History @ CUL

Everyday Life & Women in America, c1800-1920

As part of a concerted an on-going effort to rebuild its collection budget, the Library has dedicated some funds to acquire important resources that it has had to forgo in the past.  I am happy to announce the acquisition of the latest electronic primary source resource.  “Everyday life & women in America c.1800-1920” is drawn from the collections of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History, Duke University and The New York Public Library.  It comprises thousands of fully searchable images and transcriptions of monographs, pamphlets, periodicals, and broadsides addressing 19th and early 20th century political, social and gender issues, religion, race, education, employment, marriage, sexuality, home and family life, health, and pastimes.  With an emphasis on the conduct of life and domestic management literature, the collection is an important companion to Cornell’s own HEARTH database on the history of home economics.

It is hard to single out individual items among the rare books, pamphlets, and serials, but one of the most interesting titles is Town Topics, the society paper that “chronicled the New York social world during the height of the Gilded Age.”  In one of the useful essays that accompany the collection, Amy Blair notes that the journal “figures prominently in the fiction of Edith Wharton as both the public face (sometimes invited, often disdained) of the elite set and, more distressingly, as a “how-to” manual for the nouveaux riches.”

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