National Women's History Project

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Logo, National Women's History Project
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Introduces the National Women's History Project, "a non-profit organization dedicated to recognizing and celebrating the diverse and historic accomplishments of women by providing information as well as educational material and programs." Includes a 5,000-word essay on the history of the women's rights movement and a 7,000-word timeline. The site gives detailed information about the organization's activities, including efforts to bring women's history into public life, a list of curricular ideas for teachers, material concerning National Women's History Month, and a 15-question quiz on Women's History.

Perhaps most valuable, the site furnishes approximately 200 partially annotated links, arranged into 12 broad categories such as "Politics," "World History," and "Math and Science." Though lacking in primary source material, this site provides useful beginning resources for the study and practice of women's history.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial Times to 1950

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Logo, North American Women's Letters and Diaries: Colonial Times to 1950
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This extensive archive offers approximately 150,000 pages of letters and diaries from colonial times to 1950, including 7,000 pages of previously unpublished manuscripts. Highlighted material includes extracts from the Journal of Mrs. Ann Manigault (1754-1781), the Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, letters of Phyllis Wheatley, letters of Ellen Louisa Tucker to Ralph Waldo Emerson, letters of Margaret Fuller, and the memoirs and letters of Dolley Madison, wife of James Madison.

Search the database by keyword or use the advanced search to find material by such fields as author, race, religion, age, occupation, date of writing, document type, historical event, or subject. More than 80 fields have been indexed. This website is available either through one-time purchase of perpetual rights or through annual subscription (your library or institution may have a subscription). This collection is a useful archive of material for teaching about the history of women as well as for research in women's studies, social history, and cultural history.

Salem Witchcraft Trials

Description

In this lecture, historian Mary Beth Norton examines the original court documents from the Salem witchcraft trials; she places these well-known events in the context of the Indian wars and other witch trials in New England. The trials, she concludes, were driven more by politics than by superstition.

Harriet Tubman

Description

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland in 1820. After her escape to the North in 1849, she returned to the South more than a dozen times to ferry other slaves along the Underground Railroad. She later helped John Brown recruit men for his Harper's Ferry raid; and during the Civil War, Tubman served as a Union spy. In this lecture, historian Catherine Clinton details not only Tubman's life but also the quest to uncover new information on Tubman.

Causes of the American Revolution

Question

What were the causes of the American Revolution?

Textbook Excerpt

Textbooks tend to emphasize a political and military story that makes the American Revolution seem like a unified, logical, and inevitable event.

Source Excerpt

Primary sources reveal the diversity and complexity of the revolutionary movement. There was no single American Revolution, but many different American revolutions.

Historian Excerpt

Historians emphasize the diversity of participants, contradictions among their motives, and the variety of long-term causes of the American Revolution.

Abstract

Most elementary and middle school American history textbooks continue to portray the coming of the American Revolution in terms of a series of discrete political and military events that culminated, more or less inevitably, in the separation of the North American colonies from Great Britain. Little attention is given to underlying social conditions, the diversity among participants, and the wide variety of intellectual traditions that contributed to the revolutionary movement. By ignoring the insights of new scholarship, textbooks fail to convey a sense of the long-term causes of the Revolution, the movement's tremendous complexity, or its limitations as well as its achievements.

Women of Protest: Images from the Records of the National Woman's Party

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Photo, Lucy Burns in Occoquan. . . , Harris and Ewing, 1917, Women of Protest
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This combined archive and exhibit offers a selection of 448 photographs from the Library's National Woman's Party (NWP) collection that "document the National Woman's Party's push for ratification of the 19th Amendment as well as its later campaign for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment." Photographs span the years 1875 to 1938, but most date from 1913 to 1922. Visitors can browse photographs by title or subject or search the descriptive information. The site has a photo gallery of more than 50 photographs depicting NWP activists who were arrested and imprisoned for their role in suffrage protests. Additionally, the site provides a timeline of the National Woman's Party from 1912 to 1997 that places it in historical context. The site also provides three essays: on the tactics and techniques of the National Woman's Party suffrage campaign, a historical overview of the NWP, and on leaders of the NWP.

Austin Treasures: Online Exhibits from the Austin History Center

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Photo, Elnora Douglass
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A collection of 10 exhibits documenting aspects of the local history of Austin, TX. Each exhibit contains approximately 40 images and essays from 1,000 to 3,000 words in length. Topics include working in the city, the suffrage movement, life in the city during World War II, Victorian houses, city streets, the erection of the state capital building, landscaping, the historic suburban Hyde Park area, and memorable "firsts" in Austin.

The site links to the main local history site for the Austin Public Library—the Austin History Center—which provides a 2,400-word student essay on Austin's growth during its first 100 years, a chronology of the city from 1830–1900, and links to other relevant sites, including one presenting hundreds of historic postcards of the city. Useful for those studying Texas, urban, and western history.

Women in the Persian Gulf War

Description

In commemoration of Women's History Month, the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project organized a panel discussion composed of four female veterans of the Persian Gulf War. Each woman's experience in the conflict was equally as diverse as her background. The speakers range from Commander Darlene Iskra—who was the first woman in American history to command a ship in the U.S. Navy—to Juanita Mullen—who served stateside during the conflict, and was among the first Native American woman to serve in the U.S. Air Force. Each woman also describes her personal experiences as a female veteran in the years following the Gulf War.

The Woman's Building Library at the World's Columbian Exposition

Description

From the Library of Congress Webcasts site:

"On May 1, 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago opened its gates to an expectant public eager to experience firsthand its architectural beauty, technological marvels and vast array of cultural treasures gathered from all over the world. Among the most popular of the fair's attractions was the Woman's Building, a monumental exhibit hall filled with the products of women's labor, including more than 8,000 volumes of writing, by women and collected by women—the first important library of its kind. Hundreds of thousands of women visited the library and took what they learned to develop local libraries."