Cost: Free
Location: Online
Options: A compilation of all the livestreamed lectures from five Teacher Seminars In Person
Dates: July 20–July 31, 2025
Registration Opens: April 15, 2025
Professional Development credit will be issued based on attendance.
Learn about the crisis in agriculture, the causes of the Great Depression, and the rise of FDR.
This lecture deals with what the term statesmanship means and how it differs from leadership. Is statecraft a skill that can be learned, or does it require a temperament? To what sources can we point for contrasting views of statesmanship? What distinguishes the statecraft of founding, preservation, and refounding?
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This lecture and discussion will explore the early life of Abraham Lincoln, from his birth in a log cabin through meeting Mary Todd. It will explore the personal obstacles he overcame, including his lack of formal education and loss of loved ones, and conclude with a discussion of his famous 1838 Lyceum Address.
Join us for a session on World War II, Pearl Harbor to North Africa.
The eighteenth century followed the Enlightenment’s move toward reason in politics by developing new concepts of statesmanship. There was a very delicate transition to be managed between the traditional statesmanship of the Renaissance and the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century on the one hand, and the new democratic republics of the American and French Revolutions. George Washington is a particular example of a republican statesmanship (and all the more important for how so many other attempts at crafting a revolutionary or republican statesmanship failed) and of the statesmanship of founding.
Learn about the various New Deal agencies and the “Second New Deal” of the WPA, National Labor Relations Act, and Social Security.
This lecture and discussion will explore the infamous Dred Scott decision to see how Lincoln’s response to it helped push his Springfield neighbors toward a greater understanding of equality.
Join us for a session on the militarization of the Cold War.
The Emancipation Proclamation is one of the most important and yet most misunderstood documents in American history. This lecture will explore Lincoln’s path to emancipation and that edict’s significance.
This lecture examines excerpts from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in addition to landmark speeches in which Douglass considered whether the Constitution of the United States, and the union more generally, was pro-slavery or anti-slavery in origin and essence.
Learn about FDR’s last 100 days and the path to peace in World War II.
This lecture examines excerpts from The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt and selected essays from Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life. The purpose is to consider the roles character, self-discipline, moral decency, and grit play in the formation and education of a young statesman.
This lecture and discussion will explore Lincoln’s suspension of the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.
Woodrow Wilson, the only political science professor to be president of the United States, thought deeply and published widely as a scholar of the American political order and its history. As a teacher, scholar, and president of Princeton University, Wilson emerged as a leading Progressive thinker, advancing a reinterpretation of the American constitutional order as an evolving, organic charter for a changing country. How Wilson thought about the Constitution, and about the role of the presidency in its adaptation, will be the focus of this lecture.
November 8, 1864, stands out as one of the most remarkable days in American history. Never before—nor since—had the nation held a presidential election in the midst of a terrible civil war. This lecture and discussion will explore the momentous steps that took place in the lead-up to this pivotal election, ranging from the battlefield to the nominating conventions to the creation of mechanisms for absentee voting.
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Learn about the origins of the Vietnam War through a discussion of Nationalism and Communism in Vietnam and the growing US commitment in the conflict.
Learn about the United States’ involvement in the war both on the ground and in the air. This lecture will also explore the “political war.”
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This lecture will explore new departures and old problems. It will also touch on using American power and the war in popular culture.
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