by Sarah Magill Mueller
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3

"I really had no idea about anything when I first started, and I thought the research would help me," Everitt says. It was the first time she had worked with primary sources; they turned what had previously been history-by-rote into the stories of real women who battled to play real sports.

Everitt discovered right away that primary research is quite different from tracking down books in the library; it is a sometimes baffling encounter with documents and artifacts that can be maddeningly difficult to interpret. There are few knowing authors to act as guides, only archive staff to teach the collection's organizational system and help retrieve boxes of letters, clippings, keepsakes, and records.

The goal for students is to develop an accurate reflection of what the past was really like -- and decide what bearing the past has on his or her own present and future. Everitt says it's the difficulty of slogging through mountains of archival evidence, and the subsequent brain power needed to make sense of it, that makes primary historical research such an effective tool for raising the historical consciousness of modern students. "It really connected me to my project -- feeling and seeing and sifting through actual documents and handwritten letters to the chancellor. It gave a whole new meaning to research; I hadn't done anything like that before."

MU admitted its first class of 22 women in 1868, and by the early 1900s women were playing intramural sports. It wasn't until the 1920s, however, that women athletes began meaningful intercollegiate competition (the Mizzou Musketeers and their wall-scarring practices are an example). The pace of change picked up in 1972 with the passage of Title IX, the landmark federal educational amendment that banned sex discrimination in schools, whether in academics or athletics. Title IX paved the way for the first women's athletics budget: $15,000. Since then, women's athletics at Mizzou has grown to include 11 programs with combined budgets topping $3.5 million.

Everitt found much material to document the long road to equality in women's athletics. What she didn't find was very much information about MU volleyball. She's still working at it, confident that the athletes she works with today could benefit from knowledge of the successes and the failures of the past.

She says the research has already influenced her own plans. "I would love to be a senior women's administrator some day, a director of women's sports," Everitt says.

"Dr. Rosser persuaded me to do something in athletics and learn more not just about the game but everything behind it. You can't work in a current environment without knowing the historical underpinnings of how it came to be," she says.

Exactly right, says Rosser. "I really wanted to do something to create assignments that would make the history of higher education come alive for students, rather than just reading and memorizing lots of dates, facts."

After inviting staff members from MU's Western Historical Manuscript Collection and the University Archives to lecture her students, Rosser figured out what that something would be: the integration of MU's historical resources into a primary materials research program.

"I really want them to enjoy history, and this is a way of creating their own knowledge from existing history that is there in folders and photographs. They draw from that information," she explains. "At the beginning all they do is grouse about it, but then they start going to the archives. They actually start touching old letters that maybe [Richard Henry] Jesse wrote, and they see knowledge come alive. At the end of the semester they say that it is the coolest project they've ever done."