Lives of women in the region west of the Mississippi from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, dealing with how women of different classes and ethnic backgrounds interacted with one another and participated in the development of frontier culture and society.
What does it mean to engage with women’s history? What happens, historiographically speaking, when we begin our research and writing with women’s experiences and concerns? (And with which women should we begin?) What kinds of sources will we have to use, and why? How do historians interpret non-textual sources like photographs and artifacts? Whose perspectives should we be taking into account, and why? If we practice women’s history well, what do we learn about the advantages and liabilities of mainstream historical practice? And is “women” a useful category of analysis at all in an age where U.S. culture is coming to recognize gender isn’t binary? Questions such as these will drive our inquiry into the history of women in the western United States. This course is about the experiences of those women, but it is also about methods, controversies, ideas and ideologies, and the ways women’s history gets deployed in academic circles, K-12 history lessons, and everyday life in the United States.
While we will read and discuss texts similar to those you may have read in other undergraduate history courses, students in History 346 can expect to perform different kinds of work in this course. In a typical upper-division history seminar, each individual student undertakes independent research with the end goal of producing a 15-page research paper. This paper usually is read only by the student and the course instructor; the knowledge is not shared beyond the course. In this traditional paradigm, not only does the student’s research not help future researchers, but students also do not benefit from the advantages inherit in “crowdsourcing” research—that is, they don’t have a system whereby they can share primary sources, recommend new leads to pursue, and engage in communal considerations of the secondary literature. We will replace this traditional history coursework with a collaborative, project-driven approach that still emphasizes research, writing, and revision, but outside the scope of an individually authored essay.
A major part of this course involves collaboration. We will work with local collections of artifacts and texts and share via digital multimedia a history of Idaho women’s history, as told through their shoes (yes, shoes!). Thanks to new technologies and students’ creativity, we have multiple ways to shape this project, and we will decide on its final genre and media together. In addition to providing a narrative about the women under consideration, the project will emphasize user engagement with the artifacts and texts and will assume users will interact with the content on a multiplicity of devices.