Happy New Year to you all! I’m not quite sure when my sabbatical officially ends, but I’ll be back in the classroom next Monday — teaching CWC for the only time this year! — so we must be close.
I’ll continue to conduct research and write blog posts throughout the winter and spring, though at a slower pace (for both activities) than I did last fall. My goal is to start writing the narrative essays that will make up the meat of the final digital project as we head into summer vacation, then debut the finished website in time for Homecoming in mid-October.
But in the meantime, I did add some new pages to this website that may help tide everyone over for now — and will stay on the final site in some way or another. You’ll find them on the menu at the top of each page.
First, a three-part timeline of the women’s history of Bethel, telling a rough draft of our story in outline form, with a mix of event descriptions (both at Bethel and beyond it, to provide some larger context), quotations from various sources, photos, and video clips from some of our oral history interviews. It’s a work-in-progress; I’m sure I’ll keep adding, subtracting, and modifying which events I include and how I represent various themes. But my students can tell you that I love timelines as storytelling tools, and they give me one more way to share the emerging story I want to tell — and to get feedback from you all, since I’ll leave those pages’ comments section open for now, in order to collect memories and other responses.
I’d imagine that the third timeline page (covering 1972 to the present) might be trimmed down by the time I’m done, since that’s the period on which I’ll focus most of my attention in the final narrative. But the other two pages provide a way to stretch our story back to Bethel’s origins in the 19th and early 20th centuries and through its long residence on Snelling Avenue.
Then I’ve also started to compile lists of books and articles for further reading. For while my main goal is to tell a Bethel story well, I also hope that it will leave readers curious about larger themes in women’s history, especially as it intersects with the histories of Christianity, higher education, and sports. The readings page is also a rough draft; if you want to suggest other books or articles that I’ve missed, the comments section will be open on that page for several months yet.
I’ll be back on the blog next week to share the first of two posts about the experiences of women students in the early 1990s…
One goal of this blog is to help involve members of the Bethel community in doing the history of Bethel, so comments are always welcome! Just know that if you leave a comment at the project blog, I’ll take that as expressing your permission to quote it in the project.
The Women of Bethel 