NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers

Thanks to generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) the Library Company is again the site of a Summer Seminar for School Teachers.  Sixteen teachers from around the country, chosen from a record number of applications, will spend four weeks immersed in a course entitled The Abolitionist Movement: Fighting Slavery and Racial Injustice from the American Revolution to the Civil War under the direction of Richard Newman, Associate Professor of History at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

The seminar participants will examine key themes such as slave rebellions, inter-racial activism, and women’s role as abolitionists, and they will explore teaching strategies, films, and other media that will enhance their own performance in the classroom. Several visiting scholars will share their expertise with the group, and one of the field trips is a day-long excursion to Gettysburg. The participants also have an opportunity to conduct research in primary sources in the Library Company’s extensive collections. Professor Newman has described the seminar’s main goal as integrating new scholarly perspectives on abolitionism into classic interpretations of the movement, with a central focus on the use of original documents in the classroom.

To learn more about the NEH Summer Seminar for School Teachers visit our webpage.