A Preview of MAHG 2026
Every summer, something remarkable happens on the Ashland University campus in north-central Ohio. Social studies teachers from across the country pack a suitcase, leave home for a week (or two, or three, or four), and join us for our Master of Arts in American History and Government (MAHG) program.
MAHG is built around the lives of working teachers, so when summer arrives, we invite you to leave behind the headaches and stresses of the teaching world and move into the quiet serenity of Ashland. Graduate credit and professional development are part of the deal, but our alumni will tell you the most transformative part is the connection you make with kindred spirits from schools around the country.
To get a taste of what’s coming this summer, we wanted to share five of the many MAHG courses on the schedule for this summer, and we hope at least one of them makes you reach for your calendar. We have fellowships available for teachers, and all new degree-seeking students can take advantage of our “first class free” promotion.
Our first week of classes begins June 21, so don’t wait. Apply now!
1. “The United States and the Holocaust” with Stephen F. Knott (United States Naval War College)
This course asks a question with no comfortable answer: What did Americans know, and what were they prepared to do, as the Holocaust unfolded? Prof. Knott works through the rise of the Nazi regime, FDR’s wavering response to the refugee crisis, Wannsee and Operation Reinhard, the liberation of the camps, and the painful debate over why the Allies did not bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz.
Reading Highlight: Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy’s letter to War Refugee Board Director John W. Pehle. This is the letter in which the War Department formally refuses to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, one month after D‑Day. Pehle had been pressing for the raids; McCloy wrote back that the effort would divert forces from the real work of defeating Germany. It’s a short document that carries an enormous ethical weight, one that teachers are sure to continue discussing long after the class is over.
2. “Rise of Modern America, 1914–1945” with Emily Krichbaum (The National Women’s History Museum)
It is hard to find another thirty-year stretch in which the United States changed more profoundly. Prof. Krichbaum’s course moves through two world wars, the Red Scare, Presidents Harding and Coolidge, the New Deal, and internal fights over race, radicalism, and “normalcy.” The primary source list is rich, spanning the Zimmermann Note, Randolph Bourne, Eleanor Roosevelt, and more.
Reading Highlight: W.E.B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers.” A one-page thunderclap that concludes, “We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.” It is tight enough to teach in a single period and powerful enough to anchor days’ worth of conversation about what America owed the Black veterans who came home to the Red Summer of 1919.
3. “American Political Rhetoric” with Elizabeth L’Arrivée (Rosary College)
For teachers who want to share the musicality of a good speech with their students. Prof. L’Arrivée pairs Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric with American voices across the centuries: Webster, Clay, Lincoln, Douglass, Darrow, Bryan, Nixon, Huey Long, and RFK. Students leave with a new vocabulary for talking about style, argument, and persuasion, and at the end of the week, they write and deliver a speech of their own.
Reading Highlight: Robert F. Kennedy’s impromptu remarks in Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Five minutes with no notes, and a quotation from Aeschylus. It is the sort of speech that reminds you why we study rhetoric in the first place.
4. “The American Western” with Christopher Burkett (Ashland University)
You probably did not expect Aristotle and John Ford to share a syllabus, but Prof. Burkett’s course on the American Western is one of MAHG’s most distinctive offerings. Students read Owen Wister’s The Virginian; watch My Darling Clementine, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers; and argue about what the frontier tells us about courage, friendship, self-government, and the limits of law.
Reading Highlight: Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” The original frontier thesis argument still provokes engaging classroom discussion. Is American character really shaped by the encounter with “free land”? What did Turner get right, and what did he miss? A worthy topic for U.S. history teachers to analyze.
5. “Contemporary America” with Vincent Cannato (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
If your students love asking how we got here, this is the course that builds the bridge from Watergate to our own moment. Professor Cannato covers a lot of ground in this class, reviewing the “Malaise” speech, the rise of the Moral Majority, Milliken v. Bradley, the Reykjavik summit, the Starr Report, Bush v. Gore, 9/11, Obama, and beyond. He frames each political turn against its cultural backdrop: Christopher Lasch next to Jimmy Carter, Grandmaster Flash next to “Broken Windows” policing. You’ll leave with a usable map of the last fifty years.
Reading Highlight: Jimmy Carter’s “Energy and National Goals” address. Everyone calls it the “Malaise Speech” even though Carter never used the word. Read alongside Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism and Robert Bellah’s writings on civic life, it’s a stark message from an American president about the spiritual condition of the country. And by pure coincidence, the class will be in session on the 47th anniversary of the day Carter gave the speech.
Join us this summer
The real magic of the on-campus week is hard to put on a syllabus: the late-dinner conversations that keep going until someone notices the dining hall is closing; the after-class debates that spill into study sessions; the group texts that last long after everyone has flown home. Teachers tell us they first come to Ashland for the content, but they come back for the community. If you’re looking for a summer that challenges and refreshes your teaching at the same time, you’ll find it here.
