The Making of America: From the Colonial Period Through Reconstruction | Teacher Seminars Online

Amid the United States’ semiquincentennial, explore the history of the colonial era, the American Revolution, the early republic, and the origins and aftermath of the Civil War in this special seminar. A quartet of scholars will highlight the history behind America’s formative years, with a different scholar on each day.

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David W. Blight, Lead Scholar

David W. Blight is a teacher, scholar, and public historian. At Yale University he is Sterling Professor of History and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administration of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs on the history of slavery and its abolition. His biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom garnered nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as a member of a small team of advisors to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. In 2018, Blight was appointed by the Georgia Historical Society as a Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow, which recognizes national leaders in the field of history as both writers and educators whose research has enhanced or changed the way the public understands the past.

Denver Brunsman, Lead Scholar

Denver Brunsman is associate professor and chair of the History Department at The George Washington University, where his courses include George Washington and His World, taught annually at the Mount Vernon estate. He is the author of the award-winning book The Evil Necessity: British Naval Impressment in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2013) and the forthcoming book George Washington and His World (2026) as well as co-author of a leading college and AP US History textbook, Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (2016; 2020), among multiple other publications. His honors include the Oscar and Shoshana Trachtenberg Prize for Teaching Excellence and induction into the George Washington University Academy of Distinguished Teachers (2018) as well as selection to the College Board AP US History Development Committee (2018–2023; Higher Ed Chair, 2021–2023).

Lindsay M. Chervinsky, Lead Scholar

Dr. Lindsay M. Chervinsky is a presidential historian and executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon. Previously, she was a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, a historian at the White House Historical Association, and a fellow at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Chervinsky is the author of the award-winning books Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic and The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution and co-editor of Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture. She regularly writes for public audiences in publications like The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic and offers commentary for outlets like CBS News, C-SPAN, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.

Justene Hill Edwards, Lead Scholar

Justene Hill Edwards, associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, is a specialist in the history of American slavery and the evolution of Black economic life in America. She is the author of Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank (2024) and Unfree Markets: The Slaves’ Economy and the Rise of Capitalism in South Carolina (2021). Hill Edwards has won numerous fellowships and awards, most recently an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship and the 2025 Virginia Literary Award for Nonfiction. In 2024, she was awarded an inaugural Dean’s Research Fellowship by the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia. Hill Edwards is on the editorial boards of The Journal of the Civil War Era, Enterprise & Society, and the University of Virginia Press. She serves as a trustee of the Midland School, the Shockoe Institute, and the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library.