This Worldwide Web site is intended to serve as a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000, the website seeks to advance scholarly debates and understanding at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools.
Women and Social Movements: Basic Edition contains the following resources:
90 document projects that interpret and present documents, most of which are not otherwise available online. Each document project poses an interpretive question and provides a collection of documents that address the question. Altogether these document projects provide more than 2,800 documents, more than 1,000 images, and 900 links to other websites. They demonstrate that historical analysis is an interpretive process based on documents. Viewers of the site are encouraged to participate in that interpretive process. We expect to add six new document projects or archives annually. Women and Social Movements is also now accepting submissions of document projects for consideration for online publication.
More than 35,000 pages of documents pertaining to Women and Social Movements. These materials have been selected by the Editors for their relevance to the focus of the website. We plan to add 5,000 additional pages of documents annually. For a listing of full-text sources, go to Browse Bibliography and click on the Full Text Primary Sources tab.
A dictionary of social movements and organizations.
A chronology of U.S. Women's History.
Teaching Tools with lesson ideas and document-based questions related to the website's document projects.
Regularly-published news from the archives about primary sources in U.S. Women's History.
The website that appears here under the joint imprint of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and Alexander Street Press of Alexandria, Virginia, began in a senior seminar that Kathryn Sklar taught at the SUNY Binghamton in the Spring of 1997. The course was intended to introduce advanced undergraduates to the excitement of discovering, editing, and analyzing historical documents focusing on women and social movements in American history. The students produced portions of what became the website's first document projects in December 1997.
When the format of documentary projects proved extremely well matched to the new internet media, Thomas Dublin, her colleague at SUNY Binghamton, joined her in creating an innovative website for the documentary projects, adding his knowledge of U.S. women's history and substantial experience with the use of computers in historical research. With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and later from Houghton Mifflin and ProQuest Information and Learning, the Women and Social Movements website grew rapidly. In 2001, with a second NEH grant, we began a collaboration with eleven faculty from other colleges and universities around the country. By the end of 2002 the website offered 43 documentary projects that interpreted about 1000 documents ranging from 1775 to 2000. The site attracted about 30,000 viewers a month from more than ninety countries. Yet two aspects of the website were not sustainable: the intensive labor needed to transform student work into authoritative scholarly analysis; and the initial sources of the site's funding.
This combination of success and challenges prompted us to reconceive the Women and Social Movements website in the Spring of 2002. Convinced that the technology and the format of the website were ideally matched to generate new knowledge in U.S. Women's History, we decided to encourage faculty and advanced graduate students to submit document projects for the site. That effort has been remarkably successful; for more than five years we have published regular additions to the website from a wide range of scholars drawing on their specialized knowledge of women and social movements to create documentary projects for the site. We established an Editorial Board for the website as well as guidelines for submissions with blind peer review. In the Spring of 2002 we also began discussions with Alexander Street Press, which resulted in our decision to publish jointly with ASP. This relationship has provided stability for the website and facilitated its expansion.
In March 2004 we became a online journal and have added new document projects regularly, publishing on average eight new projects annually. The website also includes digitized versions of books and pamphlets related to women and social movements in the U.S. expanding the site by about 5,000 pages a year. Initially these volumes focused on one hundred years of the woman suffrage movement, 1830-1930, including the six volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage (1881-1922) edited by Stanton, Anthony, and other leaders of the woman suffrage movement and all the proceedings of the three national conventions of anti-slavery women held in the 1830s and the woman's rights conventions held between 1848 and 1869. Alexander Street Press has provided detailed semantic indexing and database searching for these and other resources on the site, greatly improving its scholarly utility. We also publish book reviews under the direction of Professor Carol Faulkner of Syracuse University and website reviews edited by Melanie Shell-Weiss of Johns Hopkins University.
In addition to the continuing publication of document projects and digitization of additional documents, we are committed to expanding the Teaching Tools component of the website. Since January 2001 we have published lesson ideas and document-based questions drawing on the website's rich document projects. These resources--numbering 43 in March 2009--are fully indexed along with document projects, document archives, and full-text sources. We continue to reach out to teachers using the website; as the documentary base expands, we will encourage teachers to develop new materials for the Teacher's Corner.
In March 2007 we introduced the expanded Scholar's Edition. The new edition includes the Women's Commissions Collection., with 90,000 pages of publications by federal, state, and local Commissions on the Status of Women between 1963 and 2005. It includes as well an online edition of Harvard University Press's landmark five-volume Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, available for the first time in electronic form. Women and Social Movements in the United States: Scholar's Edition is available as an upgrade to the Basic Edition. We are also committed to publishing additional electronic resources, such as the database on Commissions on the Status of Women, that we trust will make lasting contributions to research and teaching in U.S. Women’s History. We are currently working on a major new digital archive, "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2000," which will contain 150,000 pages of published and manuscript resources examining the international collaboration of women's activism since 1840. That new resource will be available by subscription to academic libraries beginning in mid-2010.
Kathryn Sklar and Thomas Dublin will continue to serve as co-editors of the website and shape its content. Along with high scholarly standards, Alexander Street Press brings unique talents to the technical dimensions of the project. They have developed the site's search engine, database, semantic (keyword) indexing, and design.
By adding new document projects and extensive full-text sources to the database annually, we plan to create a rich and continually expanding resource for the ongoing study of U.S. Women's History.
EDITORIAL POLICY
A note on transcription:
To prepare our key-entered transcriptions of documents we begin with photocopies of the original documents, whether archival manuscripts or published works. We transcribe originals as they appear and do not correct errors in spelling or non-standard punctuation except in the case of typographical errors in printed sources or insignificant errors in manuscript sources. Errors have not been noted with "[sic]" except in cases where recognition of the error illuminates the document. We have only added words occasionally to clarify the meaning of an obscure passage and have always used brackets [ ] on such occasions. We have always used ellipses to indicate places where we have excerpted portions from a longer document. Where we have deleted a paragraph or more, we have inserted asterisks to mark this editing. We have also added signatures in brackets if the original document was an internal copy of a letter and as such did not have a signature.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, Distinguished Professor of History
Thomas Dublin, Professor of History
Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender
History Department
State University of New York at Binghamton
Binghamton, New York 13902-6000
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