New Digital Collection: Jennie Wilde's Float Designs

Jennie Wilde (1865-1913) designed floats for many New Orleans Mardi Gras parades. Mistick Krewe of Comus 1910 float designs features 20 of Wilde's colorful and detailed designs.  Google Books Preview includes the chapter on Jennie Wilde in Henri Schindler's Mardi Gras Treasures: Float Designs of the Golden Age (Pelican Pub. Co., 2001). 

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. 

Interview with Aviator Janet Harmon Bragg

Janet Harmon Bragg (1907-1993) was the first African American women to receive a commercial pilot's license.

Bragg described an earlier attempt to obtain a pilot's license in an interview that is featured on the Smithsonian blog The Bigger Picture. After being told that she did very well on her flight test, Bragg was denied the license because she was a black women.

Learn more about this pioneering aviator by reading Soaring Above Setbacks: The Autobiography of Janet Harmon Bragg, African American Aviator (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996). The book includes photographs of Bragg and group portraits of members of the Challenger Air Pilots Association.

Digital Collection: Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers

The Archives of American Art blog is highlighting women who have contributed to the development and understanding of contemporary and modernist art in the United States. The first entry features Betty Parsons (1900-1982), who opened the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York City in 1946. A photograph of Parsons and a letter from Peggy Guggenheim provide just a hint of the 61,000 images that are available online in the Betty Parsons Gallery Records and Personal Papers. See More About the Collection for a biographical profile of Parsons. The Archives of American Art site also includes the transcript of an oral history interview with Parsons (1981). Access additional digital collections, oral history interviews, and collections by topic (e.g., Women) on the Research Collections page.

New Exhibit: Taxing Visions

Taxing Visions Exhibition Catalog

Taxing Visions: Financial Episodes in Late Nineteenth Century American Art
Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, January 29 - May 30, 2011

This exhibition features 34 works that reflect the economic hardships that women, African Americans, children and artists faced from Reconstruction to the end of the nineteenth century. Curators Jessica Todd Smith and Kevin Murphy discuss four of these works (e.g., "Tattered and Torn," at right) in the National Public Radio segment, Portraits of the Poor: Dignity in Times of Despair (6 min 28 sec).

New Exhibition: Dorothea Lange’s "Three Mormon Towns"

Dorothea Lange's "Three Mormon Towns," Brigham Young University Museum of Art, January 20 - April 30, 2011

In 1953, Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams spent three weeks taking photographs in three southern Utah communities: Gunlock, St. George, and Toquerville. About 35 of these photographs were published in  the Life magazine article, Three Mormon Towns  (available online in Google Books).

Curator Diana Turnbow selected 62 photographs for "Dorothea Lange’s ‘Three Mormon Towns.'"  The website for the exhibit includes Turnbow's essay, "From Guggenheim Fellowship to Life Magazine: Dorothea Lange's Lasting Impression of Southern Utah;" Lange's initial layout for the article;  the original Life article; a brief video interview with Lange's son, Dan Dixon; and the photographs from the exhibit (see "Exhibition Checklist").

Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (Norton, 2009) offers additional background about "Three Mormon Towns" (pages 367-369), including how the project strained the relationship between Lange and Adams. Gordon discusses Lange's life and photographs in a National Public Radio interview: Dorothea Lange: Drawing Beauty Out of Isolation (7 min, 48 sec).

New Book: Women in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)

Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC. Edited by Faith S. Holsaert, Martha Prescod Norman Noonan, Judy Richardson, Betty Garman Robinson, Jean Smith Young, and Dorothy M. Zellner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010. WorldCat record with Google Preview

Founded in 1960, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) played a pivotal role in many of the key events of the American civil rights movement.

In Hands on the Freedom Plow, 52 women offer their personal stories of working for SNCC. In addition to coverage of the founding of the SNCC and work in the national SNCC office, the volume provides new perspectives on a variety of topics: early sit-ins, voter registration campaigns, and Freedom Rides; the 1963 March on Washington; the Mississippi Freedom Summer; the movements in Georgia, Alabama and Maryland; and Black Power.

Editors and contributors have recently appeared on two forums to discuss the book and their personal experiences in SNCC: 

Hands on the Freedom Plow (BookTV; video; 1 hr, 20 min) Importance of music in the movement;

Sisters in the Struggle: Women in the Civil Rights Movement (Forum Network; video, 54 min.) 

 For additional sources that document the history of SNCC, see the Civil Rights Digital Libary.

A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College

“Everything Is Wholesome and Abundant”: A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College, 1837- Today, A Library Exhibition in Williston Library Court (November 1 – December 15, 2010)

This announcement includes a wealth of information about culinary history at Mount Holyoke College. In Celebrating an MHC Thanksgiving in the 1800s (video; 5 min, 30 sec), archives librarian Patricia Albright showcases diaries, letters, and photographs from the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. The site also offers sample images from the exhibition and information about such topics as kitchen layout, strategies for preserving foods before the days of refrigeration, and victory gardens. 

Making Bread, 1894-95 (Image Provided Courtesy of the 
Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections)

Three Exhibits Explore Colonial Sewing

Eve M. Kahn, Revising Our Ideas of Colonial Sewing, New York Times (September 30, 2010). Kahn highlights exhibitions at the Connecticut Historical Society, the Florence Griswold Museum, and the Winterthur Museum that offer new insights into Colonial women’s sewing habits.

Connecticut Needlework: Women, Art, and Family, 1740-1840 
Connecticut Historical Society, October 5, 2010 - March 26, 2011
This exhibition features more than seventy examples of needlework art. An illustrated catalog by Susan P. Schoelwer (pictured at left) accompanies the exhibition. Online information about the book includes images of five samplers from the exhibition.

With Needle and Brush: Schoolgirl Embroidery from the Connecticut River Valley 
Florence Griswold Museum, October 2, 2010- January 30, 2011
Many of the 70 embroideries, watercolor sketches, and portraits in this exhibition are from private collections.

Betsy Ross: The Life Behind the Legend 
Winterthur Museum, October 2, 2010 - January 2, 2011
Marla Miller, who co-curated the exhibition with Winterthur's Linda Eaton and Katie Knowles, is the author of the new scholarly biography, Betsy Ross and the Making of America (Henry Holt, 2010).

Preserving Historic Films

The National Film Preservation Foundation site offers online access to examples of its preservation work. Three of these films document the history of women:

Wohelo Camp (ca. 1919) (Northeast Historic Film), a promotional film about the pioneering all-girls summer camp in Maine, includes footage of the girls involved in a variety of activities: jewelry making, pottery, canoeing, cooking, gardening, and horseback riding.

Manhattan Trade School for Girls (1911) (George Eastman House) This  promotional documentary film (16 min., 10 sec) includes footage of students playing basketball, dancing, cooking, sewing, and making hats. Jennifer M. Bean's commentary provides historical context throughout the film.

A Trip through Japan with the YWCA (ca. 1919) includes footage of women in traditional occupations,  fleeting images of workers outside a textile factory, and scenes with Ainu women (pictured at left). For background on the Ainu, see Ainu: Spirit of a Northern People (Smithsonian Institution in Association with University of Washington Press, 1999).

Changing the Face of Medicine: Celebrating America's Women Physicians is an online exhibition developed by the National Library of Medicine. The website accompanies a traveling exhibition currently touring public libraries and universities around the United States. The site spans 150 years of history and includes biographies of more than 350 women, and features photographs, video interviews, and short films.

The exhibition explores major themes in the history of women in medicine, from the nineteenth-century campaign to gain access to medical schools to ongoing efforts to reform education and diversify the profession at all levels.

There are resources for educators, activities for schoolchildren, and bibliographies and career resources for scholars and students. Visitors are also invited to share their own stories of women physicians they admire.

New Digital Collection: Gottlieb Jazz Photos

Gottlieb Jazz Photos 
This Library of Congress collection of 200 photographs (now in the public domain) on Flickr documents the jazz scene in New York City and Washington, D.C. from 1938 to 1948. More photos will be added each month until all 1,600 in the collection are in Flickr. Browse the collection for photos of Mildred Bailey, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Sarah Vaughan, and Mary Lou Williams.  

William P. Gottlieb's photos of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mary Lou Williams.

For additional context, listen to Gottlieb's comments on the Billie Holiday photograph and on the Ella Fitzgerald photograph. Also, the National Public Radio's segment on Women in Jazz  includes an audio clip of a 1973 interview with Mary Lou Williams.

50 Great Voices (from Brazil, Egypt, Great Britain, India, Turkey, U.S., ...)

50 Great Voices, a new series from National Public Radio,  profiles "singers who've made their mark internationally and across recorded history." Each of the profiles features audio recordings of songs and interview clips. Women are well-represented in the singers profiled so far:

• Fairuz: Lebanon's Voice Of Hope
• The Many Voices Of Lauryn Hill
• Sandy Denny: Mercurial Queen Of British Folk Rock
• Janis Joplin: The Queen of Rock
• Lydia Mendoza: The First Lady Of Tejano
• Radmilla Cody: Two Cultures, One Voice
• Esma Redzepova: 'Queen Of The Gypsies'
• Sezen Aksu: The Voice Of Istanbul
  
• Ella Fitzgerald: America's First Lady Of Song
• Umm Kulthum: 'The Lady' Of Cairo
  
• Elis Regina: The Feeling Between The Notes
• Asha Bhosle: Voice of Bollywood and More
• Maria Callas: Voice of Perfect Imperfection
• Mahalia Jackson: Voice of the Civil Rights Movement

Museum Exhibition: American Woman

New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art currently has an exhibition that traces the particularly influential archetypes of moneyed women's dressing in the United States during the first half of the 20th century. American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity journeys from 1890 to 1940 through highly idealized feminine images of "the Heiress," "the Gibson Girl," "the Bohemian," "the Patriot and the Suffragist," "the Flapper," and "the Screen Siren." It may be of particular interest to 20th-century U.S. fashion historians. Most of the clothes were originally designed in the United States and France.

This Special Exhibition will run through August 15, 2010.

The Samuel J. May Anti-Slavery Collection at Cornell University includes more than 10,000 titles collected by May to document the abolitionist struggle. The pamphlets and other materials included in the May Collection are rare because of their generally ephemeral nature. The collection can be browsed by title, author, or date. A full-text search is also available.

For historians of women abolitionists, the collection includes important works documenting the experience of British and American women abolitionists. For example, the collection includes British Quaker abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick’s Immediate Not Gradual Abolition; the proceedings for the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women (1837, 1838, and 1839); Angelina Grimke’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South; and reports from the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Ladies’ New-York City Anti-Slavery Society, and the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. The collection also includes Civil War and post-war era materials. Of particular note are reports from Civil War era women’s associations such as the Ladies Aid Society of Philadelphia and the Ladies' Union Relief Association.

Roundtable: Teaching the History of Women and Gender with Legal Sources

The most recent issue of the Journal of Women's History includes nine articles on the use of legal sources in teaching women's history. A variety of countries and topics are covered: Islam, gender, and the law; sources for teaching Chinese and Korean women's history; women's crimes in early Colonial India; African American marriages in slavery and freedom; the use of desertion notices in early American newspapers; and Roe v. Wade as U. S. constitutional history.

For additional guidance on the use of legal sources, see the Law Library of Congress section of American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States.