Bridging Generations with Collective Biography: Sharing Stories from 1977

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In 1977, thousands of women gathered in Houston, Texas, for the first and only federally funded National Women’s Conference (NWC) in U.S. History. Their purpose was to set and deliver an agenda to the president that would ensure that women’s rights would be a central focus in the wider human rights debate. 

The Sharing Stories from 1977 Project, led by Dr. Leandra Zarnow (Associate Professor of History, University of Houston) and Dr. Nancy Beck Young (Moores Professor of History & Director of CPH, University of Houston), seeks to preserve and amplify this important political moment through a massive, crowdsourced digital archive. In Part I of their conversation, Drs. Zarnow and Beck Young introduce their practice of “big biography” - capturing the lives and demographics of over 2,000 delegates, 30,000 conference observers, and 150,000 regional participants. They emphasize that the success of this monumental project is only possible through the collective efforts of educators, students, researchers, archivists, and NWC participants from across the country. 

In Part II of this episode, Drs. Zarnow and Beck Young are joined by three such collaborators - Dr. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu (Professor of History and Asian American Studies, University of California, Irvine), Dr. Stacie Taranto (Associate Professor of History, Ramapo College), and Dr. Emily Westkaemper (Associate Professor of History, James Madison University). They discuss how Sharing Stories has promoted strong intergenerational exchange, especially as students realize that many of the issues of the 1970s are still the issues of today. 

Check out this amazing project: https://sharingstories1977.uh.edu/discover

The Center for Public History at the University of Houston. https://uh.edu/class/cph