The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History selected Connie Booth, Mt. Lebanon High School English teacher, to study for a week in July along with twenty-three teachers from across the country at Columbia University in New York City.  The seminar titled "Literature, History, and Culture of the Civil War" was led by Professor Andrew Delbanco, Director of American Studies at Columbia, and focused on the fiction and nonfiction of the 1850s, leading up to the Civil War.  Works by Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and many others were read and discussed as representative of the political and moral issues of that time period. 

The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American Studies offers programs and resources to teachers and promotes the study of American history by using the primary documents of an era in order to help students understand the complexity of national events and issues.