Clio in the Classroom: A Guide for Teaching U.S. Women's History Edited by Carol Berkin, Margaret S. Crocco, and Barbara Winslow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. See in particular chapters on teaching women's history with visual images, three-dimensional objects, and oral histories.
Related Site Making Sense of Historypresents two approaches that will help students and teachers make effective use of primary sources. "Making Sense of Documents" includes sections on specific types of primary sources, such as oral history, maps, letters and diaries, advertisements, and documentary photography; historians offer tips for analyzing online primary sources and provide a guide to online and print sources. "Scholars in Action" allows students to interpret a specific primary source (e.g., letters of labor activist Sarah Bagley) before listening to a historian discuss the document.
More than 75% of the gospel vinyl released between 1940 and 1970, the “Golden Age of Gospel Music,” is unavailable in any format. The Black Gospel Music Restoration Project at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, seeks to preserve the remaining African American gospel recordings from this period and to create the definitive online encyclopedia of gospel music. Many of the recordings preserved by the BGMRP were either recorded live at local radio stations, or were produced by small, obscure producers now out of business or bought up by larger recording labels. Working with other universities and private collectors, the BGMRP has digitized, scanned, and cataloged more than 2500 previously unavailable 78s, 45s, and LPs, making the BGMRP the largest single repository of black gospel music.
The BGMRP grew out of the research of Baylor University professor Robert Darden, author of People Get Ready: A New History of Black Gospel Music (Continum 2004). In working on People Get Ready, Darden learned that much of the music from gospel’s golden age was missing. Darden, a lifelong gospel music enthusiast, was writing about music he had never heard. In 2005, Darden wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times, “Gospel’s Got the Blues” (February 15, 2005). New York businessman Charles Royce read Darden’s editorial and offered to fund a digitization project. The BGMRP is physically housed in the Ray I. Riley Digitization Center at Moody Memorial Library on the Baylor University campus in Waco. Because of copyright restrictions, off-campus online access to the collection is currently limited to 30-second samples of the music. A select group of music clips are also available through Baylor University’s iTunes U.
The BGMRP preserves the music of an era when gospel music and civil rights were, as Darden notes, “indelibly linked.” Gospel music provided an important accompaniment to the sit-ins, marches, and voter registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement. The movement’s most significant song “We Shall Overcome” was reworked in part from an old Baptist hymn. The album Freedom Highway recorded by the Staple Singers, featuring Mavis Staples, was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and dedicated to the freedom marchers.
Iron Hill Museum oral history recordings and transcripts (University of Delaware Library) Iron Hill School was one of more than 80 schools for African-American children built between 1919 and 1928 as part of philanthropist Pierre Samuel du Pont's "Delaware experiment." The 37 interviews in this collection document community and school life, relationships between schools, civil rights, transportation to and from school, employment, and churches.
Related Site: Iron Hill School This lesson plan, part of the National Park Service's Teaching with Historic Places site, offers additional information about the history of the school, photographs and the school's floor plan, and activities (e.g., collecting oral histories) for students to learn the history of their own school.
Martha Groves, UCLA Will Catalog Noted Conservationist's Collection, Los Angeles Times, May 2, 2011.
Ellen Stern Harris, known as the mother of the California Coastal Zone Conservation Act of 1972, left a vast but unorganized collection of letters, photographs, publications, and research files. This article highlights the challenges of processing Harris' papers, the value of the collection for researchers, and plans for digitizing the collection.
Related Sources
See the following digital collections that document the work of women conservationists and environmentalists:
Rachel Carson Papers (Yale) This collection includes photographs of Carson as a child and adult; images from draft manuscripts for the books Under the Sea Wind, Silent Spring, and The Sense of Wonder; and an early article by Carson in Nature Magazine.
A Tale of Two Women: Marjory Stoneman Douglas and Marjorie Harris Carr (Everglades Digital Library) Marjory Stoneman Douglas (1890-1998), author of landmark book The Everglades: River of Grass (1947), helped found Friends of the Everglades in 1969. Marjorie Carr helped stop a construction project that threatened central Florida's ecosystem. This collection includes interviews with Douglas and Carr, as well as a lecture by Douglas about a variety of environmental issues.
National Jukebox, a new digital collection from the Library of Congress, includes more than 10,000 historical audio recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. New recordings will be added to the Jukebox every month. Highlights include recordings by Nora Bayes (1880-1928), Geraldine Farrar (1882-1967), Alma Gluck (1884-1938), and Louise Homer (1871-1947), Maud Powell (1868-1920), and Ernestine Schumann-Heink (1861-1936).
Images of singers often appeared on sheet music covers. Researchers can use the Sheet Music Consortium's database to search across sheet music collections at UC-Los Angeles, Indiana University, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. A search for Nora Bayes retrieved 82 records, including Ladies First (at left) from Johns Hopkins.
Chronicling America provides access to more than 3.7 million newspaper pages from more than 500 newspaper titles published in 22 states and the District of Columbia between 1860 and 1922. Try searching for notable women singers from the first quarter of the 20th century. For instance, a search for Alma Gluck retrieves images and stories about Gluck, as well as advertisements such as the one at right from the New York Tribune (July 8, 1916).
While perfoming historical research on her-story don't forget to look at US Federal Patents. There is a world of wonder inside those unassuming pages.
ACCESS VIA:
uspto.gov
google patents
visit your local federal depository
Did you know that Hedy Lamarr filed a patent which is the foundation for our GPS navigation, wi-fi, cellphone, and a myriad of technology we take for granted today? Patent #2,292,387.
She gave this patent over to the War Dept. in order to assist with the war effort in WWII. They accepted it but brushed her away.
I would be more than glad to share this presentation with you and am always open to giving the presentation in person. Just contact me.
