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Defining Freedom
Year One Activities for the WASAH Project
Campus Coordinator: Brett Barker (Univ. of Wisconsin-Marathon County)
Having chosen “freedom” as the central theme of our three-year project, the first year will be spent in an intensive study of the many ways Americans have defined that concept over the last several centuries. Freedom is something many inhabitants of North America have sought, but they often defined freedom in different, and sometimes conflicting, ways. The summer institute will analyze how Americans defined freedom during the early years of our nation's history, including detailed examinations of American Indians’ conceptions of freedom; religious, political, and economic freedom as factors in colonization; and the central role of the American Revolution and Civil War era in defining freedom in United States history. Sessions will also introduce teachers to the importance of primary sources to history, how to find these sources, and how to use them effectively in the classroom.
Workshops during the year will build on the summer institute and continue the exploration of freedom and its definitions up to the present day. The influence of war and wartime pressures upon conceptions of freedom; Americans’ perception of the West as the wellspring of freedom; the central place of the Civil War in defining freedom both through emancipation and the rhetoric of wartime; the changing conceptions of freedom occasioned by industrialization, urbanization, and immigration; and the expanding definitions of freedom in 20th-century America will all be examined in detail during the 2008-2009 school year. After thinking conceptually and critically about “freedom” as a complex and contested term in American history during the first year, teachers will be prepared to understand how this complexity helped define both struggles over, and defenses of, freedom in the American past.
Potential workshop and seminar themes during the 2008-09 School Year:
1. Defining Freedom during Wartime: From the Alien and Sedition Acts to the Patriot Act
2. “Freedom over the Next Hill”: the Westward Movement
3. “A New Birth of Freedom”: The Civil War and Reconstruction
4. “Eight Hours for What We Will”: Industrialization, Workers’ Rights, and Economic Freedom
5. Immigration, Ethnicity, and American Freedom
6. Expanding Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement and 1960s Social Activism.
Click the link below to the final schedule for the July 22-30, 2008 Summer Institute.
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