The initial project brought faculty from the history department to collaborate with individuals in the UNLV library special collections department to produce the Nevada Women’s Archives. This collection of documents and photos provides manuscript resources for historians. After several years it became apparent that despite planning for collection diversity, additional measures were needed to achieve it.

The Las Vegas Women Oral History Project developed at a time (circa 1994) when a critical shortage of information on women’s lives existed and few oral history projects collected the narratives of women. The goal was to collect personal histories from women who were unlikely to leave manuscript resources, yet whose lives informed the wider narrative of Las Vegas’ development.

Initially a graduate student collaboration, it evolved into an extensive multi-focus collaboration between the History department and the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada. Faculty, graduate students, and community members all participated in collecting these narratives. The third project, which spanned four years, created three one-half hour televised programs called MAKERS: Women in Nevada History. A co-production of VegasPBS and the Women’s Research Institute of Nevada, the shows brought the research out of the archives and into the living rooms of Nevadans throughout the state.

On this website, visitors may find the entire collection accessible for browsing, research, and teaching.

The text and images on these pages are under copyright and permission for use must be given by those institutions.