About
This website was created by the students and instructor of English 202-004, Texts and Contexts: American Women’s Bestsellers: Digital Humanities Perspectives, taught by Catherine E. Saunders at George Mason University (GMU) in Fairfax, Virginia during the Spring 2015 semester. The main goals of the assignments associated with creating the site were to allow students to discover documents providing historical and cultural context regarding spaces and places depicted in the four novels we read in full (Charlotte Temple, The Lamplighter, The House of Mirth, and The Color Purple), to practice critical thinking and analytical skills by articulating connections between literary and contextual texts, and to communicate those insights to each other and to a broader public through item description and exhibit text.
Third-party works incorporated in this site that were published after 1922 may be protected by copyright. These works have undergone a fair use analysis and are believed by this site’s contributors to meet the criteria for fair use, as defined in 17U.S.C.§107. Proprietary items licensed using a Creative Commons license or in the public domain may also be included in these pages. All works are provided complete attribution, regardless of source. Names of repositories where original items are housed are included in the “source” field of the item description. If you believe your work has been used inappropriately on this site, please contact Catherine E. Saunders at csaunde1@gmu.edu.
Student- and instructor-created content on this site (including assignments and other curricular materials) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Copyright remains with the individual author(s). You may reproduce or adapt all or part of an exhibit or assignment for nonprofit purposes, but “you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made,“ and “you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.” Any other use requires permission from the author(s), who may be contacted through Catherine E. Saunders.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Claudia Holland of the GMU libraries, who provided invaluable advice on copyright and licensing questions; the GMU College of Humanities and Social Sciences, which supported creation of an Omeka-based approach to English 202 through a Term Faculty Teaching Development Grant; and to Amanda French, who conducted an Omeka workshop for GMU English Department faculty.