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Women and Social Movements in the United States - New Features

I am pleased to announce a new release of Women and Social Movements in the United States, bringing the collection to over 35,000 documents from nearly 150,000 pages of full text.

You will notice there is new software architecture. The interface provides an entirely new way to search and browse the database. The database provider is making many changes to improve the site's accessibility and functionality.

This release adds two new document projects (for a total of 90 projects):
- How Did Women's Antislavery Fiction Contribute to Debates about Gender, Slavery, and Abolition, 1828-1856?, by Holly M. Kent
- How Did American and Japanese Gender Hierarchies Shape Japanese Women's Participation in the Transnational WCTU Movement in the 1880s?, by Rumi Yasutake

This release also introduces "document archives," which bring additional primary source documents to the collection. Like the document projects which have been in the collection all along, document archives are primary source documents organized by topic. The difference is that the archives contain less scholar commentary and more primary source documents, giving historians and their students the opportunity to form their own interpretation of the sources. In other words, the archives present primary sources without the pedagogical apparatus. Each archive is prefaced by just a brief introductory essay, but no abstract or annotated sources (as users will find in the more scholarly document projects).

The first document archive is featured in this release and was assembled by scholar Jana Brubaker. The archive focuses on Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a noted Boston reformer in the first third of the twentieth century. This archive contains 79 documents.

Please let us know what you think about these changes.