Learn about the Sisterhood
A Recreation of the Woman’s Literary Department from the New Orleans 1884 World’s Fair.
Discovery & Recovery
This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books is a digital humanities recovery project that 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.
As you explore these exhibits and articles, we encourage you to investigate
- the meaning of “woman” and 19th-century “womanhood”,
- the intersections of gender with race, region, the South, and sectionalism;
- women and library history;
- women and bibliographic activism;
- women in world’s fair and exposition culture;
- archival recovery.
As a digital humanities project, we encourage visitors to contend with how the collection (original and digital reconstruction) and this recovery work is used, put into used, troubled, and limited.
Explore
Original Research
Through Articles and Exhibits about the 1884 World’s Fair
Featured Exhibit
Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair
Drawing from our study of Black women’s literature, Black literary history, and recovery scholarship, we have attempted to recover an untold part of the story of the Woman’s Department at the 1884 New Orleans World Fair and the “beautiful sisterhood of books” it included.
Teach the Sisterhood
This Beautiful Sisterhood Project provides a curriculum including readings, educational resources, and workshops to support educators in integrating the Beautiful Sisterhood collection, including the digital archive and exhibits, into their classrooms.