Rutgers Institute for High School Teachers

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Rutgers Institute for High School Teachers

The Rutgers University High School Teachers Institute has been offering one day interdisciplinary seminars for over a quarter of a century.

These seminars provide teachers with an opportunity for in-depth study and analysis of topics central to their teaching. Teachers are able to work with noted scholars in a collegial setting learning the latest interpretations of key historical events and literary trends. Teachers receive New Jersey professional development credit, and will come away with a variety of documents and sources that

they can immediately use in their classrooms. This year's offerings:

*World War I and the Global History of the Twentieth Century (10/10/14)
Michael Adas, Abraham E. Voorhees Professor of History, Department of History, Rutgers University

*The "Great Patriotic War" of the Soviet Union (1941-1945): Myth and Realities (10/24/14)
Jochen Hellbeck , Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University

*Telecommunications in American Society 1844-1984 (11/14/14)
Sheldon Hochheiser, Archivist and Institutional Historian, IEEE Center, Stevens Institute of Technology

*Memoir and Memory: Myth and Reality (11/20/14)
Leslie Fishbein, Associate Professor, Departments of American Studies and Jewish Studies, Rutgers

*Oral History: Great Depression and WWII (12/5/14)
Shaun Illingworth, Director, Rutgers Oral History Archives, Rutgers University

*Teaching The French Revolution (1/30/15)
Jennifer Jones, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University

* Women in the American Revolution (2/6/15)
Carol Berkin, Presidential Professor of History, Baruch College, CUNY

*Teaching Major Themes in African and Global History Using Life Stories and Small Places (2/27/15)
Allen Howard, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Rutgers University

*Maritime History as World History: The Interplay of Technology and Society (II) (3/13/15)
John Vardalas, Outreach Historian, IEEE History Center, Stevens Institute of Technology

*Inventing America: Thomas Edison and the History of Technology and Industry (3/23/15)
Paul Israel, Professor, Department of History, Rutgers; Director, Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers

*Approaches to Teaching about War in American History (4/23/15)
Jonathan Lurie, Professor Emeritus, Department of History, Rutgers-Newark
Maxine N. Lurie, Professor Emerita, Department of History, Seton Hall University

*Teaching the US Occupation of Postwar Japan: The Oliver L. Austin Photographic Collection Digital Archive (5/1/15)
Kurt Piehler, Associate Professor of History & Director, Institute on World War II and the Human Experience, Florida State University

For detailed descriptions of each seminar, please see our website:
rcha.rutgers.edu

11/20/2022

“The World of Medieval Monasticism”

December 9, 2022

Anthony di Battista, Lecturer, Department of History, Rutgers University

From illuminated manuscripts to herb gardens to inspirations for Chaucer and Shakespeare, monasteries are central to an understanding of the Middle Ages. Monasticism was among the most popular and influential forms of religious devotion in the medieval period. Its influences extended well beyond the walls of the monastery and helped to depose emperors and to found universities. This seminar will examine the origins of medieval monasticism from the Desert Fathers to the founding of the Franciscans and will ‘illuminate’ the enduring influence of these movements on the formation of the medieval world.

09/19/2022

“Class, Race, Gender, and Empire in the Making of the British Industrial Revolution”

September 30, 2022

Seth Koven, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University

Steam engines, factories, coal and textiles are part of any historical reckoning about how and why Britain became the world's first great industrial capitalist economy. This seminar will also show why Caribbean slavery, sugar, Indian o***m, and the labor of poor women and children were no less important in the making of the so-called Industrial Revolution. The seminar will explore the emergence of the concept of the "Industrial Revolution," the many ways in which scholars have approached it while also using primary sources drawn from across the globe to link together British, imperial and global histories.

02/07/2022

“Broken Pots and Broken Bones: Understanding the Ancient World”

February 18, 2022

Adam Di Battista, New York University

Without written histories, how do scholars understand cultures that existed thousands of years in the past? While many ancient societies lack a formal historical record, most cultures left behind artifacts, texts, and even entire settlements. Using case studies from the Mediterranean and Near East (ca. 3500-500 BCE), we will examine large-scale patterns in the ancient world, such as ancient colonialism and international trade. However, archaeology also offers an intimate view into the private lives of individuals, including the foods they ate, the tools and daily objects they used, and the art they created. This seminar will examine how archaeologists and other scholars of the ancient world interpret the past at both inter-cultural and individual scales.

12/15/2021

“The Scottsboro Trials of the 1930s and the Trial of the Men Accused of Emmett Till’s Murder in the mid-1950s.”

February 4, 2022

Paul Clemens, Professor of History, Rutgers University

Our seminar will deal with two famous court cases that helped alert the nation to how local law reinforced racial injustice before the era of student sit-ins and voting rights struggles in the 1960s. The Scottsboro trials in Alabama during the 1930s Great Depression of nine African American accused of ra**ng two white women was an attempt at a legal lynching. While the Supreme Court would twice step in and provide a new definition of what the 14th Amendment protection of a fair trial meant in America, the lives of the defendants were brutally affected. We will then look at the story of Emmett Till’s murder in 1955, shortly before the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott. The Mississippi murder led to a “not guilty” verdict by an all-white jury In Mississippi of those accused of the murder. The murder and the acquittals inspired a national protest, led by Till’s mother, that was a foundational moment in strengthening the resolve of civil rights workers for racial justice. We will also consider how recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of both trials and the people involved. If you would like to read about the trials before the seminar, see https://famous-trials.com/ (a marvelous teaching resources, if you do not know it already).

11/22/2021

“How Did the Cold War End?”

December 3, 2021

David Foglesong, Professor of History, Rutgers University

This seminar will examine different approaches to explaining and remembering the end of the American-Soviet Cold War. We will begin by analyzing interpretations that concentrate on the roles of “great men,” particularly Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. Then we will consider arguments about how “citizen diplomats” contributed to the end of the Cold War by challenging negative stereotypes, altering popular attitudes, and influencing government policies. Finally, we will discuss the impact of ideas about how the Cold War ended – particularly the notions that the United States won the Cold War and that the Cold War ended with the collapse of the USSR in December 1991 – on US foreign policy in the last three decades. The seminar will be led by David Foglesong, a historian of American-Russian relations. His lectures will draw on his books, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire” (2007) and From Distant Friends to Intimate Enemies (forthcoming), as well as on his current research about citizen activism and the end of the Cold War.

10/28/2021

“Piracy in World History: “The Greatest Pirate in History”

November 19, 2021

Johan Mathew, Assistant Professor of History, Rutgers University

Pirates were some of the most depraved and horrific individuals in human history. And yet they are also somehow beloved characters fit for Disney cartoons; for some reason they make “rape and pillage” sound like a birthday party game. How do we reconcile this disturbing contradiction? This workshop takes three figures from across the globe who have a claim to be the world’s greatest pirate. In understanding their stories and their historical contexts we seek to explore issues of race, gender, imperialism, inequality, and the long history of globalization. In the workshop we will be introduced to different eras and locations of piratical activity and we will learn what these instances reveal about their societies and how we can use these exciting stories to explore important historical concepts and debates.

10/07/2021

“Baseball History as American History”

October 22, 2021

Norman Markowitz, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University

This seminar will examine America’s “national pastime” as a microcosm of a changing American society and culture. Through the study of baseball in U.S. History, the seminar will examine player individualism in conflict with team effort, and player solidarity in conflict with owners’ control. Historic segregation and ethnic discrimination will be examined as they conflicted with the egalitarian and democratic ideals celebrated in the early years of the game. The development of baseball from its first inceptions as an amateur “gentleman’s game” in the pre-Civil War era to its present role as a multi-billion dollar transactional business will be the primary focus of the day.

09/15/2021

Africa and World War II

October 1, 2021

Allen Howard, Professor Emeritus of African and Global History, Rutgers University

Not the fact that African troops fought and were killed in sizeable numbers or that North Africa saw many key battles, especially those connected with the defeat of Rommel. If one shifts the focus from battles to logistics, we see that African farmers and miners in colonies supplied vital food and other materiel and that Africa furnished key ports and other bases. The main case here is Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone -- a British Colony where 6,000 Americans were stationed. It was the second most important convoy port, and women and men in Freetown lived through food shortages, air raid drills, etc. as in London. It truly was a World War. This seminar will provide educators with novel sources, photos, a bibliography and new ideas, as well as a chance to talk about teaching wars.

“Baseball History as American History”

09/08/2021

The Rutgers High School Teachers Institute is returning to in-person seminars this year with limited capacity. We will also offer a remote option for educators unable to attend. Please visit our website for registration and series information: https://rcha.rutgers.edu/high-school-teachers-institute/2018-2019-seminar-schedule

We look forward to seeing you again!

10/30/2020

The World of the Gothic Cathedral: From the Building of Chartres to the Burning of Notre Dame

November 13, 2020

Anthony Di Battista, Lecturer, Department of History, Rutgers University

Gothic Cathedrals are the most beautiful and the most visible remainders of the Middle Ages. They required generations of laborers to construct them, and in the modern era are still used every day for precisely the same purpose for which they were built.This seminar will examine the world that fostered the construction of these edifices: the economic changes necessary to build on a monumental scale, the role of pilgrimage, the technical challenges, and the flowering of the Gothic style across Europe.

10/21/2020

African American Young Women, Brown vs. Board of Education, and the Long Civil Rights Movement

October 30, 2020

Rachel Devlin, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University

Brown vs. Board of Education has been called “The Case of the Century” and “the finest hour of American law.” This workshop will examine how and why African American young women and girls led the fight to bring Brown to fruition and then, in vastly disproportionate numbers, volunteered to desegregate historically white schools in the early nineteen sixties. In the process we will examine the everyday lives of black girls at midcentury with an eye toward understanding the particular skills and commitment they brought to school desegregation in particular and the larger civil rights movement in general. We will follow girls through the arduous process of filing desegregation law suites and into formerly all-white schools where they were met with daily violence, harassment and social ostracism. We will consider their oral histories, keeping in mind how individual women chose to tell their stories of what was, by all accounts, a war inside American public schools. We will also consider how girls and young women fought back against sexual harassment and violence, the outsized role women played in the Montgomery bus boycott and other landmark civil rights protests, and how their activism informed the civil rights movement as a whole from the 1940s through the 1960s.

10/09/2020

Accidents and Disaster in the US and the World

October 16, 2020

Jamie Pietruska, Associate Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University

Although accidents and disasters are often perceived as isolated, rare events, they have become increasingly central to the history of the United States and the world over the past four centuries. Through efforts to anticipate hazards, develop new tools for risk management, build infrastructures for relief, expand government capacity for disaster response, and remember victims, accidents and disasters have become a part of everyday life. In this seminar, we will begin with an introduction to some concepts (including normal accidents, unnatural disasters, and disaster capitalism) that scholars have used to understand risk and catastrophe in modern life. Then we will trace the history of hurricane prediction, beginning with knowledge about hurricanes in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic World, then examining the late nineteenth-century use of telegraph networks for storm tracking and the creation of the U.S. hurricane reporting network in the West Indies during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, and concluding with computerized hurricane forecast models in the context of Hurricane Katrina. The seminar will also suggest ways to incorporate the history of hurricane forecasting into broader themes in U.S. history courses, including American imperial expansion, the growth of federal administrative capacity, and racialized patterns of housing and transportation in American cities.

Address

88 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ
08901

Website

http://rcha.rutgers.edu/

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