic, market capitalism won and set the nations on the path of its development. How did the values of the land conflict with those of the market? What impact did the battle between land and market have in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries? How and why did the market win?
Teaching Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: A Common Core Close Reading Seminar
Leader
Eliza Richards
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
If you have borne a thousand injuries as best you could and would like to avenge them through some close reading, join us in studying this popular Poe story, a Common Core exemplar text. We will probe its inmost recesses and along the way examine its context and the appeal of the Gothic. Grab a pipe of Amontillado, if you can find it; otherwise a bottle of Medoc will do. Take this flambeau, follow us, and watch out for the nitre. You needn’t worry about a trowel.
Teaching Emily Dickinson: A Common Core Close Reading Seminar
Leader
Lucinda MacKethan
Professor of English, Emerita, North Carolina State University
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
Emily Dickinson’s poetry is among the most evocative and challenging in our literature. Ambiguity abounds; images amaze. Many a class has lingered over a single word. This seminar will explore the techniques of literary close reading and examine several Dickinson poems, including “The Railway Train,” “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark,” and “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” all Common Core exemplar texts.
Teaching Robert Frost: A Common Core Close Reading Seminar
Leader
Sean McCann
Professor of English, Wesleyan University
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
The popularity of Robert Frost’s poetry stems in large part from its apparent accessibility. The Yankee wisdom Frost dispenses is as solid and dependable as a stone wall. At least so it seems. Upon close inspection accessibility yields to ambiguity, and we find gaps in the wall. Through close reading of several Frost poems, including the Common Core exemplars “The Road Not Taken” and “Mending Wall,” this seminar will examine the technique and meaning of Frost’s poetry to discover how it can be at the same moment both reassuring and disturbing.
Teaching “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”: A Common Core Close Reading Seminar
Leader
James Engell
Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature
Harvard University
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
“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 indict American history, American religion, and American law? Join us for a close reading of a July Fourth speech that contains its own fireworks. A Common Core exemplar text.
FSA Photography and the 1930's
Leader
Sara Blair
Professor of English, University of Michigan
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. We have all seen FSA photographs, even though we may not have realized we were looking at FSA photos. They 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? How can we use them with students?
Teaching Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd”
Leader
Andrew Delbanco
Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies
Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities
Columbia University
National Humanities Center Fellow
About the Seminar
Ever since its publication, Herman Melville’s story “Billy Budd” has been the subject of vigorous critical debate. Did Captain Vere, the commander who condemns Billy to death for killing the despicable Master-at-Arms John Claggart, impose a just sentence? Is Vere a tragic figure struggling with an agonizingly difficult decision or an oppressor upholding the authority of empire? And what of Billy? Is he an embodiment of virtue whose example can redeem a fallen world or a naïf whose failure to recognize evil gives it more power? And what of the story itself? How does it relate to the context of its creation, America in the 1880s, and that of its setting, a British warship during the Napoleonic Wars in the early nineteenth century? Join our drumhead court as we judge “Billy Budd.”
These seminars focus on teaching with primary sources — historical documents, literary texts, visual images, and audio material. Emphasizing critical analysis and close reading, they address the skills of the Common Core State Standards while giving teachers the opportunity to deepen their content knowledge.
Technical Requirements
Seminar texts are provided free online. The Center draws texts from a variety of sources, including America in Class® primary sources and lessons, and attempts to select fresh material that will invigorate classroom instruction.
Cost: $35.00 per seminar. Email Caryn Koplik, Assistant Director of Education Programs, for special pricing.
Recertification Credit: The National Humanities Center programs are eligible for recertification credit. Each seminar includes ninety minutes of instruction plus approximately three and one half hours of preparation. The preparation and seminar total at least five hours of professional development per event. Because the seminars are conducted online, they may qualify for technology credit in districts that award it. The Center will supply documentation of participation.