he Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) hold annual seminars for professors of American history at smaller colleges.



Seminar: 2008

Slave Narratives
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges and the United Negro College Fund
Yale University, June 15–18
Led by Professor David W. Blight

The genre of slave narratives is usually divided into three categories: biographies, fiction, and autobiographies, with the third category by far the largest. Autobiographies by former slaves were first published in the late 18th century and early 19th century and grew in scale as new texts were promoted and printed by the early abolition movement in Britain and the United States. This seminar will examine in depth both antebellum and postbellum narratives.

Click here for the full seminar description in pdf format.

Seminar: 2007 (for Community College Professors)

The Civil War in Global Context
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges
New York University, June 24-30
Led by Professor Thomas Bender

The Civil War is the central national event of American history and a distinctively American experience. It is also, however, part of larger liberal and nationalist developments in the mid-nineteenth century that occurred on every continent: creating modern nation-states, extending new political and economic freedoms, and defining national citizenship. This seminar will examine these transnational and global aspects of the American Civil War and consider how such study enriches our understanding of the sectional crisis, the breakup of the Union, and the limits of Reconstruction.

Seminar: 2006

Slavery: Scholarship and Public History
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges
Columbia University, June 25-28, 2006
Led by Professors David W. Blight and James O. Horton

America as an idea was a complex contradiction, even before it was a nation. Its ideal of human freedom contradicted its reality of human slavery, a fact widely recognized and commented upon at the end of the 18th century. Over the last century and more, historians have attempted to explain the history of American slavery and its role in the formation of the nation's political, economic, and social structure. Their changing interpretations reflect the state of American historical scholarship and the changing racial dynamics of the nation. This seminar will focus on American slavery scholarship, and the difficulty of the public presentation of this important aspect of American history as it confronts the American memory and sense of heritage.

Seminar: 2006 (for Community College Professors)

Recent Scholarship in American History
Co-sponsored by the Virginia Community College System, in partnership with the University of Virginia and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation
University of Virginia and Monticello, June 12-20, 2006
Led by Professor Carol Berkin

This seminar focuses on four recent books, each selected in an effort to look at familiar survey course topics in a new way. It is led by Carol Berkin, Professor of History at Baruch College and City University of New York Graduate Center.

Seminar: 2005

Interpreting the History of Recent and Controversial Events
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges
June 21-23, 2005
Led by Ernest R. May, Charles Warren Professor of American History, Harvard University

Historians studying the recent past have to evaluate and use sources not available to historians studying earlier periods. This seminar examines examples involving files from intelligence agencies; secret voice recordings; and videography and digital imaging. It also looks at the 9/11 Commission report, which provides a very recent example of the age-old problem of comparing written and oral sources and an example as well of the challenge of matching history and memory.

Seminar: 2004

Slavery: Scholarship and Public History
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges
Columbia University, August 8-11, 2004
Led by Professors David W. Blight and James O. Horton

David W. Blight is Class of '54 Professor of History at Yale University. His books include Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the Civil War, and Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. James Oliver Horton is the Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History at George Washington University. He is author of Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community, and co-author (with his wife Lois E. Horton) of In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860; Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North; Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America and Slavery and the Making of America.

Seminar: 2003

Political History of the Early Republic: New Challenges, Old Strengths
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges
Columbia University, June 22-27, 2003
Led by Professor Joyce O. Appleby

Joyce Oldham Appleby, Professor of History Emerita at University of California at Los Angeles, is past president both of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Her books include Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, Capitalism and a New Social Order, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans, and, most recently, Thomas Jefferson.

Seminar: 2002

The Slavery Debates: Problems in Slavery Studies Today
Co-sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges
Columbia University, June 2-7, 2002
Led by Professor David Brion Davis

David Brion Davis is Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction, the National Book Award for History and Biography, the Bancroft Prize, and numerous others, Professor Davis has recently published In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery (Yale University Press).