News & Events
Two New Interterm Courses Just Added
Two new interterm courses have just been added to the archives concentration:
ARX 100, section 1: Virginia Woolf archives in the Mortimer Rare Book Room
Cornelia Pearsall, Department of English
January 11–15, from 1–2:30 p.m.
1 credit (S/U)
Meeting daily in the Mortimer Rare Book Room, this course will work intensively with Smith College's Virginia Woolf archives, drawing chiefly though not exclusively from the Frances Hooper Collection of Virginia Woolf Books and Manuscripts and the Elizabeth P. Richardson Bloomsbury Iconography Collection. We'll analyze various kinds of archival materials, including family photographs, first editions from Virginia and Leonard Woolf's innovative Hogarth Press, literary manuscripts and several collections of letters. Throughout the week, students will work independently with a range of documents, considering especially the relation of their physical details and condition to their content (the images or words). There will be three short papers (totaling five pages) due over the course of the week.
ARX 100, section 2: From Subjects of Reform to Agents for Social Change: Working Women in the Industrial Program of the YWCA
Susan Van Dyne, Program for the Study of Women and Gender
January 11–15, from 10:30 a.m.–noon
1 credit (S/U)
Through hands-on research with primary sources from records of the YWCA, we'll consider how working women in the decades from 1910–30s used the Y to transform the national organization and their own lives and working conditions. We'll analyze how the YWCA's strategies—education of single working girls at risk in low-wage factory jobs, cross-class organization and building local, regional and national federations—provided the tools for working women to become leaders, labor organizers and educators of the middle-class professional staff of the Y to embrace labor activism as central to their mission. We'll write short pieces totaling five pages.
"Digital Public History in the 21st Century," by Tom Scheinfeldt
November 5, at 5 p.m., in Seelye 201
Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of the Center for History and New Media, is one of the foremost practitioners and advocates for the fields of public history and for digital archives, arguing for the expansion of our conception of primary historical sources to include massive, democratically inclusive digital archives such as two he manages, September 11 Digital Archive and Hurricane Digital Memory Bank. Sheinfeldt's lecture is sponsored by the Archives Concentration, the American Studies Program, and the Smith College Lecture Committee.
To learn more about Scheinfeldt's work visit The Center for History and New Media (CHNM). CHNM is a blockbuster clearing house for research and teaching history in the 21st century. In addition to digital archives, the CHNM offers pedagogical tools, theoretical essays and an innovative think tank for creating and disseminating open access software to humanists, such as Omeka and Zotero.
Scheinfeldt believes that our teaching and research practices and our conceptualization and definitions of our fields will change as a result of digital access, collection and new paradigms for preserving and interpreting the past, and its links to our present realities and future possibilities.
A Conversation Between President Christ and Gloria Steinem '56
On Oct. 21, 2009, Smith College celebrated the life, words and work of alumna Gloria Steinem '56, in commemoration of her 75th birthday. For more than 50 years, Steinem has been at the forefront of the movement for women's equality.
Oral History Workshop
September 30, October 2 and 7, from 1 to 4 p.m.
Campus Center 102
The Sophia Smith Collection, in association with American studies and the Study of Women and Gender, will be offering a three-part oral history workshop for any interested students. We will introduce students to methodological and ethical issues, discuss the uses of oral history and cover the techniques and protocols for conducting interviews, including an overview of recording equipment. Students will experiment with oral history and will conduct a short interview of their own to share with the group.
Pre-registration is necessary as space is limited. For more information or to register, please contact Kelly Anderson at kpanders@smith.edu, or at extension 2979.
Archives Concentration Presentation
September 22, at noon, in Seelye 207
Pizza will be served
If you enjoy reading other people's mail, seeing the drafts of a famous poet, touching the scrapbook of an early Smith student or having direct access as a researcher to the largest women's history archive in the world and oldest in the U.S., we invite you to apply to participate in the Archives Concentration. In-depth knowledge of archival collections and methods can be useful in a wide array of fields including education, public policy, community organizing, advocacy work and the law.
Applications for the concentration are due October 1. We expect to admit 15 students each from the sophomore and junior classes. Accepted students will be notified before pre-registration in November.
Historians look to the future
Financial Times, August 10, 2009
Helping designers to develop skincare products was not what Sophie Clapp had in mind when she trained as an archivist. But after working with Churchill's wartime papers—via a spell in Unilever's archive—that is what she ended up doing, at Boots. The result was Boots Original Beauty Formula, an apothecary-style range marking the company's 160th anniversary.
Compost, Activism and Oral History
Students wove together excerpts from their interviews with activist women to tell a larger story. The transcripts and recordings of these oral histories are available to the public at the Sophia Smith Collection.
"Have a Spot of Tea and a Bit of History"
NewsSmith, Summer 2009
A story and accompanying video about Nanci Young, Smith College archivist, who delivers tea talks on the history of Smith College houses. She draws from a treasure trove of institutional and archival records, early photographs, scrapbooks, letters and journals documenting the life of the college and its students since Smith's opening in 1875.
"Roughing It: Leaving the East for the Wild West"
The New Yorker, issue dated April 20, 2009
A story about two Smith alumnae fleeing privileged but unfulfilling lives in
the East to become schoolteachers in Colorado in 1916. The article about the
adventures of Rosamond Underwood and Dorothy Woodruff is based on papers in
the Sophia Smith Collection.
