Database spotlight: Women and Social Movements, Scholar's Edition

Women's History Month is an appropriate time to let you know about another great database from Alexander Street Press, Women and Social Movements, Scholar's Edition. The Reinhardt community can access this database at any time through the library, but in honor of Women's History Month, Alexander Street is offering free online access to the collection for all of March. Click here for easy access.

The winner of a 2004 Oustanding Academic Title Award from Choice journal (a publication of the Association of College & Research Libraries), Women and Social Movements is used by students of women's history and American history all over the world. This resource seeks to document the history of women's activism in public life from 1600 to 2000, advancing scholarship in US history by making the insights of women's history accessible to teachers and students at universities, colleges and high schools.

The collection includes 91 document projects and archives with more than 3,600 documents and 150,000 pages of additional full-text documents, and more than 2,060 primary authors. The document projects are written by leading scholars and are organized around interpretive questions, each with 20 to 50 primary documents that address the question. Some examples are "How Did the Ladies' Association of Philadelphia Shape New Forms of Women's Activism During the American Revolution?," "How did White Women Aid Former Slaves During the Civil War?" and "How did Black and White Southern Women Campaign to End Lynching?" How easy would that make your term paper research?

Full-text primary documents include the proceedings of all women's rights conventions from 1848 to 1869, the proceedings of the Women's Christian Temperance Union from 1874 to 1898, and selected publications from the League of Women Voters, dating as far back as the '20s. The collection is updated semi-annually; recent additions include the five-volume biographical dictionary Notable American Women, which might be EXTREMELY useful for our upcoming trivia contest, and the collected publications of federal, state and local Commissions on the Status of Women.

The collection also includes book, film and Web site reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. And, surprise, surprise--there's even a blog and discussion group, which I think will be of particular interest to the history faculty, where their peers discuss how they've used the collection in the classroom, share syllabi and exchange ideas.

Check it out!