The National Women’s Party was founded in 1913 and was instrumental in raising public awareness of the women’s suffrage campaign. With only 50,000 members, the NWP commanded the attention of politicians and the public through aggressive agitation, relentless lobbying, creative public stunts, repeated acts of nonviolent confrontation, and examples of civil disobedience. The tactics employed by the NWP were versatile and creative and drew inspiration from other major activist campaigns such as the labor activism, campaigns for temperance, and the antislavery movement. Although traditional strategies, such as lobbying and petitioning, were mainstays of the movement, the NWP also used more creative and public action such as parades, pageants, street speaking, demonstrations, and mass meetings to call attention to their cause.

The activist activities of the National Women’s Party, whether conferences, demonstrations, parades, arrests, or legal action, were documented in newspapers. In this skill assignment you will use ProQuest Historical Newspapers (PQHN) to research the activities of suffrage organizations. You should use PQHN to identify events or activities of the various suffrage organizations and together with your group build a database that seeks to answer a question about the activities of the group.

For this skill assignment, you should work in groups of no more that 4 people to formulate a research question and build your database. Each group member should then contribute 10 records to the database and write a blog post that describes the database you build and what historical question it answers.

Step 1: Research the Activities of the National Women’s Party and formulate a question that you wish to use a database to answer.

• You may wish to narrow your search to look only at one type of activist strategy employed by the NWP (such as parades, conferences, demonstrations, legal actions, or arrests) or to look at only one location (such as New York City, Major East Coast Cities, Activities in smaller towns in the mid-west or south etc.) or by a particular set of year(s).
  
• Formulate a question you’d like to use a database to answer. i.e. What types of activities caused activists to be arrested? Were there certain locations or cities where activists were more likely to be arrested?
• Once you’ve narrowed your topic, read through some of the articles and identify the types of information you want to track.
  • You might want to capture the names of prominent activists who were involved in the activity. The location, the size of the event, whether the event drew counter protesters, violence, or action from law enforcement etc.
    
  • Be sure to also track bibliographic data so you know where your information came from.

Step 2: Map your Database on a piece of paper and have it approved by me.

• Your map should include every table you plan use and the fields which will make up the table.
• Be sure to include primary and foreign keys and note the relationships between the tables.
• You must get your model signed off on by me before you begin building.

Step 3: Build your Database

• Once you’ve finalized your model and had it approved by me you can begin building it as a group in Airtable.
• Be sure to include a column in one table where you can enter the name of the person who added that record.
• Build out your model before you begin entering information.
• When you’ve finished, enter a few records to make sure your set up works. Show it to me before you proceed with entering the rest of your data.

Step 4: Once you’ve entered all your data, each member of the group should write a blog post that describes the model you came up with in class.

• Each person should contribute 20 records (rows) to your database. Be sure to mark each person’s contribution in a column.
• In your blog post address the following questions:
  • What aspect or question did you decide to focus on and how did you build your database to answer that question?
  • i.e. What were suffragists arrested for and where did it occur most?
  • Explain the decisions you made about what to include, what to ignore, and how to normalize the data.
  • What did you learn about databases?
  • How can databases be useful for historical research?

Due before the start of class on Tuesday April 2nd.