Multi-Day Seminars

Spring 2025 Multi Day Schedule

The application period will be open from September 9, 2024 through September 29, 2024.
Take a look at our options to prepare for your application. Remember to consider your travel logistics when applying.

Applications are now closed for Spring 2025. Thank you for applying!

Security, Self Determination, and Empire:The Grand Alliance, 1941-1945

New Orleans, LA | January 17-19, 2025

World War II brought about the formation of what Winston Churchill called the “Grand Alliance” of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. But while this alliance proved remarkably effective in bringing about the defeat of the Axis Powers, it was less obvious whether the partnership could last beyond the end of the war. In this seminar we will use a role-playing game from the Reacting to the Past series, based on the Yalta Conference of February 1945. Participants will take on the roles of U.S., Soviet, and British delegates, working to reach agreement on a number of important questions regarding the nature of the postwar world. 

The Failure of Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow

Atlanta, GA | January 24-26, 2025

This seminar will examine the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of the era of Jim Crow. In the span of only a decade, from approximately 1875-1885, the monumental effort undertaken by the federal government to make African Americans equal citizens of the United States was abandoned and replaced by a campaign of racial discrimination and white supremacy commonly referred to as Jim Crow. This seminar will explain why this critically important change that shaped the future of the nation occurred.

Slavery and the Constitution

Charleston, SC | January 31- February 2, 2025

Our current reckoning with race and American history asks a fundamental question about the nation’s founding: was the United States Constitution an antislavery or proslavery document? Irreconcilable answers to this question informed the nineteenth-century sectional conflict over slavery and the meaning of the American Civil War. This seminar begins with the Federal Convention of 1787 and culminates with the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, tracing how the framers of the Constitution and subsequent generations understood the place of slavery in the national constitutional order. 

Controversy, Consensus, and Compromise in the American Founding

Tucson, AZ | February 21-23, 2025

The American Founding is alternately hallowed as a miraculous moment of inspiration, and criticized as a vague set of mundane compromises. We will explore and discuss the specific points of controversy, important agreements in principle, and crucial moments of compromise that animated the debates and discussions of the American Founding Era. 

The End of the Cold War and the Challenge of the Nineties

College Station, TX | February 21-23, 2025

The last decade of the Cold War saw a renewal of profound tension between the United States and the Soviet Union as the detente established in the 1970s collapsed in the face of a multitude of crises. The world likely came closer in the early 1980s to a nuclear war than any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. And yet, by the end of the decade the Soviet system had undergone a profound transformation that ended the decades long confrontation peacefully, and by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union itself would be no more. The unexpected end of the Cold War opened up a new host of questions for U.S. policymakers. This seminar will explore the new challenges peace brought.

Born Into Conflict:The United States and American Indians

St. Augustine, FL | February 28-March 2, 2025

When the American Republic was born, it was already involved in a conflict with Indians, the so-called Northwest Indian War, a conflict that would result in the near total destruction of the United States Army. This three-day seminar will examine the two centuries of Indian Wars between the nation and its Indigenous nations from the Northwest Indian War to the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Sometimes that warfare took a different form, from forced relocation to the forced education of boarding schools. The seminar will include a visit to the Castillo de San Marcos National Monument, once known as Fort Marion. Located on the Florida Peninsula, who would have thought this fortification, on the relative periphery of America, would be involved in four of the country’s Indian Wars and be the origin of Indian boarding schools?

America in World War I

Kansas City, MO | February 28-March 2, 2025

This seminar will examine primary documents to consider how American participation in World War I transformed American society. We will analyze debates over entering the war and expanding the postwar role of the United States in the world, the homefront mobilization required to fight overseas, challenges to civil liberties during the conflict, the wartime fight for expanded civil rights by women and African Americans, the American soldiers’ experience of war, and the enduring legacy of the conflict.

How Congress Began

Philadelphia, PA | March 28-30, 2025

Congress began as a revolutionary body, gathering representatives from the colonies to protest British policy and eventually declaring independence from Great Britain.  During the Revolution Congress served as the  organ of government for the new United States, but dissatisfaction with their performance led to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 and the redesign of Congress as a bicameral legislature.  Looking at the Revolutionary Congresses, the Articles Congress, the Convention’s reconfiguration, and the First Congress under the new Constitution, we will explore the origins of America’s “republican branch.”

The Gilded Age and the Challenge to the Founding

San Simeon, CA | April 4-6, 2024

The results of the Civil War clarified many fundamental issues regarding the nature of the American government and the enlightenment ideals that rooted its founding.  Many new theories of government—some native, some imported from Europe—promised progress beyond political equality, individual liberty, and representative government.  The United States did not escape the influence of these ideas.  Through the discussion of primary sources, this seminar will examine how Populism, Progressivism, Scientific Racism, Socialism, Social Darwinism and various other political and social theories influenced American politics.

Westward Expansion

St. Louis, MO | April 25-27, 2025

This seminar opens with a consideration of the West in the contest of empire. It proceeds to consider the connection between Manifest Destiny, the questions of Indian removal, and the extension of slavery into the territories, concluding with a consideration of the Mexican War and the impact of westward expansion on the emergence of modern America.

James Madison and the Constitution

Montpelier Station, VA | May 2-4, 2025

James Madison’s name is synonymous with the Constitution of the United States.  The Virginia Plan was his idea, and he recorded the most authoritative account of the debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.  He defended and explained that Constitution in the Federalist Papers, and then he shepherded the Bill of Rights through the House of Representatives. But Madison was not only a constitution maker. As creator of the first opposition party, and then as Secretary of State and as president, Madison was again and again a central figure in the work of interpreting the Constitution and putting it into practice.  In this seminar, we will explore the mind of James Madison.

Salem Witch Trials

Salem, MA | May 16-18, 2025

Few moments in American history have captured the collective imagination in quite the way that the Salem Witch Trials have. What caused this local hysteria? Patriarchy? Fear of Native Americans? Religious fervor? This seminar will examine primary documents, as well as some recent scholarship that puts “the black witch, Tituba” at the center of the 1692 Salem convulsion.

Andrew Jackson

Nashville, TN | May 16-18, 2025

Andrew Jackson was a Revolutionary War soldier and militia general successfully leading troops against Native American tribes. Moreover, he organized American resistance to a British invasion at New Orleans during the War of 1812. In frontier Tennessee, Jackson was a lawyer and judge and served in the United States Senate. A plantation owner and slaveholder, he fought several duels and prospered economically after setbacks and debt. As presidential candidate and president, Jackson argued for universal white male suffrage, term limits upon political office, and the election of both state and federal judges. His best-known policies included supporting easy terms on public land, the Indian Removal Act, his opposition to the renewal of the Bank of the United States charter, and his firm stand against South Carolina’s nullification of tariff law. In this seminar, we will delve into the complex and controversial career of Andrew Jackson. 

Ellis Island: 19th & Early 20th Century Immigration

Newark, NJ | June 6-8, 2025

This workshop will use primary sources to examine the experiences of predominantly European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will look at the evolution of American immigration law and how such laws were enforced at Ellis Island, as well as the reaction of native-born Americans to this large wave of immigration.

Lincoln, Race, and the New Birth of Freedom

Durango, CO | June 20-22, 2025

This seminar will examine Lincoln’s speeches and letters, as well as those of select contemporaries, on emancipation, civil war, and reconstruction. We will focus on Lincoln’s consistencies and inconsistencies on race, his changing war goals, and his vision for a postwar reconstructed nation rededicated to the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence.

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