Upcoming Institutes

Reconstruction and the Remaking of Texas (Spring 2023 Webinar Series)


In the spring of 2023, Humanities Texas will hold a series of 90-minute webinars for Texas and U.S. history teachers on Reconstruction, offering new assessments of the era and providing a collection of curriculum materials geared toward bringing innovative perspectives into the classroom

Curriculum

The series will take place via Zoom from 5–6:30 p.m. CT on the following Mondays: January 16, 23, and 30 and February 6. Teachers who register will receive information for each webinar in the series. Attendance for every weekly session is encouraged but not required.

Team-taught by a historian and two master teachers (Andrew Torget, the University of North Texas; Jay Ferguson, Round Rock ISD; Chassidy Olainu-Alade, Fort Bend ISD; and Michelle Phillips, College Station ISD), the sessions will focus on exploring how Reconstruction remade the ways that Texans thought about freedom and citizenship and how state and national governments fought over the fate of both newly freed African Americans and their defeated former masters. Content will be aligned with the TEKS.

Like all Humanities Texas teacher programs, the webinar series will be content-based and teacher-centered, with an emphasis on teaching with primary sources and developing effective pedagogical strategies. Teachers attending this webinar series will walk away with an expanded understanding of Texas during the Reconstruction period and curated primary source lessons that are classroom-ready.

Spring 2023 Webinar Schedule

  • January 16—The Road to Reconstruction: This session will focus on the road to 1865 and how life in Texas changed with the end of the Civil War, the sudden death of slavery, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In attempting to rebuild a war-torn nation, the United States had to grapple with far-reaching questions about what freedom and citizenship would mean for the former slaves and their former masters in a post-war world.
  • January 23—Presidential Reconstruction:This session will trace the efforts by President Andrew Johnson to bring ex-Confederate states—like Texas—back into the American Union and how that empowered former Confederates to retake power with bold efforts to subjugate and control recently freed African Americans in the state. Remarkably, this led to an uprising in the U.S. Congress that would wrest back control of Reconstruction from President Johnson and place Texas—and ex-Confederates across the South—under the command a U.S. general.
  • January 30—Congressional Reconstruction: This session will explore how Texas was remade under military rule when the U.S. Congress took over Reconstruction. During this period, former slaves suddenly found themselves at the center of political power in the state while their formers masters found themselves disfranchised, leading to tremendous violence and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually, ex-Confederates clawed their way back into political power, as they rewrote the state constitution in an attempted to rewrite Reconstruction.
  • February 6—The Legacies of Reconstruction in Texas: This session will look at the end of Reconstruction in Texas and its long legacies in race relations, political power, and how the state approached most challenges throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus will be on the long and complicated legacies that have connected the era of Reconstruction to later developments in Texas history, continuing up through the modern day.

Eligibility

The institute is open to secondary-level social studies teachers in Texas schools.

Attendance and CPE Credits

The online program is free to teachers and their schools. Participants will receive CPE credit and a wealth of curricular materials for each session in the series. Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend every weekly session. CPE hours will be based on Zoom attendance and adjusted if a participant misses any portion of the program. In order to attend the webinars and receive CPE credit, you must be a registered participant.

How to Apply

Complete the online application for the "Reconstruction and the Remaking of Texas" online series. By submitting an application, you are signing up to receive information about and access to each weekly session of this series. Please apply as soon as possible, as registration will occur on a rolling basis.

Sponsors

The online series is made possible with major funding from the State of Texas with ongoing support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Questions about Teacher Institutes

Call 512.440.1991 or email institutes@humanitiestexas.org.