WGST-290: American Women's and Gender History: Carroll: Suffragist Poster Exhibit Project

https://infoguides.rit.edu/prf.php?id=5e50cf08-7cdb-11ed-9922-0ad758b798c3

The Posters: Schlesinger Library Collection

Harvard's Schlesinger Library is home to one of the finest collection of resources for research on the history of women in America, the library's holdings are strong in:

  • Women's rights and feminism
  • Health and sexuality
  • Work and family life
  • Education and the professions
  • Culinary history and etiquette

The posters you are working with come from within the many digital image collections held by the Schlesinger Library. Because they exist within a library's catalog, gleaning any known details about these posters, the image's metadata* can give you valuable information. Use this metadata to launch your further research.

When accessing the Schlesinger Suffrage Posters from within this library (Harvard calls their catalog "Hollis"), ask yourself questions such as:

  • is the creator known?
  • is a "real" person depicted in the poster?
  • is the actual poster part of a someone's collection, or an institution's collection?
  • does the poster exhibit symbolic iconography? Such as symbolic flora or fauna, a certain color scheme, a mythological or representative female figure?
  • does the poster reference a particular event?
  • what else was happening at the time of the poster's creation?

*Metadata is data about data. It is descriptive information about a particular data set, object, or resource, including how it is formatted, and when and by whom it was collected, created, authored. Although metadata most commonly refers to web resources, it can be about either physical or electronic resources.

~See below for helpful research resources~

Library of Congress: Digital Images

Library of Congress Digital Collections: Women’s History

This rich collection of primary source artifacts, which includes the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection may include following formats:

  • Manuscript/Mixed Material
  • Photo, Print, Drawing
  • Archived Web Site
  • Audio Recording
  • Book/Printed Material
  • Notated Music
  • Film, Video
  • Map
  • Newspaper

RIT Database: Social Movements

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000
    

This RIT subscription, Women and Social Movements in the United States, brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life. Thousands of pages of materials provide scholars with in-depth access to the published histories and records of women's reform organizations throughout the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Library of Congress: Historical Newspapers

The Library of Congress: Chronicling America

Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1963 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.

RIT Databases: Historical Newspapers

New York Times
    

Full-text coverage (from 1851 to the present) of the US newspaper of record. Offers superb coverage of national and international news, plus coverage of important speeches and documents, Supreme Court decisions, and presidential press conference transcripts.

NYS Historic Newspapers
    

This RIT subscription database offers a collection NYS Historic Newspapers providing free online access to a wide range of newspapers chosen to reflect New York's unique history. Selected historical newspapers from Livingston, Monroe, Ontario, Wayne and Wyoming counties are included.

Smithsonian Institute

The Smithsonian Institute's Suffrage Collection

A small but curated collection of images and suggested websites speaking to suffrage.

RIT Library's Search Tool

The Library’s search tool: “Summon”

From the homepage, https://library.rit.edu/, you’ll see this search bar:

Summon is what we call the library’s catalog gateway that searches ALL of our materials. So, if you are not accessing a specific database, here is where you want to search.

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Please contact your librarian with any questions.

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