Using Online Resources to Re-center the U.S. History Survey:
Women's History as a Case Study

Kriste Lindenmeyer

In a recent interview in the New York Times, Gerda Lerner was asked if it was time to eliminate the separate focus on women's history. She defiantly responded, "For over 4,000 years, men have defined culture by looking at the activities of other men. . . . Give us another 4,000 years and we'll talk about mainstreaming."1 Her point is a good one, yet the majority of undergraduates will never take a women's history class. It is therefore important to weave women's history into the standard U.S. history survey. Although today's survey textbooks include gender as one of the perspectives necessary for a full understanding of America's past, women's experience is usually presented only as an "add-on" to the central narrative. Fortunately, teachers can remedy this situation by making creative use of the World Wide Web. I have found that assigning students to read, and work with, selected online primary sources allows me to recenter the U.S. history survey by placing women's experience at the core instead of the fringes.	1
My frustration with the treatment of women and gender in most textbooks led me to the seminar "Making History on the Web: Creating On-Line Materials for Teaching United States History" held at the University of Virginia in June 1996.2 Promoters suggested that the World Wide Web might fill pedagogical voids left by commercially published texts. But in 1996 a ride on "the information highway" provided little substance for historians and could often best be described as a trip on the "World Wide Wait." Some libraries and archives were beginning to digitize segments of their collections, but it seemed that significant progress was far in the future.3	2
About the same time, commercial publishers began experimenting with laser discs, CD-ROMs, and Web sites. A few pioneering efforts by online publishers such as iLrn.com have managed to survive the dot-com compost heap. Other e-supplements produced by traditional publishers (for example, Bedford/St. Martin's America's History, Addison Wesley Longman's History Place, and W. W. Norton's The Essential America) have enhanced printed textbooks.4 While these digital formats offer interesting alternative presentations, they rely on existing textbook models that do not fully include women's history or a gender perspective in the U.S. survey.	3
Thankfully, since 1996 there has been an explosive growth of Web sites highlighting women's contributions to American history. To turn an old phrase, if you have not visited the Web lately, you have not seen the Web. It has also become easier to identify the best online sources.5 The primary-source Web sites I use in teaching the second half of the U.S. survey are maintained largely by libraries, archives, museums, university history departments, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations. Their quality is high, they are free, and I choose where, when, and how to incorporate them into my courses. While instructors must be sensitive to the wide variance in students' computing expertise, the benefits of using online sources to enhance printed textbooks and supplemental readers far outweigh the difficulties.6	4
Yet there is a need for more discussion on the best practices for using online sources. As Phyllis Holman Weisbard noted in her comments during a session on women's history Web sites at the 2002 Berkshire Conference, we know little about instructors' actual use of women's history Web sites in their teaching and research. 7 A query to the H-Women listserv, sponsored by H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences, asking for feedback on Weisbard's comments failed to elicit a single response.	. . .