Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600–2000

One of the premier collections on the World Wide Web for the teaching of U.S. history, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000, includes (as of March 2014) 110 document projects with almost 4,350 documents and more than 153,000 pages of additional full-text sources relating to U.S. women's history.

Bi-annual releases (generally March and September) include not only new document projects and full-text sources, but also reviews of It also book, film, and web site. An enhanced search engine offers extensive metadata filters for both document projects and full text sources.

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000, began in 1997 with a small grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. For six years, Kathryn Kish Sklar and her students at SUNY Binghamton developed document projects consisting of 20-30 transcribed documents focused around a historiographic question. Students not only transcribed the primary source documents, but also learned the necessary HTML for the placement of the project on the course web site. Document projects proved an ideal form for combining the internet’s spaciousness with the historian’s craft of working with primary sources. At the end of the first semester of teaching this senior seminar, Kathryn Sklar was joined by Thomas Dublin, her colleague at SUNY Binghamton, in creating an innovative website for the documentary projects, adding his knowledge of U.S. women's history and his experience with the use of computers in historical research. The first document project went live on a public web site in December 1997.

Women and Social Movements website grew rapidly. In 2001, with a second NEH grant, the editors 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, authored in part by undergraduate students, which interpreted about 1,000 documents ranging in time 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 a reconception of 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, Sklar and Dublin decided to encourage faculty and advanced graduate students to author document projects for the site. That effort proved remarkably successful; the website now includes document projects and archives from a wide range of scholars drawing on their specialized knowledge of women and social movements. Sklar and Dublin established an Editorial Board for the website as well as guidelines for submissions with blind peer review.

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