May, 2015,

The Laura X – Laura Rand Orthwein, Jr. World Institute is hosting two jazz/blues benefit concerts  for Harris-Stowe University on June 21st and 22nd, to celebrate our new home for the storage, filing, and archiving of the Laura’s Social Movements Archives. These archives feature documents, media, and other materials collected by Laura X, aka Laura Rand Orthwein, Jr., over the last fifty years. They pertain to the women’s movement and a wide array of precursors and overlapping social movements from the second half of the 20th century, with special emphasis on how the women’s movement established women’s rights as human rights. The collection includes materials from Laura X’s successful state-by-state campaign to abolish the legal privilege for marital and date rape.

These archives presently consist of over 120,000 individual elements located in St. Louis, Missouri. The Institute’s archive staff and volunteers will use our new location for sorting, cataloging, and assigning Finding Aids to the 580 boxes of materials, in order to keep them vibrant, accessible, and available for researchers, curators, filmmakers, and other interested parties.

The new location is an environmentally controlled space appropriate for an archival collection. It is approximately 5,000 sq. ft. including a private office area, Archive Room, display space, and a layout & work area.  We are particularly proud of our proximity to Harris – Stowe State University, in St. Louis, to enhance resources for students, professors, historians, film documentarians, museums, exhibitions, high school teachers, activists, and other members of the general public.

We anticipate this location will provide a long-term base, tied to the community and institutions in the region. This site will also represent the hub of the Virtual Museum of all Laura X Archives, including those materials housed at the University of California – Berkeley, Harvard, University of Illinois and other institutions. Those collections contain  almost a million individual items of late 20th century social movements history; including  the originals filmed for The Women’s History Research Center (WHRC) microfilms later donated for distribution to and by the National Women’s History Project. These are still available and are distributed through Primary Source Media/Cengage Learning (http://www.gale.cengage.com/psm/) to some 450 libraries and collections in 14 countries. For more information on the Archives, CLICK HERE.

Laura’s Social Movements Archives is a fiscally sponsored project of Inquiring Systems, Inc. (ISI), a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation founded in 1978. Any rent abatement, concessions, grants, gifts, donations of real estate are tax deductible.

For additional detail on Committees and Governance, CLICK HERE

For additional detail on Leadership, CLICK HERE

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