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

June 01 - 04, 2017

Historic sites and archives can grab our imaginations to make the past come alive. They engage us intellectually and emotionally through places, artifacts, photographs, and documents. This Berks-specific program, proposed by the National Collaborative forWomen’s Historic Sites (NCWHS) and co-sponsored by the CCWH, explores and encourages the value of historic sites and archives for teaching women’s history.

First, a roundtable discussion chaired by Historian/Professor Nancy Hewitt features four resource-based experts discussing their innovative pedagogies that engage people in programs on women’s rights and leadership, feminism and their roles in political families. Noemi Ghazala will explore the challenges of interpreting an event--the Seneca Falls Woman's Rights Convention--that left a blemish on our national narrative; Director Lucienne Beard at Paulsdale, Alice Paul’s home in Mt. Laurel, NJ, analyzes their experimental educational programming; curator Elizabeth DeMaria explores the Roosevelt women's influence on Theodore Roosevelt’s policies and practices; and curator/archivist Heather Cole from Harvard’s Houghton Library Archives shares reactions to Theodore Roosevelt’s senior thesis endorsing women’s rights.

Then, the NCWHS-National Park Service host a special event at Sagamore Hill NHS, a 30-minute bus ride away. After a private tour of the Roosevelt home with NPS curator Laura Dabrowski and Alice Roosevelt Longworth’s biographer, Stacey Cordery, participants will visit the Old Orchard Museum at Sagamore Hill.

These elements mix presentations, explorations and conversations, demonstrating how greater collaboration between academic and public historians (in historic sites and archives) enlivens and complicates U.S. women’s history and its pedagogy (in schools, universities, and senior learning programs).