This week-long professional development seminar offers teachers a comprehensive exploration of immigration to the United States from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on immigrants’ pursuit of freedom and opportunity, their contributions to American society, and the changing legal and political landscape, participants will examine how successive generations of newcomers helped shape the nation.
The seminar begins with nineteenth-century immigration, particularly the arrival of Irish Catholics fleeing famine, poverty, and political repression. Participants will explore the growth of immigrant communities in American cities, the rise of nativism, and the ways immigrants used political participation, community institutions, and local government to secure opportunity and influence.
The program then turns to the great migrations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when millions of Irish, German, Italian, Jewish, Polish, and other European immigrants entered through Ellis Island, while Asian immigrants arrived through Angel Island. Teachers will consider how these newcomers confronted discrimination, preserved cultural traditions, built communities, and gradually became participants in American civic and cultural life.
A field study in New York City, including Ellis Island, the Tenement Museum, Chinatown, and Little Italy, will allow participants to examine immigration through the powerful lens of place, memory, and community.
Teachers will leave with deeper historical understanding and practical strategies for helping students explore immigration as a central and continuing part of the American story.
Speaker:
Harold Holzer
Harold Holzer is a distinguished historian of Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War era, and nineteenth-century American political culture. He is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College and has served on Hunter’s history faculty. Before joining Hunter, Holzer spent 23 years as a senior vice president at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2026, he was appointed Manhattan Borough Historian.
A graduate of Queens College, City University of New York, Holzer has authored, co-authored, or edited more than 55 books and hundreds of articles. His recent book, Brought Forth on This Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration, examines Lincoln’s evolving views on immigration and the important role immigrants played in nineteenth-century American politics, the Civil War, and the nation’s developing understanding of citizenship and national identity.
Holzer’s other major works include Lincoln at Cooper Union; Lincoln President-Elect; The Presidents vs. the Press; and Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion, which received the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, and Goldsmith Book Prize. His scholarship has explored Lincoln’s political leadership and rhetoric, emancipation, public opinion, the press, and the ways Americans have remembered and interpreted Lincoln.
In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded Holzer the National Humanities Medal for his contributions to the study of Lincoln. He was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2025 and previously co-chaired the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. Holzer is also co-founder and chairman of The Lincoln Forum and served as a historical adviser to Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.
Mark Thomas, PhD
Mark Thomas, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at La Salle University, where he teaches courses in international relations, American foreign policy, political thought, and constitutional and legal studies. He also serves as the faculty contact for La Salle’s Pre-Law program and has been active in the university’s civic and constitutional education programs.
Thomas earned his BA from La Salle University, an MA in International Relations and PhD in Political Science from the University of Notre Dame, and an MBA from the American Graduate School of International Management. Before entering academia, he worked extensively overseas, including in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Central Europe, and Central Asia, experience that informs his teaching and research on international affairs and national security.
Thomas’s scholarly interests have included the foreign policies and political development of Central Europe, Ukraine, Russia, and other successor states of the Soviet Union. Following the September 11 attacks and the Global War on Terrorism, his research increasingly examined national-security law and the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in shaping the constitutional and legal framework governing national-security policy. More recently, his scholarship has addressed the war in Ukraine, including the integration of cyber operations into modern warfare.
At La Salle, Thomas has also emphasized experiential civic education. He has led students on academic programs in Washington, D.C., connecting classroom study of politics, foreign policy, and constitutional government with visits to Congress, federal agencies, diplomatic institutions, and other centers of American government.
Typically scheduled from Sunday through Friday in the summer, Founding Forward’s week-long teacher seminars are hosted at Union League Liberty Hill, a 300+ acre private conference center and golf course in suburban Philadelphia. Each seminar has a single theme and consists of content-focused talks by highly regarded scholars (morning and afternoon) interspersed each day with activation sessions featuring either lesson demonstrations from master teachers and presentation from resource providers like Retro Report or Periodic Presidents. Finally, each seminar includes an out-of-classroom field study to historic sites, archives, and museums.
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