R3 and the Digital Humanities: The White Glove Project

Here at R3, we want to highlight some of the digital humanities and archival projects that focus of rhetoric race and religion. If you have a digital project focused on any aspect of rhetoric, race, or religion, please share them with us here at R3. Today’s Post: The White Glove Project directed by Dr. Melody Lehn

In an address to the American Newspaper Publishers Association in 1987, Nancy Reagan offered the following assessment about the unique role that first ladies have historically occupied in American political culture: “If the president has a bully pulpit, then the first lady has a white glove pulpit. It’s more refined, more restricted, more ceremonial, but it’s a pulpit all the same.”

Taking its inspiration from Nancy Reagan, the idea for the “White Glove Pulpit Project” originates from a concern that much of what we know about how American first ladies use their undefined, yet powerful role to shape and influence political culture comes through public discourse about them rather than attentiveness to their actual words and accomplishments. While discourses (popular and scholarly alike) assessing the performances of first ladies inform our understanding of this role throughout history, there is a wealth of untapped resources. Diaries, letters, autobiographies, newspaper columns, speeches, interviews, memoranda, visual images, and now texts circulated through social media demonstrate how presidential spouses tell a deeper and richer story that individually and collectively created a viable platform for advocacy that continues today.

Part digital archive, part digital bibliography, and part news-sharing platform, the White Glove Pulpit Project is using Twitter to not only assemble various secondary texts (press coverage, historical analysis, media, and more), but also and more importantly to recover and circulate primary sources for public consumption and, hopefully, scholarly examination across different disciplines.

Dr. Melody Lehn, Assistant Professor of Communication at University of South Carolina is the project’s director. She hopes the page expands to become a collaborative project where people send contributions about their favorite first ladies. You can follow the project  on Twitter @wgpproject!