HIST 4460: North American Borderlands, 1500-1900

The letters exchanged between Mercy Otis Warren (1728-1814) and Hannah Winthrop (baptized 1727-1790) provide a remarkable window into the daily lives of families living through the challenges of revolution and nation building. The correspondence between Warren and Winthrop reveals the important roles that women played in the revolutionary era.

This website contains Philadelphia-area collections highlighting women’s struggle to pass the 19th Amendment. It includes digital items such as letters, photographs, diaries, annual reports, and more.

Each of the 19 collections listed here explores some aspect of the sociocultural construction of gender in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Examples include the Digital Transgender Archive, images of women in 19c prints, and a history of social dance in America.

This database simplifies access to digital collections of primary sources (photos, letters, diaries, artifacts, etc.) that document the history of women in the United States. These diverse collections range from Abigail Franks' letters to her son from the 1730s and 1740s (Center for Jewish History) to Katrina Thomas' photographs of ethnic weddings from the late 20th century.

Home economists had a deep and lasting influence on the development of America during the Progressive Era, and their work is archived in HEARTH, a core electronic collection of books and journals in Home Economics and related disciplines. Titles published between 1850 and 1950 were selected and ranked by teams of scholars for their great historical importance.

Contains digitized back issues of Harper's Bazaar, an American monthly women's fashion magazine, from 1867-1900.

The Lydia Maria Child Papers consist of ninety mostly personal and at times provocative letters dating largely from 1831 to 1894. The bulk is letters from Lydia Maria Child to her wealthy Boston abolitionist and philanthropic friends, the Lorings, between 1839 and 1859. They concentrate on the period of Child's distress with the institutional politics of antislavery, her editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, her growing attachment to New York Bohemia, and the publication of "Letters From New York." The correspondence documents her day to day finances, friends, and family.

Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library’s extensive trial collections, Studies in Scarlet features over 420 trial narratives involving the crimes and passions of both renowned and ordinary people.

Diaries written by British and American women who documented their travels to places around the globe, including India, the West Indies, countries in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as around the United States.

The seven volumes of diaries and notebooks, 1793-1861, of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (ca.1775-1865) document her position at the center of a Washington, D.C., social circle that included George and Martha Washington, James and Dolley Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Bayard Smith, and the cabinet members, congressmen, and diplomats who constituted the city's entwined social and political worlds. Thornton was the daughter of Ann Brodeau, who emigrated from England in 1775 with the help of Benjamin Franklin and established a successful school in Philadelphia. The identity of Anna Maria Thornton's father is unknown, but he may have been English clergyman William Dodd, who was hanged for forgery in 1777.

The Beecher family is considered by many as one of the most influential families among its contemporaries. The family is known for their stance on abolition, religion, education, and women’s rights. Its members had written and preached about the immorality of slavery for decades and had taken action in various ways, including purchasing and subsequently freeing slaves. The collection housed at the Schlesinger Library consists of over 10,000 items, which includes correspondence (both business and personal), manuscripts, newspaper articles, and photographs from family members.

Hannah (1792–1870) and Samuel (1790–1838) Blackwell immigrated to the United States from England with their nine children in 1832. Their extraordinary family, four generations of whom are represented in these papers, went on to play important roles in 19th and 20th century American social reform movements. The Blackwell family papers contain correspondence, diaries, writings, financial records, drawings, organizational records, and other material that document family members' personal, professional, and public lives. For more than a century and across generations, the Blackwells offered each other advice on courtship, marriage, finances, domestic relations, health, and childrearing.

The papers of nurse, educator, philanthropist, and lecturer Clara Barton span the years 1805-1958, with the bulk dating from 1861 to 1912. The collection contains correspondence, diaries and journals, reports, addresses, legal and financial papers, organizational records, lectures, writings, scrapbooks, biographical material, printed matter, memorabilia, and other papers. They relate primarily to Barton's work providing relief services during the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, her founding in 1881 of the American National Red Cross, and her establishment in 1905 of the National First Aid Association of America.

Frances E. Willard (1839-1898) earned a world-wide reputation as a social reformer, most notably for her leadership of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the largest and most powerful woman's organization of its time. This online resource provides access to Willard’s complete journals for the first time.

Margaret Bayard Smith was a D.C.-based author and leader in social and political circles during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Her papers span the years 1789-1874, with the bulk of the material concentrated in the period 1796-1840. They include family and general correspondence, diaries, journals, and commonplace books.

Women Working explores women's impact on the economic life of the United States between 1800 and the Great Depression. This digital collection aggregates thousands of items that illuminate women's history including over 650,000 individual pages from more than 3,100 books and trade catalogs, 900 archives and manuscript items, and 1,400 photographs.

This collection consists of correspondence, scrapbooks, clippings, college records, images, diaries, publications and ephemera documenting the history of women physicians beginning with the first medical school for women, Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania.

The History of Women's Education is an online locus of scholarship on the history of women’s higher education, fostering inquiry and dialogue on how women’s education has informed contemporary life and how it will shape the global future.