A lesson plan in which students create their own multi-media epic poems about the year 1900. Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and Hart Crane's The Bridge serve as artistic models for students, who also draw on life histories, sound recordings, and other primary resources.

Studies the national literature of the United States since the early nineteenth century. Considers novels, essays, and poems, focusing on efforts to define and reform a sense of American identity amidst increasing awareness of cultural diversity. Readings usually include works by Hawthorne, Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Dickinson, Frost, Faulkner, Maxine Kingston, and Amy Tan. This is a HASSD -CI course. Like other communications-intensive courses in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, it allows students to produce 20 pages of polished writing with careful attention to revision. It also offers substantial opportunities for oral expression, through presentations of written work, student-led discussion, and class participation. The class has a low enrollment that ensures maximum attention to student writing and opportunity for oral expression, and a writing fellow/tutor is available for consultation on drafts and revisions.

Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society presents materials held by the New-York Historical Society that document the lives of ordinary citizens from both sides who were involved in the Civil War. Included are photographs and drawings that document the war's impact, recruiting posters used in New York, letters from Civil War Nurse Sarah Blunt and the first and only issue of The Prison Times handwritten by Confederate prisoners in Fort Delaware.

Civil War Treasures is drawn from archival collections housed at the New-York Historical Society. The materials in this collection include Civil War enlistment and recruitment posters, etchings and sketches, envelopes embossed with decorations related to events or portraits of prominent personalities, photographs, and stereographs. The collection also contains a copy of the Prison Times, a newspaper produced by Confederate prisoners of war at a federal prison camp in Delaware; several of Walt Whitman’s letters written from hospital visits to wounded servicemen; a series of letters from Sarah Blunt, a nurse in hospitals at Point Lookout, Maryland, and Harper's Ferry, West Virginia; and manuscripts relating to the work of William Oland Bourne, a New York social reformer, editor, and author. Background on the types of materials included can be found at Archival Collections from which the Civil War Treasures Are Drawn.

The Special Presentation: Before, During, and After the Civil War provides a brief overview of the events of the Civil War, illustrated with graphics from the Civil War Treasures collection. This presentation could be used to introduce students to the collection.

The digitized images and documents in the collection provide access to mid-19th century archival manuscripts and popular graphics that contain a wealth of information on the political and social history of this pivotal era in American history. However, some of the materials in this collection contain language or negative stereotypes that may be offensive to some readers. Students should be prepared for encounters with such historic materials before they begin working with the collection.

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This collection offers access to the four Walt Whitman Notebooks and a cardboard butterfly that disappeared from the Library of Congress in 1942. They were returned on February 24, 1995.

The Thomas B. Harned collection of the Walt Whitman papers spans the period 1842 to 1937, with most of the items dated from 1855 to 1892. It was donated in 1918. The collection consists of correspondence, poetry and prose manuscripts, notes and notebooks, proofs and offprints, printed matter, and miscellaneous items, laminated and boxed in seven containers, and supplemented by one manuscript box of ancillary material. A detailed description of the Harned collection has been published in the Library of Congress publication Walt Whitman: A Catalog (1955), which contains an introductory essay on significant Whitman collectors and their collections and an annotated bibliographic listing of Whitman items located among the collections of various divisions within the Library of Congress.