Research Guides: HIST 341: Women, Gender and Sexuality in Early America (HC): Historiography

Taking Account of Historiography

Blackwell Companion Titles Related to 18th and 19th Century History
The Blackwell Companion volumes usually focus on a time period or cultural movement. Authors contribute essays on important aspects of the broader topic. Historiography often plays a large role in the author's analysis.
You can search for Blackwell Companion* in Tripod and add another keyword.
Ex.: ("blackwell companion*") AND histor* AND mexic*
History Compass
This journal publishes literature reviews exclusively. Literature reviews are a particularly useful kind of journal article when doing research. They address the issues involved in a particular question and the debates among scholars. They map out the intellectual terrain succinctly and give you the major landmarks in terms of key authors and significant titles for greater understanding.

Example:
Ann M. Little
"Gender and Sexuality in the North American Borderlands, 1492–1848"
2009
Abstract: Borderlands history has traditionally been dominated by the masculine concerns of warfare, politics, and diplomacy, but in the past two decades, women’s and gender historians have produced studies that reveal that gender and sexuality were central to all colonial North American borderlands encounters among and between Native Americans and Europeans. This new scholarship argues not just for the importance of women in borderlands societies, but for the importance of looking at gender identities, work roles, and sexual and marriage practices, and the role all of these things played in intercultural contact and conflict. Scholars interested in gender and sexuality should take a broadly comparative approach in this field, because of the striking similarities as well as important differences that emerge with a continental perspective.

Oxford Bibliographies Online
Includes introductions to each topic area, guides to introductory works, textbooks, guidebooks, journals, reference works etc., and links to useful websites. Bibliographies are browseable by subject area and keyword searchable.
Annual Reviews
A searchable collection of critical review articles capturing the current understanding of a topic, including what is well supported, what is controversial, and where further research is needed.

Dissertations

Doctoral students go through an exhaustive literature search when writing their dissertations. They also tend to work on new questions, sometimes ones that have received very little attention from scholars before. You can obtain many of these dissertations and benefit from all the bibliographic treasues and new ideas. Check ProQuest Dissertations & Theses to identify dissertations on your topic.

Dissertations & Theses Global
Millions of dissertations and theses from around the world.

British Library EThOS Electronic Theses Online Service
This service provides full text of many recent dissertations written at British universities. Some are available for immediate download, while others take a day or two for delivery.
DART-Europe E-theses portal
For searching across digital collections of theses in several different European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Greece.

Book Reviews

ProQuest Research Library
Provides citations and full-text magazine and journal articles in a wide variety of disciplines, both scholarly and popular in scope. Covers 1971-present.
New York Review of Books
The New York Review of Books (or NYREV or NYRB) is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs.

Interdisciplinary Resources

Other fields of study, including art history and literature, can add to our knowledge and understanding of women's history. Some examples of useful resources are listed below.

African American Literature in Transition, 1830-1850: Volume 3 by Benjamin Fagan (Editor)
ISBN: 9781108386067

Publication Date: 2021-05-07

This volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850. Chapters focus on Black women and the antislavery press, the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and the work of Nancy Prince in Jamaica. See other volumes in Tripod for the series covering the years 1750 to 1880.
Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects : American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 by Dianne Macleod (Other Primary Creator)
ISBN: 9780520237292

Publication Date: 2008-09-16

Dianne Sachko Macleod brings a surprising paradox to light, showing that collecting, which provided wealthy women with a private sense of solace, also liberated them to venture into the public sphere and make a lasting contribution to the emerging American culture. See Chapter 1 concerning women collectors during the antebellum period.
Only the Clothes on Her Back : Clothing and the Hidden History of Power in the Nineteenth-century United States by Laura F. Edwards
ISBN: 9780197568576

Publication Date: 2022-02-24

An innovative recasting of US legal and economic history through the power of clothing for those who lacked power and status in American society. Wives wove linen and kept the proceeds, enslaved people traded coats and shoes, and poor people invested in fabrics, which they carefully preserved in trunks. Edwards shows that these stories are about far more than cloth and clothing; they reshape our understanding of law and the economy in America.
"Workt by Hand" : Hidden Labor and Historical Quilts by Catherine Morris; Brooklyn Museum Staff
ISBN: 9780872731738

Publication Date: 2013-01-01

Like the exhibition it accompanies, this catalogue, spans two centuries of quilt making, examining the historical designation of quilts as crafts and the impact of feminist scholarship on the ways quilts are viewed and interpreted.