Starting March 3, 2003, David Blight will moderate a month-long open discussion on teaching the Civil War on the HISTORY MATTERS Web site (below). To subscribe, go to http://ashp.listserv.cuny.edu/archives/civilwarforum.html and choose "Join or leave the list." This forum will run from March 3 through March 31, 2003.

Blight will answer questions and lead a discussion on teaching the Civil War in high school and college level U.S. history survey courses, with specific suggestions for strategies and sources. Although the moderator will respond to questions and comments, we also encourage participants to respond to one another.

David Blight is Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College. His most recent book is Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 1863-1915 (2001), winner of numerous prizes, including the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for the most outstanding book on slavery, resistance, and/or abolition. He is also the author of Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989); and the editor or co-editor of numerous books on the Civil War period, including Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (1997). Blight has also written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African-American intellectual and cultural history. In addition to his career teaching at colleges and universities, he was for seven years a public high school teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.

HISTORY MATTERS is a gateway to the Web for teachers of the U.S. History Survey course. It provides high school and college teachers (and their students) a starting point for exploring American history on the Web with 800 first-person historical documents for use in the classroom, an annotated guide to 700 quality, history websites, and a range of teaching resources (including sample syllabi, teaching assignments, and forums). HISTORY MATTERS is a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University and the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning of the City University of New York. The HISTORY MATTERS website was created with support from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The 2002-2003 forums are funded by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.