Blue Wallpaper

Teach the Sisterhood

Recovering the 1884 Woman’s Literary Department for the 21st Century

Queens-College-Old-Library-2

Educational Resources

This Beautiful Sisterhood Project provides readings, educational resources, and workshops to support educators in integrating the Beautiful Sisterhood collection into their classrooms. This curriculum demonstrates strategies for using the resources within our collection, including the digital archive and exhibits, and methods for contextualizing the 1884 World’s Fair within the context of the following themes: contextualizing the meaning of “woman” and 19th-century “womanhood,” gender, race, region/south, and sectionalism. Educational resources may include syllabi, units/modules, assignments, readings, multimedia, and/or teaching debriefs.

Bibliography

Click on the dropdowns to explore a bibliography of research about the Woman’s Literary Department and the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair.

  • Miki Pfeffer. Southern Ladies and Suffragists: Julia Ward Howe and Women’s Rights at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair, University of Mississippi Press, 2014.
  • Katherine Adams. “Becoming Global: Gender, Race, and Cognitive Mapping at the 1884 World’s Fair,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 8, no. 1 (2020): 11-41.
  • Pfeffer, Miki, “‘Mr. Chairman and FELLOW AMERICAN CITIZENS’: African American Agency at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, 1884-1885,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 51, no. 4 (Fall 2010). 
  • Susan Tucker. “Julia Ward Howe, Maud Howe, and an Archival Legacy: Recordkeeping and the Library of Women’s Books at the 1884 Cotton Centennial,” Libraries: Culture, History, and Society 5, no. 1 (2021): 1-23.
  • Kate Adams and Jacquelyne Thoni Howard, “Recovery without Reification: Curating This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books,” Record, Document, Archive. LSU Press, Forthcoming 2026.

Coming Soon

Educational Resource Library & Archive

Explore our selection of syllabi, modules, assignments, and teaching debriefs about the Woman’s Literary Department and the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair. Many of these assignments offer students the opportunity to publish their work as part of the online Beautiful Sisterhood Exhibit.

We suggest completing these lessons in the order they appear as they build upon each other, allowing students to scaffold their learning of the material. These lessons may be completed in a sequence or if time is limited, as separate deliverables. 

A Spatial Introduction to the Fair

Explore This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books project as map data during the 1884 World’s Fair.

Research the Sisterhood

Create pieces of scholarship, drawn from this research that can be published as part of the Beautiful Sisterhood Exhibit.

Develop a Recovery Exhibit

Students will create an exhibit to be published as part of the This Beautiful Sisterhood of Books.

Call for Content!

Contribute Educational Resources and Content

Do you have suggestions and examples for incorporating the Beautiful Sisterhood Project in classroom teaching? We are eager to publish additional education resources here! These may come in the form of syllabi, units/modules, assignments, readings, multimedia, and/or teaching debriefs. Selected materials will be peer-reviewed and then featured on this page. Assignment authors will be listed as contributors of the Beautiful Sisterhood collection.

To propose an educational resource for consideration by the editors, please submit a 50- 100-word proposal and short bio via this form.

Propose a Resource