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, serves as a resource for students and scholars of U.S. history and U.S. women's history. Under the joint imprint of the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender at the State University of New York, Binghamton, and Alexander Street Press of Alexandria, Virginia, it is organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000. Seeking to advance scholarly debates and understanding in American history at the same time that it makes the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges, and high schools, the collection includes (in April 2009) 90 document projects or document archives with almost 2,800 documents, 125,000 pages of additional full-text sources, written by more than 2,240 primary authors. It also includes book, film, and web site reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. An effective search engine provides users full-text searching of all the primary documents mounted on the site; the authors' database is fully integrated into the search capabilities. New issues are published semi-annually in March and September.
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Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000, began in a senior seminar that Kathryn Kish Sklar taught at SUNY Binghamton in the Spring of 1997. The course was designed to introduce advanced undergraduates to the excitement of discovering, editing, and analyzing historical documents that focused on women and social movements in American history. Each student in the course completed her own document project, transcribing the documents and learning the necessary HTML for the placement of her project on the course web site. Document projects focused on a historiographic question derived from the secondary literature on a given topic, usually one related to change over time. Drawing on the ample microfilm collections available in the university library, each project offered 20 to 30 documents that addressed its question. An introduction and document headnotes guided readers through an argument related to the question. Monographic in focus and permitting exploration of questions in depth, document projects proved to be an effective way to combine the internet’s spaciousness with the historian’s craft of working with documents. Online document projects permit the publication of documents and the interpretation of documents without the usual constraints associated with print publication. 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.[1]
Women and Social Movements endeavored to give the field of U.S. women's history an online presence at a time when it seemed that women’s history was not well represented on the main sites in U.S. history. With initial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the 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.[2]
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.
Yet despite this expansion, in the spring of 2002 the site’s future seemed uncertain because grant funding was no longer available (the site was no longer experimental), and the editors were unable to locate new sources of funding for the staff of graduate students who maintained the site and made its expansion possible. This funding dilemma was solved when Stephen Rhind-Tutt of Alexander Street Press, approached the editors and suggested that they consider publishing jointly with ASP. The press could fund the website’s costs through library subscriptions to the site. In 2003 the editors decided to publish jointly with ASP. This relationship has provided stability for the website and facilitated its expansion.[3]
In March 2004 Women and Social Movements became a quarterly online journal, adding new document projects quarterly, publishing on average eight new projects annually. The website also began to include digitized versions of books and pamphlets related to women and social movements in the U.S., which expanded the site by about 5,000 pages a year. Initially these volumes focused on one hundred years of the woman suffrage movement, 1830–1930, including the six volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage (1881–1922) edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and other leaders of the woman suffrage movement and all the proceedings of the three national conventions of anti-slavery women held in the 1830s and of the Seneca Falls Convention and the National Women's Rights Conventions held between 1848 and 1870. Alexander Street Press has provided detailed indexing and database searching for these and other resources on the site, greatly improving its scholarly utility. A Dictionary of Social Movements and a Chronology of U.S. Women's History, both especially prepared for the website, provide users unique subject access to both document projects and full-text sources on the site. Book reviews and website reviews were also incorporated into each issue.[3]
In March 2007 Sklar and Dublin began co-publishing with Alexander Street Press a greatly expanded version of the database—the Scholar’s Edition of Women and Social Movements. This edition features an online archive of all publications by federal, state, and local commissions on the status of women since 1963. Constituting 90,000 pages of documents collected from over 300 repositories, these commission publications offer a major new set of sources for research on the lives of American women since 1960. In addition, the Scholar’s Edition includes the first electronic version of Harvard University Press's five-volume biographical dictionary, Notable American Women (1971–2004), which is fully indexed and searchable.[4]
With Volume 13 (2009) the publication schedule of Women and Social Movements became semi-annual, publishing in the spring (March) and fall (September) Between 2004 and 2009 the size of each issue had increased considerably, and the editors needed to devote more time to the preparation of each issue. Each issue now includes three document projects or document archives—along with book reviews, notes from the archive, teaching tools, and full text sources.
With the assistance of a large advisory board, the co-editors are now preparing another digital archive, "Women's International Agendas, 1840-2000." This archive will bring together 150,000 pages of published and manuscript resources generated by women’s international activism since 1840. That new resource will be available by subscription to academic libraries and beginning in mid-2010.
As of April 2009, Women and Social Movements: Basic Edition contains the following resources:
Introduced in March 2007, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000: Scholar's Edition is available as an upgrade to the Basic Edition. In addition to the features of the Basic Edition, Scholar's Edition subscribers enjoy access to the landmark five-volume reference work, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary from Harvard University Press, available for the first time in electronic form, and all publications by Commissions on the Status of Women in the U.S., 1963-2005. The Commissions database includes 90,000 pages of publications by federal, state, and local Commissions on the Status of Women.