In 2016, with funding from the Robina Foundation, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) began planning a three-year international teachers’ workshop series. This program, the GLC Shared Histories Institute, focuses on how different countries have dealt with the legacies and trauma associated with reconstructing the social, economic, and political order following a foundational break in the status quo. The goal of the Institute is to develop best practices for classroom teaching of these difficult topics. The three countries and associated issues included in the first phase of the project are: the United States (Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement), South Africa (the history and legacies of apartheid), and Sierra Leone (colonialism, slavery and the slave trade, and post-colonial struggles). Institute instructors and teachers will compare and contrast the three cases in order to understand how societies might teach reconstruction within broad historical frameworks. The audiences for this project are high school teachers and their students.