NEH Landmarks of American History Workshops for School Teachers

Bruce Cole

This summer, NEH will support seventeen intensive academies for school teachers at sites across America which witnessed key moments in our nation's history. Like all NEH-funded professional development programs, they will be rich in the study of primary texts and in scholarly discourse, but they will also add a distinctive and timely emphasis on the importance of American places. The 2,200 school teachers who will participate in these workshops will immerse themselves in historical topics that range from the earliest colonial settlements to the Civil Rights Movement of our own time. They will return to their classrooms with a deeper understanding of American history and an intensive experience in how to incorporate historical places into their teaching.

Historical places educate and inspire. John Adams wept with emotion when he visited the Netherlands church whence the Pilgrims who settled Massachusetts Bay Colony had come. The historian who has brought Adams to life for our generation, the 2003 NEH Jefferson Lecturer, David McCullough, tells us how important it is to be on site—in his own words, “[To] look at Carpenters' Hall in Philadelphia. You go in there and you think: This is where the first Continental Congress met? One of the greatest beginnings in all of history began in this little room?” Who can walk across the open field to Gettysburg's Cemetery Ridge or stand where Joshua Chamberlain started his desperately courageous bayonet charge to save Little Round Top without feeling the complexity—and the weight—of that battle and the destiny that depended on its outcome? Who can view the quiet simplicity of everything at Mt. Vernon from Martha Washington's jewelry to the sepulchers of our first First Family without a deepened understanding of the man who led America in war and peace to its birth as a nation?

Teachers participating in Landmarks workshops this summer will have such opportunities. Those who join the program offered by the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, “Stony the Road We Trod,” will read seminal texts and meet key leaders of the Civil Rights Movement like the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, while walking the steps of those who struggled for racial equality in America—visiting the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the 16th Street Baptist Church, Tuskegee University, and the Dexter Street Baptist Church. Participants in the North Carolina Museum of History program on black entrepreneurs and artisans will study the handiwork of antebellum black craftsmen, free and enslaved, like furniture maker Thomas Day and Elizabeth Keckley, who was Mary Todd Lincoln's seamstress. Other teachers may choose to focus on the Illinois and Michigan canal this summer in Chicago, visiting its monuments and studying how it united nineteenth-century America. The seventeen Landmarks Workshops encompass Pearl Harbor, Mt. Vernon, the Vancouver Historic Reserve, the U.S. Capitol, Nebraska's Fort Robinson, and many more.

I am particularly heartened by the way historians and historical organizations have responded to the call for this initiative, one of NEH’s new We the People projects. Some of the nation's most eminent historians have stepped forward to lead or contribute to these programs. The topics show deep thinking, scholarship, and creativity. Highly traditional landmarks, like Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, serve as the focus of profound analysis of the economy and society of Jackson's age, the nature of Jacksonian democracy, as well as the slave system and Indian policy of the age. The entire historical district of Savannah will serve as the text for a program on its three centuries of urban planning from colonial settlement to the present, and a similar use of Charleston, SC, will explore the politics and culture of slavery and freedom in a place where they received much of their nineteenth-century definition.

Our history is not a story of perfection but a story of imperfect people working toward great ideals. The seventeen Landmarks workshops will give the school teachers on whom so much of our future depends the opportunity to study deeply with colleagues from around the nation the moments of both our successes and shortcomings. It is our hope that these teachers will return to their classrooms not only more knowledgeable of our nation’s past but also inspired by their Landmarks experience and better prepared to inspire a new generation of Americans to play constructive roles as citizens of this nation.