News about the book and other things

The good news about the book is that we are making progress!  I say we because I have a team helping me. I have hired a young woman who is studying for a PhD in African American History at Rutgers University. Her name is Shannen and she has experience in putting a book together.  We started last Friday searching for photos for the book.  I also have a young woman whom I am calling an intern, who will work for me.  She was recommended by one of the women from the Princeton Research Forum of which I am a member.  This young woman lives in Trenton, she goes to Mercer County Community College, and she wants to learn about publishing a book.  She will start next week.  So hopefully we are on track to get the book finished in December.

There is still a lot of work to do.  Besides getting the photos and the photo permissions, we have to get
permissions to use some of the text in the book and then copy edit the entire book to see that it fits into the size dictated by my contract so we have a long hard road to go.

I have dedicated all my time togetting this done.

However, as I look at the book I realize there is a lot more to say so that I have material for another book!  I have only talked about the women for whom there is a lot of public
information.  I have a list of women whom were listed in who's who in Black America that I would have to research or take their oral history.

Speaking of oral history, I did take a break to attend the Oral History Organization meeting in Atlanta last week.  I presented a paper about one of the women whose oral history had been released to the Chemical Heritage Foundation.  Her name is Reatha Clark King.   Since oral histories are private until they are released to the public, I could only talk about the women who have released their oral history.

This is not true for the book since most of the information in the book is already public.

While in Atlanta I did some research at Emory University archives.  The archives of Sinah Kelley one of the women in the book was there.  I waited through seven boxes of stuff. It was like wading through the attic of a person.  Sinah was born in 1916 so she was one of the pioneers in chemistry.  Her diary was there along with baby photos and a photo of her college graduation.  She went to Radcliff College so ten year and twenty-five year alumni books were there.  The good news is that she wrote about what she had been doing since college graduation so that I have some of her life in her own
words!  It is an interesting story.

At the Oral History conference, I took a short course in Web 2.0.  Blogging is Web 2.0 and I learned I need to blog more often.  Therefore, look for posts that are more frequent from me.

Jeannette Brown