Category: Recent News

The March 2010 issue of America’s Civil War calls the House Divided research engine “one of the most compelling sesquicentennial online projects” and predicts the site “will become a great resource for synthesizing many seemingly disparate elements of how and what we learn and teach about the Civil War.”

“House Divided: The Civil War Era and Dickinson College,” dedicated to the memory of Civil War historian Brian C. Pohanka (Class of 1977), is one of the most compelling sesquicentennial online projects I’ve come across. While the goal of the project – to create resources for teachers and students to bring the Civil War to life – is standard fare, it is the way Dickinson approaches its goal that is so special.
The site leverages the college’s own rich 226-year history to provide a “window and a starting point” to investigate the war and the events that led up to it. With a student body comprised almost evenly of Southerners and Northerners before the war, Dickinson “itself was a House Divided and its graduates were deeply involved in the sectional crisis.” President James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln’s predecessor, and Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott Decision of 1857, are but two of the many alumni whose letters, diaries and other documents have been digitized on the site.
But the digital collection is not just limited to Dickinson alumni; it includes the histories of thousands of individuals, places and events that contributed to the war and its aftermath. The site’s main page is organized in a format titled the “Daily Report” that lists birthdays, events and documents that occurred 150 years before a specific date. The site will cover the period from 1840 to 1880.
House Divided also includes almanacs, galleries, blogs, a digital classroom and much more. But one additional feature that reflects Dickinson’s forward thinking is the convention of dubbing it the “Draft Edition” from June 2008 until April 2011. This caveat means that despite the site’s abundance of material and functionality, it is still a work in progress and will not be fully fact-checked or functional until its official launch of the eve of the 2011 sesquicentennial. Labeling the site a draft edition can be seen as a throwback –an instance in which a process from old media is adapted and married to new media. But I expect the House Divided site will become a great resource for synthesizing many seemingly disparate elements of how and what we learn and teach about the Civil War.”

“American History TV” on C-SPAN 3 featured an episode inside the classroom

of House Divided Project co-director Matthew Pinsker. C-SPAN cameras followed Pinsker as he led a discussion about Abraham Lincoln and the election of 1860 for a class at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. During the session, Pinsker premiered a documentary short film recently created for Journal Divided. “Honest Abe” is one of six videos created to support new interactive essays based on excerpts from the unedited manuscript of Michael Burlingame’s Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008). Other essays include “,” “Railsplitter,” and “Make No Contracts.”

You can watch the full 75-minute episode on C-SPAN’s website.

SPECIAL PANEL AT FORD’S THEATRE TACKLES QUESTION,
“WHAT WOULD LINCOLN DO?”  (click below to view)

October 15, 2013

Noted Lincoln historians and top-flight national policy experts debate
how Abraham Lincoln gets used and sometimes abused by Washington policymakers as they invoke his legacy on behalf of their policy positions

Washington, D.C. – A unique partnership of four major non-profit institutions will host a special panel titled, Understanding How Lincoln Gets Used (and Abused) in Today’s Washington at Ford’s Theatre (511 Tenth Street, NW) on Tuesday, October 15, 2013. The panel of noted historians and policy experts will be filmed and streamed over the Internet as part of an open, online graduate course currently being offered by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the House Divided Project at Dickinson College.

The Ford’s Theatre Society, New America Foundation, House Divided Project, and Gilder Lehrman Institute are the four co-sponsoring institutions for this unique panel, which promises to offer a wide-ranging discussion of ways that modern policymakers have sometimes tried to channel Abraham Lincoln’s example in formulating and selling their policies. The panelists will debate whether Lincoln’s legacy has been used or abused in the modern context, and will offer their own assessments about how (or whether) to apply Lincoln’s lessons to some of the challenges of modern times. Panelists include:

* Moderator: Matthew Pinsker, Pohanka Chair for Civil War History, Dickinson College and Fellow, New America Foundation
* Michael Lind, Policy Director, Economic Growth Program, New America Foundation and author What Lincoln Believed (2006)
* Richard Norton Smith, noted presidential historian, George Mason University and former founding director, Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
* Craig Symonds, Emeritus Professor of History, U.S. Naval Academy and Lincoln Prize-winning author, Lincoln and His Admirals (2008)
* James L. Swanson, Senior Scholar, Heritage Foundation and best-selling author, Manhunt (2006)

This is event is free and open to the press. Interested media should contact Lauren Beyea at lbeyea@fords.org to reserve tickets. Advance tickets may also be reserved via Ticketmaster (fees apply) or at the Ford’s Theatre Box Office (no fee) beginning September 16, 2013. For more information, visit http://www.fords.org/event/what-would-lincoln-do. The session will also be available for online viewing the next day in conjunction with a live teacher’s session and filmed virtual tour of Ford’s Theatre that will run from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. EST (Oct. 16, 2013) at the “Understanding Lincoln” Livestream webpage: http://new.livestream.com/gilderlehrman/lincoln

Event summary:
Understanding How Lincoln Gets Used (and Abused) in Today’s Washington
Ford’s Theatre (511 Tenth Street, NW, Washington, DC)
October 15, 2013
12:30 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.

About Ford’s Theatre
One of the most visited sites in the nation’s capital, Ford’s Theatre reopened its doors in 1968, more than a hundred years after the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. Operated through a partnership between Ford’s Theatre Society and the National Park Service, Ford’s Theatre is the premier destination in the nation’s capital to explore and celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s ideals and leadership principles: courage, integrity, tolerance, equality and creative expression.

About the New America Foundation
The New America Foundation is a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute that invests in new thinkers and new ideas to address the next generation of challenges facing the United States. To learn more, please visit us online at www.newamerica.org or follow us on Twitter @NewAmerica

About the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History 
Founded in 1994, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History is the nation’s leading nonprofit provider of K–12 teacher training and classroom resources. Our programs promote excellence in the teaching and learning of American history. Gilder Lehrman programs include Teacher Seminars, a national Affiliate School Program, online courses, Traveling Exhibitions, online materials, and more for teachers, students, and the general public. Visit www.gilderlehrman.org to learn more.

About Dickinson College
Dickinson College, founded in 1773, is a highly selective, private residential liberal-arts college known for its innovative curriculum. Its mission is to offer students a useful education in the arts and sciences that will prepare them for lives as engaged citizens and leaders. The 180-acre campus of Dickinson College is located in the heart of historic Carlisle, Pa. The House Divided Project at Dickinson, directed by history professor Matthew Pinsker, specializes in building digital resources on the Civil War era for K-12 and undergraduate classrooms.  To find out more about the project and its flagship online course, “Understanding Lincoln,” go to http://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/
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MEDIA CONTACT: Lauren Beyea at lbeyea@fords.org

The House Divided Project at Dickinson College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History are doing something unprecedented. They are launching an open,online graduate course called “Understanding Lincoln” that will be taught by noted Lincoln scholar Matthew Pinsker in Summer / Fall 2013 and available for anybody who wants to learn more about Abraham Lincoln and his legacy during the the period leading up to the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address. The limited enrollment graduate section of this unique online seminar which offers a full-semester graduate course credit (3.0 hours certified by transcript from Dickinson College) is designed especially for K-12 educators who want to learn innovative ways to teach Lincoln’s writings within the new Common Core state standards. Registration for graduate students ends on Friday, July 19, 2013 but space is limited and enrollment will close on a first-come, first served basis.  The course tuition is $450.  The open section of the course is entirely free, however, and offers any lifelong learners a chance to follow along with selected elements of the experience and to receive a Certificate of Completion from Dickinson College if they complete certain key components of the coursework.

Graduate students in the limited enrollment section of the online course will also have a very special opportunity to participate in the events surrounding the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  On November 19, 2013, selected graduate students from “Understanding Lincoln”  will be invited to attend the anniversary commemoration in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania at no cost –including free travel and accommodations.  After the morning Dedication Day ceremonies, we will host a live-streaming webcast directly from the historic Wills House in Gettysburg where President Lincoln stayed during the night before he delivered his famous address.  Partly through the extraordinary generosity of the Lincoln Leadership Institute, we will then be able to highlight the best multi-media final  projects submitted by students in the course.  These are the students who will be selected by Prof. Pinsker to attend the ceremonies and present their work in a live online session with fellow students and other interested course observers.

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

If you’d like to see an example of how this online learning experience works in a history course, please check out this video segment on the Emancipation Proclamation, produced by Gilder Lehrman education coordinator Lance Warren and featuring Prof. Pinsker leading a short, close reading of the January 1, 1863 document.  You might be surprised by what you don’t know about this famous executive order and how much can be gained by going through it almost line-by-line.

Additional Course Information

Faculty Profiles

Matthew Pinsker will be the main instructor for “Understanding Lincoln.”  Pinsker holds the Brian Pohanka Chair for Civil War History at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he also directs the House Divided Project, an innovative effort to create free digital resources on the Civil War Era for K-12 classrooms.  Pinsker is the author of various books and articles on Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln’s Sanctuary (Oxford, 2003) and the forthcoming Boss Lincoln (W.W. Norton).  Currently, Pinsker serves as a Visiting Research Professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  He is also a Distinguished Lecturer with the Organization of American Historians (OAH) and a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC.

Lance Warren will serve as the chief course producer.  Warren is Director of Digital Projects for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.  He leads Gilder Lehrman’s online education programs and creates original video content for use in K-12 classrooms.  His co-directed film, That World is Gone: Race and Displacement in a Southern Town, won the Audience Award for Short Documentary at the 2009 Virginia Film Festival.  Warren received a B.A. in History and Political Science from Syracuse University  and an M.A. in History from Brandeis University.

Course Description

Nobody would have appreciated the power of open online education more than Abraham Lincoln, one of the great self-made, lifelong learners in world history.  This open online graduate history course aspires to create the kind of course that Lincoln would have appreciated. Just about 150 years ago, President Lincoln explained at Gettysburg how he believed that the Civil War would establish what he termed “a new birth of freedom” for the United States.  During our sessions in 2013 (July 23-Nov. 19), Professor Matthew Pinsker will use this anniversary moment to share the latest historical insights about Lincoln as well as to introduce participants to a number of cutting-edge digital resources for the study and teaching of Lincoln’s legacy.  The course will be organized around five popular designations that have been applied to the great president over the years (Railsplitter, Honest Abe, Father Abraham, Great Emancipator, and Savior of the Union) and will dig deeper into each of these themes in order to help explore their origins and assess their validity. In the process, participants will come to better understand Lincoln as man and president, and will also enjoy a unique online platform to share their own insights.

Course Objective

Crowd-sourcing is a phrase used to describe how individuals can help develop online projects by contributing content to them remotely.  Through the “Understanding Lincoln” course, we will attempt an experiment in what might be called “class-sourcing.”  Participants in this course will have the opportunity to develop various types of content that will be published online as part of a forthcoming multi-media edition of Lincoln’s selected writings.  The very best work by course participants will then be featured during a Livestreaming field trip to Gettysburg on November 19, 2013 –the date which marks the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address.  We will webcast that day from the historic Wills House where Lincoln slept the night before delivering his famous remarks. Three seminar participants whose work has been judged the best in the course will then be invited to participate in the November 19 events at no cost to themselves –with travel and lodging costs paid for by the course sponsors.

Course Readings

All readings for this course will be freely available online.  Beyond intensive readings of Lincoln’s own letters, speeches and personal documents, participants will also have assigned essays and articles to read from leading historians such as David Blight, Michael Burlingame, Eric Foner, Mark Neely, James Oakes, and Sean Wilentz.

Course Assignments

Graded assignments for this course will include various types of online discussion and written participation as well as a series of short writing assignments, including blogging.  The culmination of the course will involve the production of a major multi-media teaching project with an accompanying research paper that describes the project’s pedagogical intentions.  The final multi-media projects will employ at least one of the digital tools introduced during the course utilized in a way that helps teach Lincoln’s legacy in a creative fashion by presenting various documents and writings from his contemporaries.

 Course Schedule

Dates and times for particular course sessions remain subject to change, but here is a tentative list of key course events:

Friday, July 19 Registration closes

Tuesday, July 23 Seminar Introduction (7-9pm EST)

Thursday, August 1 Discussion section (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 7 Seminar –Lincoln the Railsplitter (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 14 Discussion section (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 21 Seminar –Honest Abe (7-9pm EST)

Wednesday, August 28 Seminar –Father Abraham (7-9pm EST)

Tuesday, September 3 Seminar –Great Emancipator (7-9pm EST)

Tuesday, September 10 Seminar –Savior of the Union (7-9pm EST)

Tuesday, October 15 Final multi-media projects due

Tuesday, November 19 Virtual Field trip –Gettysburg Address with special participant presentations (Time TBA)

Sunday, December 15 Final grades posted

CLICK HERE TO REGISTER NOW

Claiming that the fast-growing House Divided research engine shows admirable “sophistication,” Civil War Times recently reviewed elements of the project in the August 2010 issue:

“The House Divided Project builds on the experience of Dickinson College’s graduates to interpret the war era. Dickinson boasts a president, a chief justice of the U. S. Supreme Court and others among its 19th-century alumni who played roles in both the Union and Confederacy.

Readers who prefer to start the day with a historic newspaper will love the site’s opening page. After clicking “Enter,” a series of images appear, linked to biographical sketches of “Dickinsonians” born that day. Scanning down to “Events,” readers find documents or summaries of major events. In some cases there is no document, just a notation (e.g., in May 1857, Harriet Tubman was helping her enslaved parents escape to freedom). More details can be found with events tied directly to the college, such as when in 1847 Professor John McClintock and the free black community in Carlisle, Pa., tried to stop slave catchers from returning escaped slaves to Maryland. Visitors can follow links to newspaper coverage of the event, as well as brief bios of McClintock and others involved, and they will also find links to broad discussions of slavery, fugitive slave laws and the Underground Railroad.

Started in 2008, House Divided is separated into subcategories of User’s Guide, Almanacs, Teacher’s Guide and Collections. Visitors can search the site by calendars (under “Almanacs”) or subject headings (under “Collections”) – or they can opt to use the search bars to narrow their investigations.

House Divided’s creators warn that the site is still under constructions and likely will be through 2011. Anyone searching for information on battles and combatants may chafe at the limited attention these issues currently receive. The site is only completed through portions of 1861 at this point, so it is difficult to judge whether its designers will address the war with the same sophistication they brought to the crises of the 1850s.” (By Susannah J. Ural)

On Sunday September 12, 2010 members of the White Carnation League met at Dickinson College’s Waidner-Spahr Library for an opportunity to conduct research and share information with the House Divided Project’s staff and student interns. This event was organized as part of the Pennsylvania Grand Review, which in early November 2010 commemorated Harrisburg’s decision in November 1865 to honor the African Americans who fought during the Civil War. While “the gathering was meant to educate attendees on how to research their ancestors,” Carlisle Sentinel reporter Greg Gross explains that it “also proved educational for”  Dickinson College students and staff. Descendants brought old photographs, documents,

and told interesting stories about the men who served in the United States Colored Troops. As House Divided co-director Professor Matthew Pinsker noted, “it was interesting seeing college students interact with descendants.” You can read the full article online or download a PDF version.

On Saturday morning, April 16, 2011,  Matthew Pinsker will lead a teacher workshop focused on introducing educators to a variety of the best online resources for the study of the Civil War including many of the new tools provided by the House Divided Project. America’s Civil War magazine has already dubbed House Divided as “one of the most compelling sesquicentennial online projects” and predicts the site “will become a great resource for synthesizing many seemingly disparate elements of how and what we learn and teach about the Civil War.” Bloggers have been equally enthusiastic.  One history teacher / blogger claims that House Divided “will be invaluable in U.S. History classrooms.”

Breakout sessions will include hands-on computer demonstrations, focus groups and special sessions on particular topics related to Abraham Lincoln  and the outbreak of the war.

Matthew Pinsker is the Brian Pohanka Chair of Civil War History at Dickinson College and Co-Director of the House Divided Project.  He is the

author of Lincoln’s Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers’ Home (2003).  During the last five years, he has led professional development workshops on the

Civil War era for more than 1,500 teachers from 45 states.

Registration

If you would like to attend, please complete the form below. If you have any questions, contact us at hdivided@dickinson.edu

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Details

We are grateful to the following sponsors and partners for their support:

Yale University historian David W. Blight will speak on Saturday, April 16, 2011 at 7pm in the Anita Tuvin Schlector Auditorium (ATS) at Dickinson College, providing a keynote address for the opening of the Civil War 150th anniversary and the House Divided Project launch weekend. This event is co-sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues.  Renowned author of Race and Reunion: The American Civil War in American Memory (2001), Professor Blight will explore the meaning of the conflict on its 150th anniversary.  A book signing will follow.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author of numerous books, including A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (for which he received the Bancroft, Abraham Lincoln, and Frederick Douglass prizes), and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. He is also the co-author of the bestselling American history textbook, A People and a Nation.

One of the classes that Blight teaches at Yale University is available online through Open Yale Courses. This is not simply a single lecture, as you can listen or watch all twenty seven classes of HIST 119: The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877. As Blight explains, the “primary goal of the course is to understand the multiple meanings of a transforming event in American history.” Transcripts of each lecture are also available.

Listen to the Keynote Address

Details

We are grateful to the following sponsors and partners for their support: