What started as a straightforward reference question at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provoked an unmistakable volley in the culture wars – and as I fled from the battlefield via the Archives shuttle, the first woman appointed as Archivist of the United States (AOTUS) saved the day. The first full week of summer… Read more →
Tag: Archives
Accidental Traces: Stowaway Objects in the Radio Haiti Archive
From the early 1970s until 2003, Radio Haïti-Inter, or simply Radio Haiti, was the country’s most prominent independent radio station. Under the leadership of its director, Jean Dominique and its news director Michèle Montas (who was also Dominique’s professional partner and wife), Radio Haiti fought for human rights, freedom of expression, and an end to… Read more →
“Discharged Well”: or, How I Learned to Feel in the Archive
This story begins in the fall of 2007. I was on my first research trip to look through various records at the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard. I was a baby researcher, fresh from defending my prospectus and high with the achievement of receiving a research fellowship. But I was also severely insecure. As… Read more →
Bloody Archives: An Archival Insight into the History of Sanitary Towels
Given the number of people menstruating at any one time in the United Kingdom, you would have thought it would be a key interest of past governments. And yet the UK National Archives collections show remarkably little about the history of menstruation and sanitary products. Maybe this should not be a surprise, given how male-dominated… Read more →
The Rainbow Underside of Pristine White Roses: Exploring the Impact of Purity Culture in the Lives of Queer Youth
Since 2018, the Muncie LGBTQ+ History Project has been collecting the stories of queer people who grew up in and around Muncie, Indiana. I worked with the project for over a year as a research associate, conducting interviews with members of the LGBTQ+ community about their experiences growing up in Muncie, a small town in… Read more →
Blood, Teeth, and Fire: A Dispatch from Cincinnati, 1844
This is a story about walking between worlds. It happens now (more or less; December 2020) and also then (October 1844). In the present, I was working on the Dr. Todd A. Herring Collection, re-sorting folders and looking for pieces to scan so I could transcribe them over winter break. I am an archives nerd;… Read more →
Whale, Actually
Across the cover of the worn brown file, now property of the British National Archives, someone had written “Rations and Supplies – Dehydrated” in bright red pencil. This bland title gave little indication of what lay inside: a lengthy discussion about how Britain might feed its troops in South Asia in 1944, and specifically how… Read more →
Finding Friendship and Frustration in the Archive of an Institution for the “Feebleminded”
The methodology proposed by “Archival Kismet” is to go where the archive leads you (while bearing in mind, of course, all the people, structures, and historically contingent happenings that have produced “the archive” in its current form). Sometimes you follow archival sources down a dead-end rabbit hole, or along a new and exciting path of… Read more →
Archival Kismet: A Manifesto
In a fit of spring-cleaning early last year, my mother sent me a series of boxes filled with various mementos from my childhood and other things she wanted to get out of her closets and into mine. Tucked inside one of the boxes was a photocopy of a family recipe. This recipe was for varenyky… Read more →
Witness to Pain: The Migraine Art Collection
“Good morning Katherine, I just wanted to let you know that we have located the Migraine Art.” For four years, as I worked on the history of migraine, I had periodically been in touch with the team at Migraine Action, a UK-based advocacy charity for people with migraine.1 Globally, migraine affects around one in seven… Read more →