2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

This panel examines two sets of collaborations between historians, archivists, and librarians who are working together to share the stories of black women reformers via digital history projects, archival preservation and displays, student projects, and essays and biographies (in print and electronic forms) to reach a broad audience. Terrell biographer and history professor Alison Parker will join Archivist Ken Grossi in a discussion of the discovery and gifting of newly-discovered letters and diaries of the racial justice activist Mary Church Terrell to Oberlin College. They will discuss their efforts to preserve Terrell’s papers--evidence of the quotidian--to make them available to students and scholars, including Oberlin’s organization of a public history symposium celebrating Terrell’s life and legacy. Erika Piola curator at the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) will discuss the black women’s history digital humanities project based on a rare form of popular culture, Friendship Albums. The Friendship Albums are volumes of original writing and artwork gathered and circulated by free black women active in abolitionist circles in pre-Civil War Philadelphia. Relatives, friends and fellow abolitionists contributed poems, prose, and watercolors and drawings to these albums. Professor Tamar Carroll, whose students collaborated with the LCP on the Friendship Album web project, will chair and comment. We will use these two projects as case studies to explore the challenges, rewards, and lessons learned in preserving black women’s archives and using those primary sources to foster appreciation of black women’s history of involvement in political reform.