To celebrate Women’s History Month, Alexander Street Press is making Women and Social Movement in the U.S., 1600-2000, Scholar’s Edition freely available. This resource will be available through March 31, 2010.
A mainstay of women’s history scholarship and teaching in universities worldwide, this online collection is edited by Professors Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin of SUNY Binghamton. This extensive collection of primary historic documents, books, images, scholarly essays, teaching tools, and book and Web site reviews documents the history of women’s activism in public life, and is one of the most heavily visited resources for women’s studies and for U.S. history on the Web. Organized around document projects written by leading scholars, the collection is a powerful research and classroom tool designed to help users develop the skills needed to analyze primary documents and conduct research. Document projects are organized around interpretive questions, each with 20-50 primary documents that address the question. Some examples are:
• How Did the Ladies Association of Philadelphia Shape New Forms of Women’s Activism During the American Revolution, 1780-1781?
• How Did White Women Aid Former Slaves During and After the Civil War, 1863-1891?
• How Did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching, 1890-1942?
• How and Why Did the Guerrilla Girls Alter the Art Establishment in New York City, 1985-1995?
• How Have Recent Social Movements Shaped Civil Rights Legislation for Women? The 1994 Violence Against Women Act.
The Scholar’s Edition also includes more than 40,000 pages of full-text sources, including:
• Proceedings of all women’s rights conventions, 1848-1869
• Proceedings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1874-1898
• Selected publications of the League of Women Voters, 1920-2000
Also newly added to the Scholar’s Edition are:
• Notable American Women, the five-volume biographical dictionary
• The Collected Publications of federal, state, and local Commissions on the Status of Women, a digital archive with 90,000 pages of publications, 1961-2005
Alexander Street press also has a companion blog, Women and Social Movements: The Online Discussion, where faculty discuss how they’ve made use of the online collection in the classroom, share syllabi, and exchange ideas.
