2014 Summer Teacher Institutes

America in the 1860s

The institute in Denton (June 17–20), titled "America in the 1860s," will follow the eighth-grade U.S. history curriculum. Topics to be covered include the causes, events, and legacy of the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln’s administration; suffragists and abolitionists; women in the South; the transcontinental railroad; Andrew Johnson’s administration; Reconstruction; art in the Civil War era; and American writing on the Civil War.

Conrad Wise Chapman, The Fifty-ninth Virginia Infantry—Wise’s Brigade, ca. 1867. Oil on canvas. 2001.7, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas.
Daniel Walker Howe

Daniel Walker Howe (keynote speaker) is Rhodes Professor of American History Emeritus at Oxford University in England and professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. His book, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, won the Pulitzer Prize in History for 2008, and is now being translated into Chinese and Korean. He grew up in Denver and took his PhD at UC, Berkeley. He spent his teaching career at Yale, UCLA, and Oxford. He is now “emeritus” at both UCLA and Oxford, but continues his research, writing, and lecturing. Professor Howe has also written four other books, as well as fifty articles for scholarly journals and The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal. He was historical advisor to the History Channel TV series America: the Story of Us. He lectures for both academic and general audiences all over the country; in the spring of 2011 he was visiting professor at Wofford College, South Carolina. He has been married for fifty-two years to Sandra Howe, a special education teacher at Birmingham Community Charter High School in the San Fernando Valley. They have a daughter, two sons, and six grandchildren, including one in middle school. 

Daniel Walker Howe.

Michael Les Benedict

Michael Les Benedict is professor emeritus at The Ohio State University. He joined the history department in 1970 and retired in 2005. He received his BA and MA from the University of Illinois and his PhD from Rice University. He has been a visiting professor at MIT, Yale Law School, the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, and Hokkaido and Doshisha Universities in Japan. Benedict is a recognized authority in Anglo American constitutional and legal history, the history of civil rights and liberties, the federal system, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. He has published over forty essays in leading American history and law journals in addition to half a dozen history books and textbooks. He serves as parliamentarian of the American Historical Association and is currently working on the constitutional politics of the Reconstruction era.

Michael Les Benedict.

Angela Boswell

Angela Boswell is professor of history at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas. She has published numerous articles on Texas women’s history as well as a book, Her Act and Deed: Women’s Lives in a Rural Southern County, 1837–1873 (2001). She serves as the second vice president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and has co-edited two anthologies of southern women’s history, Women Shaping the South: Creating and Confronting Change (2006) and Searching for Their Places: Women in the South across Four Centuries (2003).

Angela Boswell.

Albert S. Broussard

Albert S. Broussard is professor of history at Texas A&M University, where he has taught since 1985. He has published six books: Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900–1954; African American Odyssey: The Stewarts, 1853–1963; American History: The Early Years to 1877; The American Republic Since 1877; The American Vision; and Expectations of Equality: A History of Black Westerners (2012). He is past president of the Oral History Association; he received a Distinguished Teaching Award from Texas A&M University in 1997 and presented the University Distinguished Faculty Lecture in 2000. Broussard recently completed a history of African Americans in the American West from 1500 to the present for Harlan Davidson. He earned his BA from Stanford University and his MA and PhD from Duke University.

Albert S. Broussard.

Tara Carlisle

Tara Carlisle is project development librarian at the University of North Texas, where she coordinates digitization projects for the Portal to Texas History. She works with professionals from museums, archives, universities, and public libraries throughout Texas to add new material to the Portal. She is a member of the Denton County Historical Commission and serves on the Texas Library Association’s Digital Libraries Round Table. Tara has an MA in art history and an MS in information science from the University of North Texas.

Tara Carlisle.

Daniel Feller

Daniel Feller is professor of history and editor/director of The Papers of Andrew Jackson at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and taught previously at Northland College and the University of New Mexico. His books include The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815–1840, The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics, and a new edition of Harriet Martineau’s 1838 American tour narrative Retrospect of Western Travel. Three volumes of the Jackson Papers, covering the presidential years 1829 through 1831, have appeared under his stewardship, and the 1832 volume is in preparation. Feller was the lead scholar for the PBS special Andrew Jackson: Good, Evil, and the Presidency, and he has appeared on History Detectives.

Daniel Feller.

Ian Finseth

Ian Finseth specializes in American and African American literature of the nineteenth century, with particular research interests in the slave narrative, Civil War studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Shades of Green: Visions of Nature in the Literature of American Slavery, 1770-1860 (University of Georgia, 2009), and has edited several books, including The American Civil War: A Literary and Historical Anthology, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2013). His articles have appeared in American Literary History, American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, Early American Literature, and other scholarly journals. Dr. Finseth is currently at work on a new study, provisionally titled The Civil War Dead and American Modernity, which explores the connections between mortality, visuality, historical experience, and literary realism in the development of postbellum U.S. culture.

Ian Finseth.

Maury Klein

Maury Klein is professor emeritus of history at the University of Rhode Island. He is the author of seventeen books dealing with American history, the most recent of which is A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II. He is also the author of numerous articles, essays, and reviews in professional journals, newspapers, and magazines ranging from Forbes to Sports Illustrated. He enjoys an international reputation as a historian of business and economic history, and has won numerous awards. In 2011 he was elected to the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame.

Maury Klein.

Richard B. McCaslin

Richard B. McCaslin (MA, 1983, PhD, 1988), a professor of history at the University of North Texas, is the author of Tainted Breeze: The Great Hanging at Gainesville, Texas, October 1862 (LSU, 1994), which won both the Tullis Prize of the Texas State Historical Association and a commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. He has also written Lee in the Shadow of Washington (LSU, 2001), which was nominated for a Pulitzer and won the Slatten Award and the Laney Prize. As an editor or consultant he produced two volumes of Andrew Johnson papers and an annotated bibliography on Johnson, two volumes on the Texas Senate, Commitment to Excellence: One Hundred Years of Engineering Education at The University of Texas, and Remembered Be Thy Blessings: High Point University—The College Years, 1924–1991. His forthcoming works include a history of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi and an annotated edition of Joseph B. Polley, A Soldier's Letters to Charming Nellie. For his work, McCaslin is currently listed in Contemporary Authors and Who's Who in America, and he is a fellow of the Texas State Historical Association.

Richard B. McCaslin.

Andrew J. Torget

Andrew J. Torget is a historian of nineteenth-century America at the University of North Texas, where he directs a digital humanities lab. A veteran of pioneering work in digital scholarship, he has been a featured speaker at Harvard University, Stanford University, Rice University, and the Library of Congress. In 2011, he was named the inaugural David J. Weber Research Fellow at the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University, and he is currently completing a book on the transformation of Texas during the first half of the nineteenth century.

Andrew J. Torget.

Ron Tyler

Ron Tyler is the retired director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. Prior to that appointment, he served as professor of history and director of the Texas State Historical Association at The University of Texas at Austin. Tyler is editor and author of more than two dozen books, including Prints of the West; Audubon’s Great National Work: The Royal Octavo Edition of The Birds of America; Alfred Jacob Miller: Artist as Explorer; Visions of America: Pioneer Artists in a New Land; Posada’s Mexico, and The Image of America in Caricature and Cartoon. He is currently at work on books relating to nineteenth-century lithographs of Texas.

Ron Tyler.

Jennifer L. Weber

Jennifer L. Weber is associate professor of history at the University of Kansas. She is the author of two books. Her first, for adults, is Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, about antiwar Democrats in the Civil War North. Her second, Summer’s Bloodiest Days: The Battle of Gettysburg as Told from All Sides, is about the Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath, and is targeted for nine- to fourteen-year-olds. The National Council for Social Studies in 2011 named Summer’s Bloodiest Days a Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People. Professor Weber also has served as the executive editor of the Key Concepts in American History series—eleven books explaining various aspects of government to middle school students—and edited a supplemented edition of The Red Badge of Courage for Everbind. Her most recent book, which she coedited, is The Struggle for Equality, a collection of essays in honor of her graduate adviser, James M. McPherson. She is currently working on a book about the Union’s conscription effort and its consequences. In addition to her work at KU, she serves on the advisory board of the Abraham Lincoln Institute and the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College.

Jennifer L. Weber.

Kenneth J. Winkle

Kenneth J. Winkle is the Thomas C. Sorenson Professor of American History at the University of Nebraska, where he has taught since 1987. Winkle received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin and is the author or editor of eight books. His The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln won the Abraham Lincoln Institute’s book award for the best book on Lincoln published in 2001. His Oxford Atlas of the Civil War won the Society for Military History’s Distinguished Book Award. He wrote a volume on Abraham and Mary Lincoln (2011) for the Concise Lincoln Library series, and his most recent volume is Lincoln’s Citadel: The Civil War in Washington, DC (2013). He is also the co-director of “Civil War Washington,” a digital project of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska.

Kenneth J. Winkle.

Steven E. Woodworth

Steven E. Woodworth is professor of history at Texas Christian University and author, co-author, or editor of thirty-one books. Born in Ohio and raised in Illinois, he graduated from Southern Illinois University (BA), studied at the University of Hamburg, earned a PhD from Rice University, and went on to teach at Bartlesville Wesleyan College in Oklahoma and Toccoa Falls College in Georgia. In 1997, he came to TCU, where he specializes in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Professor Woodworth is a two-time winner of the Fletcher Pratt Award, winner of the Society for Military History’s 2006 Distinguished Book Award, a two-time finalist for the Peter Seaborg Award of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War, and winner of the Grady McWhiney Award of the Dallas Civil War Round Table for lifetime contribution to the study of Civil War history. In 2012, he was named by the Princeton Review as one of “the Best 300 Professors” in the United States.

Steven E. Woodworth.

Robert Wooster

Robert Wooster is Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where he has taught since 1985. In 1998, he was named a Piper Professor for his distinguished teaching. A fellow and past president of the Texas State Historical Association, he is author of ten books, most recently The American Military Frontiers: The United States Army in the West, 1783–1900 (University of New Mexico Press, 2009).

Robert Wooster.