I’m in Boston this week with a great group of history and social studies teachers from Roanoke, Virginia. We are exploring the colonial and revolutionary history of the city. The week-long seminar was made possible by the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History and the Wilderness Education Program. I also get to work with two great master teachers: Joe Welch (former Pennsylvania Teacher of the Year) and Connie Lopez-Fink (former Tennessee Teacher of the Year).
On Monday morning I lectured on the Puritan origins of Boston (and New England writ-large) with a particular focus on Winthrop’s lay sermon “A Model of Christian Charity” (“city upon a hill”) and the role of women in 17th-century New England.
After Joe and Connie met with the teachers to work on pedagogy, we visited Old North Church. While most of the teachers were eager to visit the place where the lanterns were held to warn Paul Revere that the “British were coming” (as Longfellow put it, “one if by land, two if by sea”), they learned much more about how Old North Church (built in 1723) reflected the social and cultural history of eighteenth-century Boston.
Some pics:
