Dust Bowl Oklahoma: Oral Histories and Letters

Dust, Drought, and Dreams Gone Dry: Oklahoma Women and the Dust Bowl

This oral history collection from Oklahoma State University Library includes interviews with women who lived through the Dust Bowl, primarily in the seven western-most counties of Oklahoma where the Dust Bowl hit the hardest. Some of the topics covered include the WPA, President Roosevelt, the challenges of domestic life, experiencing dust storms as a child, rabbit drives, gypsies, and Saturday evenings in town. The  site also offers an excellent Bibliography of the Dust Bowl Era. 

Henderson, Caroline A., and Alvin O. Turner. Letters from the Dust Bowl. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001. This collection of Henderson’s letters and articles published from 1908 to1966 also includes photographs of  Henderson, her family, and of dust storms in the 1930s.

New Book: The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer

The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, edited by Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.
Although Fannie Lou Hamer (1917-1977) was a powerful speaker and tireless advocate for civil rights during the 1960s and 1970s, this is the first volume to showcase her most important speeches and testimonies.

Related Sites
Say It Plain: A Century of Great African American Speeches (American Radio Works) features Hamer's Testimony Before the Credentials Committee, Democratic National Convention. The Civil Rights in Mississippi Digital Archive includes a transcript of an oral history interview with Hamer. 

Cookbooks: The Sandy Michell Collection

Aunt Mary's Cookery Book

Cookbooks: The Sandy Michell Collection, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Monash University (March 22 - May 31, 2011)

This exhibition features cookbooks from England, France, and Australia. The announcement provides links to the exhibition catalog, descriptions of exhibition items, and online access to a selection of more than 100 items from the exhibition.

Gertrude Stein: Home Movie and Upcoming Exhibition

The Beinecke Library (Yale University) recently uploaded a Gertrude Stein Home Movie to YouTube. A portion of this short movie includes scenes of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at the Hotel Pernollet in Belley, France. The Beinecke Library also offers online access to correspondence, manuscripts, and photographs in the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers.

Exhibition Catalog

Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, an upcoming exhibition at the  Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, focuses on these themes:  Picturing Gertrude; Domestic Stein; the Art of Friendship; Celebrity Stein; and Legacies. The exhibition catalog is available from the University of California Press.

Another upcoming exhibition, The Steins Collect, will run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from May 21 to September 6, 2011.

New Digital Collection: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers

The Schlesinger Library is the primary repository for the papers of early 20th-century American feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). To celebrate the sesquicentennial of Gilman's birth, the Schlesinger Library has digitized Gilman's papers, with the generous help of the Cynthia Green Colin Fund.

In September 2010, the Nation named Gilman among the “Fifty Most Influential Progressives of the 20th Century,” taking note of her arguments that women would be emancipated only when they were economically independent and that housekeeping and child care should be professionalized. Known around the world during her lifetime as a public intellectual, author of the best-selling Women and Economics (1898), and a major influence on the women’s movement, today Gilman is known primarily for The Yellow Wallpaper, an autobiographical short story about a woman’s nervous breakdown.

To learn more about Gilman's life and to access her diaries, letters, writings, and drawings, consult the online finding aid

.

American Folk Art Museum: Quilt Exhibition and More

Quilts: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum is an exhibition on view through October 16, 2011. The announcement offers links to reviews and related media (e.g., a short video tour), as well as information about the exhibition catalog.

The museum's web site and publications highlight other forms of folk art. The Image Gallery includes early portraits, needlework and rugs, quilts and coverlets, furniture, and works by contemporary folk artists. Some of these images also appear in the exhibition catalog, American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (Henry N. Abrams, 2001).

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (Henry N. Abrams, 2001). Four chapters in this exhibition catalog by Stacy C. Hollander are particularly noteworthy: "Singular Faces" includes more than 60 portraits (e.g., "Young Woman of the Folsom Family," at right); "Girls at School, Women at Home" features paintings by students, samplers, and a bedcover; "Pennsylvania and Beyond: Fraktur" showcases folk art drawings that document births, baptisms, and other special events among German Americans; and "Simple Gifts: The Shakers" offers images of three "gift drawings" by women. For additional information about gift drawings, see Sally L. Kitch, "'As a Sign That All May Understand': Shaker Gift Drawings and Female Spritiual Power," Winterthur Portfolio 24, no. 1 (1989): 1-28.