KEY INSIGHT 3: REIMAGINE THE ARCHIVE
What is the "archive"?
I turned up the audio on my computer for HIST 701, Reading Seminar in Colonial American History, and the speakers buzzed with our opening question. Dr. Nicole Maskiell asked, “what is the archive?” A library and information science student was ready with the etymology of archive and a definition: the archive is a physical location, a building, that houses collections of written documents. But Dr. Maskiell pushed us to consider the matter further. She clicked the share-screen button, and we were soon transported to a cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In it is the headstone of Cicely, an enslaved girl. Dr. Maskiell used this artifact as the starting point for a research article, and after demonstrating her use of objects and space, she once again asked, “what is the archive? The urban space, the cemetery, that I study—can this also be an archive? Or must it have written texts to qualify?”
The question immediately brought to mind my own experiences working in a cemetery, in the National Archives, on a documentary editing project, and in a historical museum. In all of these environments, I collaborated with teams that organized documents, headstones, and artifacts. And to some extent, the process is the same across all four. At the Clay County Museum, I worked with the University of Kansas Department of Anthropology to organize and date 300 arrowheads. I also led a museum team to inventory 1,500 artifacts in our storage. (For our inventory record, see Artifact 1.) In both instances, we assigned each artifact a number. We then grouped common artifacts and wrote a brief description for each, including information about its date, owner, donor, and significance. Our team compiled this information and shared it with other board members, so they can use it to contextualize artifacts for our visitors.
The Clay County Museum has three hundred arrowheads, but none were displayed with any context (top left). After working with the University of Kansas Department of Anthropology to date the arrowheads, I sorted and researched them (top middle), then created a new display to provide context for visitors.
I created this spreadsheet (below or here) to organize an inventory system for our storied museum collections. Our team collaborated to write brief descriptions of artifacts.
Beyond the Classroom: Clay County Museum Inventory
ARTIFACT 1
On the Pinckney Papers Project, editors carefully assign each document a number, summary, and relevant notes. Editors and assistants both write descriptions of people, places, legislation, and events mentioned in the documents, then link these into the letters themselves, so readers have the context they need to interpret sources. Similarly, in the Fairview Cemetery, volunteers number the headstones by plot, then describe and sketch each. (For an example of our record sheets, see Artifact 2.) These descriptions mean that even as the headstones fade, historians will be able to learn from the text engraved on each. In all of these instances, we are constructing an archive: a collection of historical materials that we deliberately organize to increase accessibility. We provide context and some interpretation but also leave researchers room to interpret the sources within their specific projects. Dr. Maskiell’s class thus clarified my own beyond-the-classroom experiences and challenged me to see the archive not as a place but as a process.
This is a picture of me volunteering in the Fairview Cemetery. Many headstones have fallen and become buried under sediment and weeds. Another volunteer and I uncovered this fractured headstone, marked as the wife of Thomas Kidd. We cleaned it, stood it back up to take this photograph for our records, and placed the fragments together so a National Park Service representative trained in headstone repairs could later reattach the pieces.
The pictures to the right are examples of the records I help collect at the Fairview Cemetery. (Hover over the image and click on the arrows to scroll. Or you can click on the image itself to open a slideshow.) In HIST 701, we discussed the graveyard and gravestones as a sort of archive. This space itself can help historians uncover the experiences and relationships of historical actors. For example, in Fairview Cemetery, the position of someone's gravestone can reveal the deceased person's status. Fairview Cemetery includes a hill. Wealthier community members, especially those who held political office or leadership roles in the military, are buried on physically elevated ground at the top of the hill. Poorer members, including the town's enslaved population, are buried at the bottom of the hill. This area often floods, causing their bodies to shift. This dislocation is itself an extension of their marginalization positions during life. This is only one example of how studying materials (gravestones) and space can learn from an archive that includes more than simply written texts.
ARTIFACT 2
Beyond the Classroom: Fairview Cemetery Record Sheets
Limitations of the archive
As I began to see that the archive is a process, I also realized that this process is not without its flaws. My independent research challenged me to confront the limitations of archival organization. Sometimes, archives reinscribe problematic disciplinary categories. This became especially clear in my army woman research. Most early American women’s historians rely on correspondence, journals, sermons, and court records. Because most of the women I study could not write, I turned instead to military sources: orderly books, pension files, general orders, muster rolls, and soldiers’ journals. But because early American women’s and military history are so seldom studied together, archivists treat military sources as exclusively masculine and often omit women from finding aids and indexes. Historians assume that the women are hidden by archival silence, because they could not produce their own written sources. The women, however, supported their pension applications with vivid testimony. They left visible marks on the historical record, and their silence is merely a manufactured product of problematic assumptions about women’s and military history.
Sometimes historians encounter problems of logistics. Take, for example, my most used source: pension files. The National Archives houses 80,000, most of which are available as digitized microfilm images. These files include valuable information about diverse veterans’ post-war occupations, families, social networks, and experiences of disability. They are relevant to scholars of women, African Americans, Indigenous people, religion, and early American networks. Still, none are free, transcribed, or searchable. Multiple scholars have admitted to me that these sources are underexplored and yet inaccessible. (For my thoughts on how to approach this accessibility issue, see Leadership.)
As I questioned the limitations of archives, I also began to wonder why history accords such primacy to written sources. This preference is made clear in some historians’ monographs. For example, some deny the relevance of oral pension testimonies because they are based off of recollection and must, therefore, be unable to reveal the “truth” about what happened during the Revolution. Many historical journals also promote documentary evidence as superior. They prefer historians who frame their arguments as novel because they claim to have discovered new sets of documentary records.
In HIST 701, we learned that this preference for written sources is not only limiting but can also jeopardize inclusive historical narratives. Even when historians try to use written documents to access marginalized historical actors, like enslaved people, poor women, or children, they often unintentionally adopt the gaze of authors who composed sources—most often a wealthy, adult gentry. Material and oral sources can subvert these dominant source narratives. For example, in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), Marisa Fuentes studies urban space and approaches the body as an artifact. By doing so, she centralizes the gaze of enslaved women in Bridgetown, Jamaica. Similarly, Crystal Lynn Webster adopts a “child-centered perspective” in Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North (2021) by analyzing children’s books, artwork, and toys. (For further analysis of these works in broader historiographic context, see Artifact 3.)
This summer, I will have the opportunity apply methods I learned in HIST 701 to my own research by completing a fellowship with the Society of Cincinnati's American Revolution Institute. The Nicholas Sellers Fellowship will allow me to live in Washington, D.C. for part of the summer to access the Institute's collection of orderly books. I will interrogate the orderly books through the lenses of social network and spatial analysis to understand how women interacted with each other and enlisted men in New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey during the War for Independence.
In the Classroom: HIST 701 Historiography Essay
In this essay on Early American childhood studies, I consider limitations posed by the written archive—for instance, historians tend to assume the gaze of people who wrote the documents they study, which often means white, adult men. I also study how some historians, including Crystal Lynn Webster have subverted this gaze by studying materials.
ARTIFACT 3
ARTIFACT 4
Beyond the Classroom: Society of Cincinnati Fellowship Application
This fellowship will allow me to study orderly books against the grain by applying methods I learned in HIST 701, especially when I wrote the above historiography essay.
I will also have the opportunity to apply my in- and beyond-the-classroom learning about archives as a participant in the University of Kansas and National Endowment for the Humanities' Summer 2022 Public Digital Humanities Institute (PDHI). A friend and independent researcher, Michelle Cook, has been similarly frustrated by poor archival infrastructure and inaccessible military pensions in her study of local African American Civil War soldiers. We are attending the institute to start a project titled Salus Populi: The United States Colored Troops (USCT) Pension Project. Our goal is to digitize, transcribe, and contextualize pension records for Black soldiers in seven Missouri counties so they are accessible for descendant researchers, historians, archivists, genealogists, and educators. When applying to the PDHI with Michelle, I had to draw on my college experiences to confront questions such as: what types of information will our audiences most want or need? What is the best way we can portray information to make visible families, social networks, etc. often obscured within documents? The Institute will help us imagine more ways to structure online archives by offering lessons on inclusive web archive creation and design. (For our more on this project and a copy of our proposal, see Leadership.)
Summary