CHIST 4900Women's Untold Stories

Catalog

We create history by listening to the voices of the past. We tell stories that let people in the present hear those voices. In this hands-on course, students are storytellers who uncover the lives of forgotten women or re-tell women's stories from a new perspective. Students work with original archival documents from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. They touch, read, and interpret original letters, diaries, photographs, and papers of women with a diverse set of identities, backgrounds, and beliefs. These artifacts testify to how women shape society and their experiences of everyday life. Students transform this testimony into stories that are relevant and accessible to contemporary audiences. Through experiential learning, students understand how historians' interpretations of the past are created, debated, revised, and presented. This course may be repeated for credit because the specific research focus changes every time.