Live Classes: Article III and Supreme Court Term Review
Wednesday, May 31 - Friday, June 2
Part lecture and part lively conversation, our live classes are accessible to the public so that students, teachers, and parents can join in a constitutional discussion with National Constitution Center scholars.
In this session, students explore Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which defines the powers of the judicial branch and the Supreme Court. This class covers the nomination and confirmation process of Supreme Court justices and how judicial power (and the Supreme Court’s role) is defined in Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 78 and cases such as Marbury v. Madison (1803). This session will go right to present day and review the current term to date!
For our final Fun Friday Session of the 2022-2023 school year, MSNBC’s Ali Velshi returns, joining National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen to discuss the Supreme Court and some of the biggest cases the justices are considering this term. Rosen regularly joins Velshi to break down constitutional issues in the news as part of MSNBC’s and the Center’s A More Perfect Union series. Velshi will also discuss his career in journalism and answer questions from participants.
- Register for Introductory Level Class May 31 | 12 p.m. ET
- Register for Advanced Level Class May 31 | 2 p.m. ET
- Register for All Levels Class June 2 | 1 p.m. ET
Participants can join through secure Zoom Webinars. All sessions are also recorded and livestreamed on our YouTube channel.
For a full schedule of classes for the 2022/2023 school year, click here.
Find supporting resources for this class on our Article III Topic Page.
Disability History, Contemporary Rights Featuring Dr. Nicole Belolan
Sunday, June 11 | 1:45 p.m., Grand Hall Overlook and Livestreamed
Register Here to Watch Online
What is disability history, and how is it related to rights for disabled people today? In this talk, historian Nicole Belolan discusses disability history and several case studies from the 1700s-1900s about how disabled people accessed culture and everyday activities before national laws about disability were passed. The talk concludes with a discussion about the connections between the development of the field of disability history and the contemporary disability rights movement. Nicole Belolan, Ph.D., is a consulting public historian and independent scholar who specializes in disability history and access and inclusion planning for disabled people. She has worked for a variety of public history institutions and has been published in venues ranging from Winterthur Portfolio to Commonplace. Belolan has spoken about disability- and accessibility-related topics for organizations such as the New Jersey Council for the Humanities, the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, and local libraries and historic sites. Belolan is the managing editor for History@Work, the National Council on Public History blog. She has served on the board of the Disability History Association since 2019.
Live from the Museum: American Flag History Show
Wednesday, June 14
*Great for 3rd through 5th Grade Students
Younger learners are invited to tune in for a special Flag Day celebration to discover the history and symbolism of the American flag! Together we’ll learn about the history of the flag, the proper way to display it, and test our knowledge with fun flag facts. Students will even learn Betsy Ross’s famous technique for cutting a five-pointed star!
- Register for the Live Museum Class June 14 | 2 p.m. ET
Click here to view the full schedule of upcoming virtual tours and museum programs.
Virtual Program: Four Harriets of History
Monday, June 19 at 9:45 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. ET
Register Here for 9:45 a.m. ET Program
Register Here for 3:45 p.m. ET Program
Visitors can explore the lives of four American women—Harriet Robinson Scott, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—who confronted slavery through literature, lawsuits, and direct action in their efforts to free themselves and others from bondage.
Watch Live: Juneteenth and the Constitution
10:45 a.m. and 1:45 p.m. ET
Register Here for 10:45 a.m. ET Program
Register Here for 1:45 p.m. ET Program
Join the Center’s education team as we walk through the constitutional milestone events leading up to June 19, 1865, and the end of slavery in the United States. Together we’ll examine the Emancipation Proclamation, the 13th Amendment, and how the battles for freedom and equality shaped the nation.
Watch Live: A Brief History of Juneteenth Featuring Dr. Emily Blanck
11:45 a.m. ET
Register here to watch online
Join us for a special scholar talk featuring Dr. Emily Blanck, associate professor of history and the executive director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies at Rowan University. While Juneteenth Independence Day is a relatively new federal holiday, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2021, Juneteenth has long and deep roots not only in the history of Texas but in the public commemoration of freedom since the American Revolution. Juneteenth rose above dozens of other emancipation days to become America’s Emancipation Day because it most explicitly grappled with the moral challenges of freedom in a nation founded on freedom and slavery.
Blanck researches the history and memory of slavery in the U.S. Her first book is Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts and South Carolina (2014), and she is completing her second book, Juneteenth: Remembering America’s Emancipation Day.
Watch Live: Kids Town Hall - Freedom Fighters
12:45 p.m. ET
Register Here to Watch Online
Join us for a special Kids Town Hall with some very famous guests—like Henry Box Brown and Bishop Richard Allen—to share their experiences in the fight for freedom and equality.
Virtual Program: Road to Freedom: The Story of Slavery in America
Monday, June 19 at 2:45 p .m. ET
Register Here
This program explores the story of slavery in the United States through a constitutional lens, taking visitors on a journey from the time of the Constitutional Convention to the start of the Civil War. It will spotlight historic figures—like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ona Judge, Angelina Grimke, Harriet Tubman, William Still, and Abraham Lincoln—and key events—such as the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott case, and the secession of the South.
Virtual Tour: Civil War and Reconstruction
Wednesday, June 21
Explore the Center’s compelling exhibit, Civil War and Reconstruction: The Battle for Freedom and Equality, as one of our museum educators leads viewers through the exhibit. Learn how constitutional clashes over slavery set the stage for the Civil War, and how the nation transformed the Constitution after the war during the Reconstruction period. Along the way, you’ll hear the stories of people central to the conflict over slavery and give you an up-close look at special artifacts on display. In honor of Juneteenth, June’s tour will also highlight the events of June 19, 1865, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed and nearly five months after the 13th Amendment was passed (six months before it would be ratified), when enslaved people in Texas learned that they were free and that slavery in America had officially been abolished.
- Register for the Virtual Tour June 21 | 12 p.m. ET
Monthly Civil War & Reconstruction Tours made possible through the generosity of TD Bank.
Watch Live: A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools Featuring Dr. Rachel Devlin
Wednesday, June 28 I 11:45 a.m. ET
National Constitution Center
Register here to watch online
Join historian Dr. Rachel Devlin for discussion of her book, A Girl Stands at the Door: The Generation of Young Women Who Desegregated America’s Schools. The struggle to desegregate America’s schools was a grassroots movement, and young women were its vanguard. In the late 1940s, parents began to file desegregation lawsuits with their daughters, forcing Thurgood Marshall and other civil rights lawyers to take up the issue and bring it to the Supreme Court. After the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, girls continued to lead the way, making up the vast majority of desegregation “firsts.” In A Girl Stands at the Door, Dr. Devlin tells the remarkable stories of these desegregation pioneers. She also explains why Black girls were seen, and saw themselves, as responsible for the difficult work of reaching across the color line in public schools. Highlighting the extraordinary bravery of young black women, this bold revisionist account illuminates today’s ongoing struggles for equality. Dr. Devlin is a professor of history at Rutgers University specializing in the cultural politics of girlhood, sexuality, and race in the postwar United States. She has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University.
Watch Live: The Road to Equality, 1950-2023 Featuring Bob Skiba
Wednesday, June 28 I 12:45 p.m. ET
National Constitution Center
Register here to watch online
This hour-long illustrated presentation begins by examining what it was like to be queer in 1950s and 1960s America, an era that saw members of the queer community demonized, medicated, or even arrested. It continues with Philadelphia’s response to this oppression—the Annual Reminder demonstrations that occurred every July 4 from 1965 – 1969 in front of Independence Hall, which were the first organized, regularly recurring protests for gay rights in the country. Finally, it tells how the Stonewall riots changed that paradigm, morphing those Annual Reminders into gay pride marches, which gave birth to the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. Bob Skiba is the curator of collections at the John J. Wilcox Jr. LGBT Archives at the William Way Community Center in Philadelphia. He teaches a “Queer Culture and Community” class for Jefferson University, writes The Gayborhood Guru history blog, and directs the Philadelphia LGBT Mapping Project.
Watch Live: Reconstructing Rights: The Reconstruction Amendments Featuring Dr. Allison Dorsey
Friday, June 30 I 11:30 a.m. ET
National Constitution Center
Register here to watch online
Join Allison Dorsey, Ph.D., professor emeritus of history at Swarthmore College, for a deep dive into the Reconstruction Amendments and how they transformed the Constitution. Dr. Dorsey previously served on the faculty of Hamilton College and Oberlin College. She also served as a research fellow at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. In 2006, she completed an National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminar on the Black Freedom Struggle at Harvard University. In addition to numerous invited lectures and presentations, Dr. Dorsey has also taught the history of Reconstruction-era black freedmen in two NEH Landmarks in American History Workshops sponsored by the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah and an NEH Summer Seminar organized by University of South Carolina Beaufort. Her academic interests include the history of African Americans, the 20th-century civil rights movement, African American film, and food history.
