In This Issue

This first issue of 2012 contains the full range of resources that we publish--two new document projects, an update for an existing document project, book reviews, full-text sources, and News from the Archives.

Both of our new document projects in this issue continue the recent trend of exploring international dimensions of women's social movements in the United States. Ann Taylor Allen, Barbara Beatty, and Roberta Wollons bring German, U.S., and Japanese histories together, posing the question "How Did the Kindergarten Movement Provide Women with Opportunities for Professional Development and Social Activism in the United States and Internationally?" They show how the movement began in post-1848 Germany, came to the United States with mid-century German immigrants and subsequently diffused to Japan with Christian missionary efforts. Their nuanced account shows how the kindergarten movement evolved in these varied cultural settings.

Alison Parker explores the internationalism of the noted African American reformer, Mary Church Terrell, posing the central question, "What Was the Relationship between Mary Church Terrell's International Experience and Her Work against Racism in the United States?" Parker traces what Terrell learned about American racism by the comparisons offered during her repeated European trips and explores the way those experiences were reflected in her analysis of race relations and her call for racial justice in the United States.

We are also publishing in this issue a new document to supplement our existing document project on the 1977 Houston National Women's Conference. Mary Berkery offers a thoughtful introduction to readers of the National Women's Conference Official Briefing Book . The Briefing Book was distributed to journalists covering the conference in Houston in November 1977 and offers insights into the way American feminists organizing the event conceived of the event within the contexts of feminist politics in the United States and broader developments in the UN Decade for Women.

With this issue, we are publishing our third installment of documents related to the judicial movement in the United States since the mid-1980s examining and redressing Gender Bias in the Courts. Those discovering this set of reports for the first time will want to explore as well the introductory essay to this collection authored by Carrie Baker, analyzing the origins and impact of this movement and providing a context in which to better understand these documents. We published that introduction in our September 2011 issue.

We round out this issue with our usual array of complementary resources, including six book reviews, a review essay, and our regular News from the Archives. At this time we announce the departure of our book review editor, Jeanne Petit , whom we thank for her fine work for the past two years. At the same time, we welcome our new book review editor, Professor Mary Henold of Roanoke College. If you would be interested in reviewing books or have titles to recommend for review, please email Mary Henold with your suggestions.

Please note as well the announcements in the News from the Archives section, assembled by its hard-working editor, Tanya Zanish-Belcher. If you would like to make an archives-related announcement in a future issue, she can be reached at tzanish iastate.edu .

Meanwhile, we want to remind readers of the continuing publication of our second, major online digital archive, "Women and Social Movements, International-?1840 to Present." Since January 2011 we have published four installments of this new archive, which now includes 145,000 pages and will eventually reach 150,000 pages by July 2012. It includes both published and manuscript materials generated by women's participation in international conferences and organizations over a period of 170 years, from missionary and abolitionist activities in the first half of the nineteenth century to women's NGO activism in the early twenty-first century. We have also commissioned about thirty secondary articles by scholars working in fields related to the archive that will place the primary materials within a broader interpretive context and offer suggestions on how best to make use of these online resources. We will be posting those essays in June or July 2012.

Alexander Street Press is marketing this resource to libraries, offering both subscriptions or purchase plans. Your acquisitions librarian might be interested in either of these options. Please ask her or him to contact Eileen Lawrence at Alexander Street Press for subscription information and/or to request a free trial of this resource. We look forward to hearing your reactions to this major addition to Women and Social Movements.

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