Announcing Our New NEH-Funded Landmarks Teacher Workshop

We’re pleased to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities has awarded Ford’s Theatre a Landmarks of American History and Culture grant for a new week-long teacher workshop, to be offered twice in July 2015!

Tentatively titled “The Seat of War and Peace: The Lincoln Assassination and Its Legacy in the Nation’s Capital,” this workshop will explore the Lincoln assassination, its aftermath, Reconstruction and Lincoln’s legacy.

Teachers will learn about these topics through discussions with prominent scholars, trips to historic sites in the Washington area and discussion sessions with master educators on taking the lessons from the workshop into the classroom.

Here’s a brief summary of what the program will entail:

Sunday: We start the week with Kenneth Foote, who will discuss how Lincoln’s assassination shaped his legacy today. Monday: We then step back in time by discussing the Civil War in Washington with Kenneth Winkle, who recently wrote Lincoln’s Citadel, the defining book on the topic. This includes a tour of downtown Washington, led by an actor playing one of the first detectives on the Lincoln assassination case. Tuesday: We move to the assassination of Lincoln and the manhunt for Lincoln’s killer with Terry Alford, who is soon to publish the latest biography of John Wilkes Booth. This includes a visit to the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, where Booth first stopped in his flight from Washington. Wednesday: Martha Hodes discusses the country’s reaction to Lincoln’s assassination, about which she has written in the forthcoming Mourning Lincoln. Thursday: Kate Masur, author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C., leads a session on African-American politics in Washington during Reconstruction. As part of this session, the group will visit the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. Friday: We discuss how Lincoln’s legacy shaped Reconstruction and the country’s reunification. The group will spend part of the day learning about Lincoln’s legacy at the memorial built to him in 1922. Saturday: The session ends with a wrap-up discussion.

So mark your calendars now: The two sessions will take place July 5-11, 2015, and July 26-August 1, 2015. Be on the lookout for more details, including registration information, in the coming months. You can subscribe to our e-news to make sure you’re in the loop.

For those of you familiar with our Civil War Washington Teacher Fellows program, this is, essentially, the sequel content-wise. While the Civil War Washington Teacher Fellows program covers the Civil War in the nation’s capital city, this will cover its aftermath.

We’d like to thank NEH for allowing us to extend our teacher professional development programming even further!

David McKenzie is Digital Projects Manager at Ford’s Theatre. He is also a part-time History Ph.D. student at George Mason University, studying 19th-century U.S. and Latin American history, as well as digital history. Before coming to Ford’s in October 2013, he worked at the Jewish Historical Society of Greater Washington, The Design Minds, Inc. and the Alamo.