History Commons^™

Review- Archives And Human Rights, Alexandra Pucciarelli

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Archives and Human Rights edited by Jens Boel, Perrine Canavaggio, and Antonio González Quintana utilizes seventeen case studies to examine the role archives and archivists can play in international justice after human rights violations. The cases include but are not limited to; Rwanda, Spain, and Cambodia.

Community Oral History To Widen The Path: The Jewish Mobile Oral History Project, Deborah Gurt

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article presents the case study of the Jewish Mobile Oral History Project of the McCall Library at the University of South Alabama as an example of a participatory archival practice. With goals to build a collection centered on a minority experience, to engage with community members, and to foster inter-communal dialogue, the project highlights affect as one vital consideration for archival record keepers, users, and subjects.

Toward A Crip Provenance: Centering Disability In Archives Through Its Absence, Gracen M. Brilmyer

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Using the records that document the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition as a case study, this article discusses the messiness and unknowability of provenance. Drawing attention to how the concept of provenance can emphasize the reconstruction of a fonds when records have been moved, rearranged, and dispersed, this article draws attention to the ‘curative’ and ‘rehabilitative’ orientations of established notions of provenance. Put in conversation with disability studies scholarship, which critiques rehabilitating, curing, and restoring, this article outlines the theoretical scaffolding of a crip provenance: a disability-centered framework of resisting the desire to restore and instead meets records where they are …

Greening The Archive: The Social Climate Of Cotton Manufacturing In The "Samuel Oldknow Papers, 1782-1924", Bernadette Myers, Melina Moe

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article re-examines the records and correspondence of Samuel Oldknow, a late eighteenth century textile manufacturer, within the context of the environmental humanities. Oldknow’s papers, a portion of which are held at Columbia University, are most often used by economic historians to date the beginnings of the factory wage labor system. We highlight, instead, the environmental implications of Oldknow’s cotton enterprise by juxtaposing documents related to the global reach of Oldknow’s empire with evidence of his transformation of the local landscape of northern England. This process of re-scaling captures a sense of what we call the “social climate” of the …

The Suffrage Postcard Project: Feminist Digital Archiving And Transatlantic Suffrage History, Ana Stevenson, Kristin Allukian

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article introduces The Suffrage Postcard Project (SPP), a feminist digital humanities project that utilizes digital tools to explore how transatlantic suffrage postcards and feminist digital humanities practices engender new historical narratives of the suffrage movement, especially in the United States and Britain. This article uses our Omeka-based digital archive of suffrage postcards to discuss the history of the postcard, the significance of a postcard archive to digital archival studies, and the significance of the digital postcard archive to digital history.

Our project uses feminist DH methodology in coding, tagging, and data visualization to better understand how gender, and intersecting …

Blood At The Root, Jarrett Martin Drake

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

What is the sound of silence and what is the sight of absence? The following essay situates itself along those two questions by devoting close ethnographic attention to the lives and afterlives of seven people—Delia, Renty, Jem, Alfred, Fassena, Drana, and Jack—whose reflections resonate and resound throughout the world of archives. I argue that a theory of archival power must consider the role of process and place in the shaping of modern memory practices. The article begins by narrating the story of how these seven people came to occupy the center of the archival universe. Next, it traces a tale …

Exploring Rockingham County’S Past: Recapturing Local History And Promoting Accessibility, Kayla Heslin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In 2018 Exploring Rockingham’s Past (ERP) launched. ERP is an online repository created to house local records from the Rockingham County, Virginia circuit court. Just a little over a year before its launch, Clerk of the Court, Chaz Haywood entreated facility and graduate students within the history department of James Madison University to help develop community access to the records housed within his institution. Sadly, over the decades the records of the courthouse had fallen into disarray, rendering them useless. Seeing this as a significant loss of culture and heritage, Haywood and James Madison University began developing a platform that …

Curating Care: Creativity, Women’S Work, And The Carers Uk Archive, Alice Hall, Hannah Tweed

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article analyses the previously unexplored archives of the British charity, Carers UK, and its predecessor organizations, from its formation in 1965 to the present day. We argue that the archive is a valuable resource for social, political, and economic histories of care in the home, women’s work, feminist campaigns, and charitable organizations in the UK and beyond. It gives voice to traditionally silenced populations of carers through a strikingly diverse range of letters, edited collections of fiction, minutes of meetings, video diaries, newsletters, and anthologies of creative writing. As a case study, the Carers UK archive provides an important …

Lessons From The 1800s: Creating The Miss Porter's School Digital Archive, Deborah Smith

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

College preparatory (“prep”) schools have their roots in the New England region of the United States; many predate the nation's most illustrious colleges and universities. The archives at these schools contain items of importance to American history in the 1800s. However, few schools have trained archivists managing their physical collections and even fewer have created digital archives to increase access. Founded in 1848, Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut was one of the first independent schools devoted to the education of young women. This article reviews the creation of the Porter's digital archive in 2018 and examines issues specific to …

Humanizing The Enslaved Of Fort Monroe’S Arc Of Freedom, William R. Kelly Jr.

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Fort Monroe, located in Hampton, Virginia, was a United States Army post until its deactivation in 2011. President Barack Obama proclaimed Fort Monroe a national monument due to its complex history, including its ties to slavery and emancipation. This paper outlines an ongoing research project designed to identify and humanize both the enslaved who helped build the fort and those who were declared as contraband there during the American Civil War. Housed in the National Archives and Records Administration in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the United States Army Engineer Records from 1819 to 1866 is the main area of focus for this …

Lessons From The Treblinka Archive: Transnational Collections And Their Implications For Historical Research, Chad S.A. Gibbs

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In work for his 1979 book The Death Camp Treblinka, Alexander Donat began the process of locating survivors of the camp and recording their histories. In a telling testament to the lethality of this place, he could identify only sixty-eight survivors. Analysis of Donat’s early findings—emerging six years prior to the publication of any major academic monograph on the subject—offers a window into the difficulties of conducting research on this Nazi extermination camp and its widely-scattered witnesses.

Treblinka’s disembarkation ramp was effectively the eye of a transnational needle through which so many passed and so few emerged. Victims of …

Review Of Participatory Heritage, Allyson E. Smally

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This review of Participatory Heritage, edited by Henriette Roued-Cunliffe and Andrea Copeland, focuses on the book's relevance to the archives field. It highlights some of the chapters that will be most relevant to archivists, provides overviews and highlights of each of the book's three sections, discusses some of the main themes that come up throughout the book, and mentions a few strengths and drawbacks to the book’s approach. It addresses some ways the book relates to important topics in the archives field today and what areas of the field it has particular relevance for. The review concludes that Participatory …

The Nuremberg Trials Project At Harvard Law School: Making History Accessible To All, Judith A. Haran

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article is primarily a case study of the Nuremberg Trials Project at the Harvard Law School Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It begins with an historical note about the war crimes trials and their documentary record, including the fate of the several tons of trial documents that were distributed in 1949. The second part of the article is a description of the Harvard Law School Nuremberg project, including its history, goals, logistical considerations, digitization process and challenges, and resulting impact. The structure and function of the project website is described, followed by a description of a typical user experience, the …

The Half-Life & After-Life Of New Media, Nancy Austin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

It is fitting to think of the half-life of new media using the time-based metaphor of radioactive decay. As a metaphor, an object’s half-life can be a useful way to talk about the potent technological modernity of new media and, like Walter Benjamin’s well-known notion of the aura, call attention to an object’s performativity. However, Benjamin’s aura remains a constant reminder of irrevocable originality whereas remarking on half-life references a quality that changes over time. But what happens after the rhetorical impact of being new has run its course? What is the life expectancy of once-new media and what of …

When Narrative Fails: Context And Physical Evidence As Means Of Understanding The Northwest Boundary Survey Photographs Of 1857–1862, James A. Eason

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

The photographs of the Northwest Boundary Survey, taken chiefly in 1860–1861, present many of the problems commonly encountered in the study of nineteenth-century photography. These views documenting the international border between modern British Columbia and the American Pacific Northwest provide a useful case study in the close reading of physical attributes of photographs. They afford an opportunity to compare imagery and evidence across known sets, and to draw conclusions from sequencing, variant captioning, and other physical evidence. These details will help archivists and other collection managers make good decisions about depth of cataloging, digital imaging choices, and interfaces for online …