An awesome post:

Today would have been the 98th birthday of Montgomery’s beloved seamstress and Secretary of the NAACP.  Parks was 42 at the time of her political activism on that bus, which directly led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Although she was not the first woman who sat down in an act of civil disobedience (if you do not know about Claudette Colvin, go read about her here. Now.), she has become an icon of American and civil rights history. Happy birthday, Ms. Parks.

Claudette Colvin

More civil rights history this week – February 2, 1960:

Want another reason to dig Debbie Wasserman Schultz?  She defines the bullshit H.R. 3 as  “a violent act against women.” Which of course it is, but apparently in our Congress you need ovaries to see that.

“It really is — to suggest that there is some kind of rape that would be okay to force a woman to carry the resulting pregnancy to term, and abandon the principle that has been long held, an exception that has been settled for 30 years, is to me a violent act against women in and of itself.”

And in homo news… Baby steps for Illinois…

Oh yeah, and lesbians!

Check out “Women at War” by historian Elizabeth R. Varon at the New York Times to find out about women’s political and social involvement leading up to the Civil War.

Pretty!

Whoa, who wants to road trip to Ohio?

The Kent State University Museum at Kent State University has a new exhibition – “Katharine Hepburn: Dressed for Stage and Screen.”  See her outfits from “A Philadelphia Story!” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner!”  Adam’s Rib!”

The show closes September 4, 2011.

h/t to Playbill.

New Archival Digital Collection!  From “Documents from the Women’s Liberation Movement“  An On-line Archival Collection, Special Collections Library at Duke University.

The materials in this on-line archival collection document various aspects of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the United States, and focus specifically on the radical origins of this movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Items range from radical theoretical writings to humourous plays to the minutes of an actual grassroots group.

Check out the sweet documents available, including this one below:

United Women's Contingent: March on Washington Against the War, April 24. (flyer)

From The Feminist Librarian Reads.

Student waitresses work in Wilder Hall

Women’s History Sources clued me in to a great exhibition on food at fellow Seven Sister school Mount Holyoke College called “Everything Is Wholesome and Abundant”: A Culinary Chronicle of Mount Holyoke College, 1837- today.  Check out the sweet (pun fully intended) culinary history of the oldest women’s college in the U.S.

Waitresses prepare to serve Deacon Porter's hat

And some great queer images I found of the gays:

Washington DC, Early 1970's

Enjoy!

So says James Oakes in The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (1982) where he dismantles Eugene Genovese’s argument in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974) that the slaveholding class in the American South was a monolithic, paternalist group of upper-class white men.  Owners of enslaved Africans were very economically and socially diverse, and the New York Times recently uncovered this awesome map based on an 1860 slave Census that illustrates this diversity.

Thanks again to Sociological Images for this fascinating map.

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