Digital Women's History Resources

Women's History Resources now available online through the Ball State University's Digital Media Repository!

Ball State University Libraries is pleased to announce the availability of three collections of women's history resources available online in the Digital Media Repository (http://libx.bsu.edu), the Middletown Women's History Digital Collection, The Man Haters Film Collection, and the Eleanor Roosevelt Speech Collection.

Middletown Women's History Digital Collection
The Middletown Women's History Digital Collection provides online access to archival materials documenting the experiences of women in Muncie, Indiana from the 1880s through the 1930s. It includes diaries, minutes, and correspondence, photographs and other documents from the wealth of resources available in Ball State University Libraries' Archives and Special Collections. The collection is organized based on the six areas used by Helen and Robert Lynd in their seminal sociological study of Muncie, or "Middletown," in the 1920s and 1930s. This project was supported by a grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Indiana State Library.

The Man Haters Film Collection
The Man Haters is a rare 35mm silent movie filmed in Muncie, Indiana in 1915. The film was produced by Basil McHenry, a traveling film producer from Akron, Ohio. He financed the film with sponsorship by Muncie's Majestic Theater and The Muncie Evening Press newspaper. Readers of the Press were asked to cast their votes for the leading actresses using coupons printed in the paper. Filming began in Muncie, Indiana on November 3, 1915 and the movie opened at the Majestic Theater on November 15, 1915. Basil McHenry also produced similar films in other towns in Indiana and Ohio.

This digital collection contains the ten minute original version and a longer documentary version of The Man Haters film, newspaper clippings about the contest, still photographs from the film, and a booklet about history of the film.

Eleanor Roosevelt Speech Collection
The Eleanor Roosevelt Speech Collection includes digital audio,photographs, and a transcript documenting Eleanor Roosevelt's speech to convocation in Assembly Hall at Ball State Teacher's College (now Ball State University) in Muncie, Indiana, on May 6, 1959. The title of her speech was "Is America Facing World Leadership?" and warned against complacency and stressed the urgency of understanding other peoples in the world. These collections are also available to researchers in person in Archives and Special Collections, Ball State University Libraries.

If you have any questions about these or other collections in the Digital Media Repository, please feel free to contact:

John Straw
Assistant Dean for Digital Initiatives and Special Collections and Digital
Media
Repository Project Coordinator
Ball State University Libraries
Alexander M. Bracken Library
Muncie, IN 47306
jstraw@bsu.edu

Categories: digital content

CFP 2011 Big Berks Conference

The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians is holding its next conference at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst on June 9-12, 2011.

2011 marks the 15th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women and the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, which was first celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland and is now honored by more than sixty countries around the globe. The choice of “Generations” reflects this transnational intellectual, political, and organizational heritage as well as a desire to explore related questions such as:

• How have women’s generative experiences – from production and reproduction to creativity and alliance building – varied across time and space? How have these been appropriated and represented by contemporaries and scholars alike?
• What are the politics of “generation”? Who is encouraged? Who is condemned or discouraged? How has this changed over time?
• Is a global perspective compatible with generational (in the genealogical sense) approaches to the past that tend to reinscribe national/regional/racial boundaries?
• What challenges do historians of women, gender, and sexuality face as these fields and their practitioners mature?

To engender further, open-ended engagement with these and other issues, the 2011 conference will include workshops dedicated to discussing precirculated papers on questions and problems (epistemological, methodological, substantive) provoked by the notion of "Generations."

The process for submitting and vetting papers and panels has changed substantially from previous years, so please read the instructions carefully. To encourage transnational discussions, panels will be principally organized along thematic rather than national lines and therefore proposals will be vetted by a transnational group of scholars with expertise in a particular thematic, rather than geographic, field. Preference will be given to discussions of any topic across national boundaries and to work that addresses sexuality, race, and labor in any context, with special consideration for pre-modern (ancient, medieval, early modern) periods. However, unattached papers and proposals that fall within a single nation/region or the modern period will also be given full consideration. As a forum dedicated to encouraging innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship and transnational conversation, the Berkshire conference continues to encourage submissions from graduate students, international scholars, independent scholars, filmmakers, and to welcome a variety of disciplinary perspectives.

Proposals must be submitted electronically via the Berkshire Conference website: http://www.berksconference.org. If you have questions about the most appropriate subcommittee for your proposal, please direct them to Madhavi Kale (mkale@brynmawr.edu). For problems with the electronic submission, please contact Zain Lakhani (zlakhani@sas.upenn.edu).

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION: March 1, 2010.

Thematic Subcommittees & Chairs

• Beauty and the Body, Stephanie Camp
• Economies, Labors, and Consumption, Tracey Deutsch
• Health and Medicine, Julie Livingston
• Migrations: Race, Gender and Activism, Annelise Orleck
• Politics and the State, Margot Canaday
• Race in Global Perspective, Marilyn Lake
• Religion: Belief, Practice, Communities, Marion Katz and Anthea Butler
• Sexuality, Leisa Meyer and Anjali Aarondaker
• War, Violence, and Terror, Anupama Rao
• Youth and Aging, Margaret Jacobs

Individual Papers: Although we prefer proposals to be submitted for complete panels, roundtables or workshops, we always accept some single paper proposals. The submission file should include your name, paper title, and a 250-word abstract. Please also submit a short c.v.

Alternative Session Proposals: Proposals for presentations in formats other than that of conventional conference papers (films, performances, poster sessions, for example) are welcome (and subject to/contingent on the availability of facilities at the conference site). Such proposals should clearly indicate the specific requirements for their exhibition/performance/display (audio/visual setup or auditorium/studio space, for example).

Panels: Two or three papers of no more than 20 minutes each, chair, and a separate discussant. The submission file should include the author, title, and a 250-word abstract for each paper as well as a panel title, the organizer's name, and a 500-word summary abstract. Please submit a short c.v. for each participant.

Roundtables: Four to seven participants, brief presentations, with a focus on collegial discussion within the group and between the group and the audience. The submission file should include the roundtable's title, the organizer's name, a 500-word summary abstract, and a list of the participants with a brief description of their contribution to the roundtable. Please submit a short c.v. for each participant.

Workshops: Six to eight pre-circulated papers, with a chair and a separate discussant. Papers will be due April 30, 2011, and will be pre-circulated by posting on a website accessible to all Berkshire Conference registrants. Rather than presenting the papers themselves in the session, participants and audience members will spend the time discussing papers they have already read. Workshops are intended to provide time and space at the Berks for scholars working on similar ideas and themes to share pre-circulated papers and have a conversation. The workshops might be particularly useful for scholars who wish to share and exchange contributions that could be published as an edited collection. The submission file should include the author, title, and a 250-word abstract for each paper as well as a panel title, the organizer's name, and a 500-word summary abstract. Please submit a short c.v. for each participant.

Categories: conferences

Sallie Bingham Center Travel Grants Due January 29

The Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, part of the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, announces the availability of Mary Lily Research Grants for research travel to our collections.

The Sallie Bingham Center documents the public and private lives of women through a wide variety of published and unpublished sources. Collections of personal papers, family papers, and organizational records complement print sources such as books and periodicals. Particular strengths of the Sallie Bingham Center are feminism in the U.S., women's prescriptive literature from the 19th & 20th centuries, girls' literature, zines, artist's books by women, gender & sexuality, and the history & culture of women in the South.

Mary Lily Research grants are for undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars conducting research using collections held by the Sallie Bingham Center. Grant money may be used for travel, photocopying, and living expenses while pursuing research at the Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library. Applicants must live outside of a 50-mile radius from Durham, NC. The maximum award per applicant is $1,000.

The deadline for application is January 29, 2010, and recipients will be announced in March 2010. For more information and the application form, please visit: http://library.duke.edu/specialcollections/bingham/grants

Categories: grants

HerStory 360° Challenge

Beginning January 1, 2010, and continuing each day for 90 days until the end of Women's History Month, the HerStory 360° Challenge, on the HerStory Scrapbook website (www.herstoryscrapbook.com), will present 90 stories of 90 women who fought for women's suffrage. The 2010 HerStory 360° Challenge commemorates the 30th anniversary of Women's History Month and the 90th Anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, by providing internet-access to original historical sources.

During the month of February, which is Black History Month, the HerStory 360° Challenge will focus on African-American women. Because black women were often marginalized in, or left out entirely from, the history texts written by white suffragists and the mainstream media, we are fortunate that Google Books has recently digitalized The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, which was first published in 1910.

Please consider including the HerStory Scrapbook as a reference in your women’s history or women’s studies courses. And, let your colleagues know about the HerStory Scrapbook. The HerStory Scrapbook has been recommended by the National Women’s History Project.

via Nancy McDonald
www.herstoryscrapbook.com

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