Fictional Diaries and Archives
My humanities moment happened when I read a book for school written in the form of a diary. Even though it was fiction, it showed me how diaries and journals can be useful for historical knowledge. As someone who now goes to archives to read "dead people's mail," I appreciate how fictional accounts such as the one I read in grade school can teach kids about historical empathy, how history is recorded, and how these personal experiences of the past are important for future knowledge.
Carolyn Meyer
<em>Mary, Bloody Mary</em>
2004
Abigail Shimer, 25, Ph.D. Student
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The Fish on Marchmont Street
I live and teach in Madison, Wisconsin, but I usually spend my spring break on a research trip in London, England. On a cold and drizzly day in March 2019, I was walking down Marchmont Street through London's Bloomsbury neighborhood on my way to the British Library. My head was down and I was busy thinking about the documents I would request at the archives, when I noticed what looked like a metal fish embedded in the sidewalk. As I kept walking, I noticed other oversized articles cemented into the walkway: a split coin, what looked like a compass, a winged heart connected to a pineapple, a diamond-shaped plaque with the initials M.S. In one case, a heart was inscribed with "Meriah Dechesne, Born August 8th 1759."
Soon, I came across a sign that explained these objects. These were enlarged replicas of historical tokens that mothers, usually young and poor, left when they abandoned their babies at the Foundling Hospital. The hospital took in babies given up between 1741 and 1954. Today, the Foundling Museum sits on the site, around the corner from the stretch of sidewalk where I noticed these tokens. The mothers were supposed to leave a small physical object with their babies to help them re-unite later, if possible. It was a kind of identification system or secret password. Only the mother and the Foundling Hospital would know that she had left her baby with a metal fish, for instance. As it turned out, reunifications were rare.
On my way to one of the world's most famous collections of paper documents, I was shown another kind of artifact from the past. These metal tokens were mementos of heart-break and loss, of lives spent apart because of poverty and social stigma, and of stories and people that were probably absent from the written records housed three blocks away. The metal fish and its companions were a quiet and understated form of memorial. They were flat, trodden upon by thousands of people every day, plain, and potentially unexplained for most pedestrians. But they created one of the most moving monuments I have ever seen. Because of them, I think about two centuries of desperate mothers and abandoned babies whenever I walk down Marchmont Street.
2019
Mitra Sharafi, 47, legal historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
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The “Infinitely Human”: Life Writings, Locks of Hair and Lived History
Like fellow humanists, I struggled to pick a single moment to describe and share with you. However, while delving into my corpus (life writings – mostly diaries, autobiographies and memoirs - from the Franco-German borderland, Alsace-Lorraine, at the turn of the twentieth century), I am reminded of a unique moment I experienced when I discovered these documents in the archives.
In May 2018, the week after finishing my first year of the PhD program in the French and Francophone Studies Department at Penn State, I set out on my first archival trip to Strasbourg, France. Once in the archives, my curiosity and intellect were quickly at odds with my limited resources and time. In most French departmental archives, researchers are allowed to order and go through eight archival boxes per day. They usually contain part of a collection, and can range from several pieces of paper to several hundred documents. Moreover, not all boxes are described in the archive’s “finding aid” or databases. The nature of their contents sometimes requires an educated guess based on the limited information available to you. As such, with only a month in France, my research choices needed to be strategic: I had to single out the boxes I believed would contain the best documents to help in my research. One collection in particular piqued my curiosity as the archivists Virginie Godar-Lejeune and Marie-Ange Glessgen described it as having an “infinitely human quality.” While these writings fell out of my delineated period of study, I nonetheless decided to follow my dissertation committee’s advice to “listen” to the archives, indeed to avail myself of what Alsatian-Lorrainers had deposited at the archives instead of narrowly executing the search for my anticipated corpus: I requested the boxes in question.
After weeks of mechanically opening hundreds of envelopes and finding papers, postcards or greeting cards, I was quite taken aback when my fingers touched locks of hair. In addition to entire life papers (birth, marriage and death certificates, school grade reports, passports, and photographs), the boxes included locks of hair of every family member. Although I was aware of the practice of collecting children’s or spouses’ hair, I had quite a visceral reaction to seeing and touching it firsthand. The Lambs’ family archives almost systematically included such documents and objects for most family members between 1790 and 1936. The breadth of these documents spoke to the Lambs’ commitment to passing on their history: a small family of modest background in the industrial landscape of Strasbourg, France at the turn of the twentieth century. The intimacy of the objects included illustrated the family’s need to preserve their loved one’s memory. I spent the rest of the day reading through the entire family’s collection, learning about the parents’ love for their children, as well as their fear of losing them to wars and subsequent political instability in the region at that time.
As a doctoral candidate, it can prove difficult to project yourself as a researcher who can meaningfully contribute to the world around you. This experience made me realize my role as a historian, specifically, as a link in the chain of “passeuses de memoire,” or living historians. While this collection is not featured in my dissertation, it has instilled in me a sense of responsibility to preserve and make available the life writings of ordinary people, which constitute my corpus. Literally touched by the history of the Lambs family, I felt compelled to pass on their history and memory as a means of understanding larger historical conjunctures. To this end, I assign some of their letters to students in French history courses to teach how individuals lived through the vicissitudes of Alsace-Lorraine’s history.
The picture shows the lock of hair and passport photo of Emilie Lorentz-Lambs (1869-1929). The family’s archives (17J) reside at the Departmental Archives of the Bas-Rhin in Strasbourg, France. The collection is freely communicable and under no copyright laws.
May 2018
Morgane Haesen, 28, PhD candidate (French and Francophone Studies), Penn State University
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First Archival Visit
I hope I am not the only person who struggled to narrow their moment to a single episode. I am grateful for the prompt, though; in a summer full of dissertation writing and classroom prep, this prompt provided me an opportunity to appreciate how many times daily I interact with a humanities scholar or a piece of art, music, or literature. <br /><br />Certainly a moment that stands out among the rest happened when I was twelve years old. It was the summer of 2002 and I was home with my Mom and my younger sister. We lived in a rural part of southern Ohio and we were between visits to Winters Public Library so naturally I was bored out of my mind—the kind of boredom I find myself longing for now. I am certain that I spent the morning begging my Mom to take me to the public library again—though I know that we had already been that week. <br /><br />My Mom knew better, of course. As a consequence, I found myself re-reading a YA historical fiction book I had devoured the previous week. During this latest re-read, I must have focused on the latter half of the book because I remember reading the source page. And, that must have been when I saw it: the author had cited primary sources, a journal, from the Greene County Historical Society—that was in Xenia! That was within an hour’s drive! <br /><br />I do not remember what I said to my mother to convince her to go. I would like to think I was persuasive but I imagine I was just loud and persistent. We took her 1992 Subaru Justy—already ten years old. <br /><br />It would take me years to realize that her choice to take me to the archive that day was a risk and that it meant a sacrifice. We were, as I would learn later, one car repair away from “serious trouble” and this car was not in great shape. When she turned the key in the ignition, there was a sigh of relief: it had just enough gas to get us there and back. We only had one income at the time. I don’t remember the drive to the archive but I remember nearly every second of the visit once we stepped inside. I remember climbing the steps to the third floor and the warm smile on the librarian’s face who showed me how to fill out a call slip. She made me feel so welcome in that space, like I belonged there. And, like every good librarian wore a fantastic sweater, an orange cardigan to be exact. <br /><br />I also remember how my heart raced as I watched her disappear behind the shelves. I also distinctly remember imaging what the diary would look like and being surprised when the contents arrived in a manila folder. I stayed until closing and my mother waited patiently on the first floor for at least three hours, looking up obituaries in the microfilm collection. <br /><br />I think this moment stands out for two reasons: History seemed possible, it seemed comprehensible in that moment. It also stands out because over time and with coursework, I would come to understand how the book that brought me to the archive had flattened Ohio’s complex nineteenth century history—it had reduced this story to one of virtuous settlers and villainous Shawnee warriors. With coursework in history, English, and library and information science, I learned the vocabulary necessary to critique that book and how to find better books, better sources, and to tell more complete stories.
An Archival Trip
Summer 2002
Mary Wise, PhD Candidate in History at the University of Iowa
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Giving Value and Thought to the Imaginary
<em>Roxaboxen</em>, a book by Alice McLerran
During the 2019 NHC GSSR.
Katelyn Campbell, 24, PhD Student in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill
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You Cannot Copy That Map
In a lecture on the lived experiences of the local peoples of the area surrounding Dien Bien Phu in Northwest Vietnam, Dr. Christian C. Lentz, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Chapel Hill, shared this map of the Northwest Region of Vietnam and a short anecdote about why this map is of particular importance. He was in the middle of doing research in Hanoi at the North Vietnam Archives Center #3, and faced opposition when he attempted to make copies of many of the maps dating to the French colonial era in Vietnam, whether they be from the French or a Vietnamese production. This map alone Dr. Lentz was allowed to reproduce. This map represents for me the numerous layers that the themes of “contested” and “territory” manifest in Southeast Asia in this time period.
This seemingly little tidbit that he shared in the midst of his lecture is what really stuck with me, and cemented my understanding of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The “contest” for Vietnam extends much further past the initial creation of this map in 1952. The idea that a visiting scholar such as Dr. Lentz was strictly forbidden to copy any maps other than this one speaks to how hotly contested the memory of the Vietnam War is still today. As Dr. Lentz told the story, I created a mental image of a Vietnamese archival official standing over Dr. Lentz’ shoulder, closely monitoring what the American scholar copied. How do we remember this conflict? From which perspective? Controlling what can and cannot be recreated is an attempt to steer the narrative, which is very much still being written.
Dr. Lentz’ story on the “Black River Region after Northwest Campaign (Oct-Dec 1952)” map simplified for me all the complexities that contributed to the warfare in Southeast Asia into a single map, a visual representation of a territory that meant so many different things to so many different actors, each pulled into a conflict that continues to this day to be contested. I can only hope through continued scholarship, communication, and openness, that one day, the archival official will instead say, “Yes, you can copy that map.”
July 2018 - NEH Summer Institute
Maggie Childress, 24, Teacher, Wake County, North Carolina
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