Sharing Stories from 1977: Igniting Student Interest in US Women’s History

The Sharing Stories from 1977 project offers teachers an innovative way to introduce tools of digital humanities scholarship into the classroom. The collective project recovers the previously understudied 1977 Women’s Conference in Houston, Texas through the methodology of big biography. Students from around the country have been included in the Sharing Stories website as active researchers and contributors to the project, documenting the life stories of the several thousand delegates to the conference and the issues they took forward. This big biography makes available almost a million unique, fully searchable data points that offer the possibility of remaking what we know of gender and community engagement along with American politics more broadly in the late twentieth century. The module offers two lesson plans designed to bring students into how individual big biographies are created and can be used interpretatively, as well as encourage them to undertake guided quantitative data searches on the Sharing Stories site to critically explore and visualize the demographics of gender and politics in this era.