John Money’s archives pulled me in like a tractor beam. I cannot remember when or how I first learned about […]
Why the First Woman Matters: Traversing Barriers in the Archives
What started as a straightforward reference question at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) provoked an unmistakable volley in […]
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. […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Whale, Actually
Across the cover of the worn brown file, now property of the British National Archives, someone had written “Rations and […]
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, […]
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 […]