Introduction
The Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create Women in World History. The project is in development and will be completed by June 2006.
World history teachers face many challenges to incorporating primary sources in their teachingpressures of coverage in survey courses, lack of available materials, and inadequate training in dealing with unfamiliar sources. These issues are especially challenging for teaching the history of women in the world. Women in World History responds by creating an online curriculum resource center to help high-school and college world history teachers and their students locate, analyze, and learn from primary sources dealing with women and gender in world history. These materials will encourage teachers to integrate the latest scholarship in womens history and world history, as well as engaging primary sources, into their courses. Students will develop a more sophisticated framework for understanding the nature of historical inquiry.
Women in World History reflects three approaches central to current scholarship in world history and the history of women: an emphasis on comparative issues rather than civilizations in isolation; a focus on contacts among different societies; and an attentiveness to global forces, such as technology diffusion, migration, or trade routes, that transcend individual societies. Project materials also utilize recent advances in our understanding of how historical learning takes place, including complex interaction with sources, recursive reading, and skills used by historians.
Contact
Center for History & New Media
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030
703-993-9277
Project Team
Roy Rosenzweig (Executive Producer/Principal Investigator) is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of History at George Mason University. As founder and director of CHNM, he has produced a number of new media projects including the website, History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web; the website and CD-ROM Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution; the CD-ROM sequel to the first Who Built America, and ECHO: Exploring and Collecting History Online.
T. Mills Kelly (Project Co-Director) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University (GMU) and is Associate Director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM). During the 1999-2000 academic year, he was a Fellow with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the research conducted with this support focused on how the use of new media learning resources changes student learning in introductory history courses.
Kelly Schrum (Project Co-Director) is Assistant Director of CHNM and an Assistant Research Professor at George Mason University. She has worked extensively in the areas of new media, history content development, and teacher training. She has authored several articles on history and new media, including Making History on the Web Matter in Your Classroom, in The History Teacher (May 2001) and Surfing the Past Online, in AHA Perspectives (May 2003).
Sharon Leon (Associate Director) is a Research Assistant Professor at CHNM. She received her bachelors degree from Georgetown University and her doctorate in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include the study of race and gender in the history of religion and the history of science. Her work has appeared in Church History and the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
Peter Stearns (Editor-in-Chief and Senior Scholar) is Professor of History and Provost at George Mason University. Founder and editor of the Journal of Social History, he is also a prolific author of dozens of books. His most recent publications include The Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America;Fat History: Bodies and Beauty in Western Society; Gender in World History; and World History: Patterns of Change and Continuity.
Kristin Lehner (Project Manager) earned her BA in History with a concentration in African history at Wesleyan University. She has worked at CHNM for two years.
Rustin Crandall (Research Assistant) earned his BA in History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his MA in History and Art History at George Mason University and is currently a Peace Corps Volunteer in Georgetown, Guyana.
Katharina Hering (Research Assistant) is a third-year PhD student in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. She has worked at CHNM and at the GMU Special Collections Library.
Stephanie Hurter (Research Assistant, Web Designer) earned her BA in History at West Chester University, Pennsylvania. She is currently a doctoral student in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.
Rikk Mulligan (Web Developer) received his MA in History from George Mason University. He is currently a doctoral student at Michigan State University.
Paula Petrik (Information Architect and Web Designer) is a Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University and Associate Director of CHNM. She is the author or co-author of several books and coauthor of a CD-ROM for Houghton Mifflin.
Amanda Shuman (Web Developer, Programmer, Research Assistant) earned her BS in Information Technology at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. She is currently a graduate student in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University.
Consultants
Marjorie Bingham (Senior Advisor) served as Co-director of the Women in World Area Studies Curriculum Project for ten years. A former junior high-school and high-school teacher and former adjunct faculty at Hamline University, Bingham has taught and written about women in world history for many years. Publications include Women and the Constitution (Jimmy Carter Center) and numerous articles on teaching history, world history, and women in world history.
Susan Gross (Senior Advisor) served as Executive Director of the Upper Midwest Womens History Center for 20 years; Co-director of the Women in World Area Studies Curriculum Project; and Co-Director of the Women in Development Issues in Three World Areas project. Former high-school teacher and adjunct professor of history at Hamline University, Gross has taught and written about women in world history for many years.
Mary H. Rojas (Senior Advisor) was a faculty member at Virginia Tech for 13 years, where she taught sociology and international studies and was the Associate and Acting director for the Office for International Development. She also co-founded and directed the Program on Women in World Development. She left Virginia Tech to open her consulting firm, Rojas International Consultants.
Advisory Board
Patricia G. Avery taught social studies before receiving her Ph.D. in social studies education from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1987. Her work frequently appears in social studies education journals and general education journals.
Bob Bain is Assistant Professor of History and Social Studies Education at University of Michigan. Before joining the faculty at Michigan, Bain spent more than 25 years as a high-school teacher of U.S. and world history. He has published widely on the pedagogy and practice of history and world history.
Anne Chapman has an MA in anthropology from the University of Cambridge, England, and a Ph.D. in history from Kent State University. Chapman taught AP European, world, and womens history in high school for more than thirty years.
Sara Evans is Distinguished McKnight University Professor and Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. Publications include Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Centurys End; Born for Liberty: A History of American Women; and Personal Politics: The Roots of Womens Liberation in the Civil rights Movement and the New Left.
Tom Hatch is co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. He is a developmental psychologist with a doctorate from Harvard University, and has published widely on conceptions of intelligence and its multiple manifestations, alternative approaches to assessment, early-child development, and school reform.
Marilynn Jo Hitchens a former high-school teacher, is an Instructor at the University of Colorado at Denver where she teaches world history online and upper division graduate courses in the areas of Russian and European history. She is past president of the World History Association and director of the World History Institute for Teachers Online.
Gretchen Kreuter is an honorary fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is coeditor and a contributor to Women of Minnesota: Selected Biographical Essays, and has conducted workshops on womens history for classroom teachers at the Minnesota Historical Society and for the Minnesota Department of Education.
Meryll Page is currently a history teacher at St. Louis Park High School. She teaches Advanced Placement U.S. History and two International Baccalaureate history courses.
Heidi Roupp currently teaches and consults on World History projects. For 20 years, she taught World History, Asian Studies, Humanities, Comparative Political Systems, Geography, American History, and Western Civilization at Aspen High School in Aspen, Colorado. Former President of the World History Association and first recipient of the American Historical Association Beveridge Teaching Prize. She is Co-Director of the World History Network website, in collaboration with Pat Manning.
Peter Stearns (see above).
Margaret Strobel is Interim Director, Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, and Professor of Gender and Womens Studies and History, University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published extensively in the area of African womens history, including her book Muslim Women in Mombasa, 1890-1975. She is series coeditor of Restoring Women to History, with volumes on Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa.