This five-week National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar for school teachers, directed by Dr. Gerard M. Koot, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, will investigate how a region of northwest Europe, centered on the North Sea, acquired the characteristics that historians have labeled modern. We will study how the economy of the Dutch Republic rose to preeminence in the new European world economy of the seventeenth century, how Britain acquired this supremacy in the eighteenth century, and how it transformed itself to become an industrial nation. The seminar will meet at the Institute for Historical Research at the University of London and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar (near The Hague) from June 28 to July 31, 2009. NEH will provide a stipend of $3800 for expenses. For an application and a full explanation of the seminar, go to: http://www.umassd.edu/euro/neh_prosp_app.cfm For a mailed copy, contact Sue Foley, sfoley@umassd.edu or call 508-999-8301. For further information, call Gerard Koot at 508 999 8305 or write at gkoot@umassd.edu.