This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books: Engaging the Public with Historical Data

This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books, a digital humanities project, recreates the Woman’s Literary Department from the New Orleans 1884 World’s Fair and “recovers the exclusion” of Black women and their work from the Woman’s Department exhibit.[1] The project encourages scholars, educators, students, and the public to explore and interpret the collections and resources. The site offers a digital archive, an undergraduate curriculum, and exhibits relating to the 1884 Woman’s Department and late-19^th century Black women writers. The Beautiful Sisterhood Project publishes new research by scholars at all levels, inside and outside of the academy.

In addition to providing a short history of the Beautiful Sisterhood and project links, this poster visualizes the fair data and illustrates our process for building and engaging the public and students through digital history practices. The poster covers genre, location, keywords, metadata creation, database structure, storage, types of exhibits (archives, interactive essays, timelines, story maps), crowd-sourcing techniques, and curriculum integrations. The poster argues that projects like the Beautiful Sisterhood crucially links public engagement with intersectional histories and represents an expanding process of knowledge production by and for an interdisciplinary community.[2]

The original Woman’s Literary Department was created for the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair. It comprised more than 1,400 items (books, journals, newspapers, and sheet music) donated by publishers and collected by “lady delegates” from around the US. Black women were not represented, despite having proposed to exhibit their works alongside those by white women. The Woman’s Literary Department’s director, Maud Howe, declared herself determined “to keep this beautiful sisterhood of books together” as a permanent library. Within months of its presentation to a local arts society, however, the physical collection was scattered and lost.[3]

More than 130 years after the fair, the Beautiful Sisterhood collection has reemerged through digital archival processes using Maud’s shelf list. To confront Julia Ward Howe’s failure to integrate the collection, we also focused on recovering the presence and absence of Black women. We determined that simply adding Black women’s publications into the database was unsatisfactory. We wished neither to erase the historical fact of the 1884 collection’s Jim Crow instantiation, nor to downplay the racism of the white women organizers and exhibitors. It seemed crucial to preserve, in some form, the fairgoers’s original perspectives in the post-Reconstruction South. Our interactive DH exhibit, “Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair,” links to the database but also stand on its own as what Kim Gallon terms an “alternative construction.”[4] Some may view the creation of a digital collection as simply moving archival items from shelves to servers for better accessibility and preservation. Yet, collecting, organizing, describing, and presenting historical events through documents and digital tools creates new history methods for assembling and engaging with archival materials and new ways of knowing historical subjects that situate old and new knowledge together.[5]

[1] Adams and Howard, https://thisbeautifulsisterhood.org/

[2] Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: 581–82.

[3] Weimann, The Fair Women, 391; Pfeffer, Southern Ladies, 79.

[4] Gallon, “Making a Case,” 44.

[5] Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: 581–82.