AfriGeneas Writers Forum
Re: Report on the Southern Sources Symposium
In Response To: Report on the Southern Sources Symposium ()
My previous post covered my take on William Blair’s talk, “Civil War History: Deconstructing the Term.” To see how two people who hear the same talk can come away with different thoughts, compare my notes with what Sally Greene posted at the link below. She either took good shorthand, or had access to a tape recording:
Now for my impressions of the rest of the symposium:
Tera Hunter: “Retrieving Irretrievable Working Class Black Women”
Hunter identified some assumptions that hinder research in the field of black working-class women:
Hunter studied the 1881 Atlanta washerwomen’s strike in detail, using a tantalizing research method she called “layered research.” She did not go into detail except to say that she used the approach to find the histories and identities of the striking Atlanta washerwomen. Her initial research in newspapers identified names of many of the women involved in the strike, but she did not initially know where to look for other information. She stepped back and amassed a foundation of basic personal information from as many different sources as she could find, such as censuses, police and court records (including witness’ affidavits), that revealed much more about the persons behind the strike. Then she revisited her first sources (newspapers) to find new facts and new connections between events that she had overlooked the first time.
Hunter’s archival “wish list” included:
Hunter concluded with advice to historical researchers: “Remove limits from our perceptions and imagination.”
Steven Hahn: Researching Poor, Laboring People
Hahn opened with advice for people planning to use an archive. Take time to become familiar with the contents of the archive; prepare for the visit by contacting the archival staff ahead of time. If possible, make friends with someone who is already familiar with the archive who can offer tips.
Hahn then suggested that researchers need to be open-minded to recognize in archives “topics and interpretations that historians don’t embrace – even when the evidence seems to stare them in the face.” The evidence of political activities among freedpeople in 1868 led him to speculate whether slaves had political organization and activity. He found evidence that political activity among ex-slaves did not spring spontaneously from emancipation, but had antecedents in slavery.
Hahn was amazed at the evidence available in the American Colonization Society records on microfilm. He found thousands of letters from freedmen and women in the South describing conditions in their neighborhoods, asking for information about emigration to Liberia, and naming others who might be interested in emigrating. Regardless of whether or not the letter-writers ever emigrated, these are marvelous sources written by newly-freed black people about themselves and their conditions. Hahn characterized the ACS papers as “one of the great sources for documents of post-emancipation southern blacks.”
Hahn discussed the challenges of researching poor, laboring people, including “problems of what we bring to the archives and what archives bring to us.” The types of records found in archives tend to show powerful people in detail at any one moment or in depth through time, doing important things. These same records tend to show common people in “episodic and haphazard” glimpses – they show us “flashes” of limited info about specific people who momentarily appear then disappear from the archival record.
Hahn critiqued the dangerous but increasingly popular view that we can not know anything outside of ourselves (“self-humbling” and “self-referential”) as a deadly enemy to the historian’s craft.
Hahn called historians to:
W. Fitzhugh Brundage: Comments
“Limited imaginations no less than limited collections” narrow our perspective on Southern history.
Three institutions collected knowledge on the inhabitants:
Final question: “What is going to propel a young generation of students to a new explosion of thought that will lead Southern history to new discoveries?”
JIM CROW ERA
Daniel T. Carter: Access to the Archives
Carter raised two concerns:
Glenda Gilmore: “Southern History Writ Larger”
Gilmore has researched Southern history in Russian state archives! She related her experience of searching through reports sent to Russia from the Jim Crow South by Russian agents.
Gilmore had sought unconventional sources because, “the Jim Crow South produced Jim Crow archives” – meaning that collections policies by Southern archives reflected the social and racial biases of the archivists. For example, the racial views of J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, founder of UNC’s Southern Historical Collection [and archivist from 1930-1948], shaped collections policy for materials from Reconstruction through the Civil Rights era; he only collected records from white people.
Gilmore suggested that sometimes the best place to research the South is in the North. Because of Jim Crow attitudes at Southern archives, she asked, “How many relevant collections migrated North?” The following Northern archives hold the types of African-American records missing from the Southern Historical Collection:
THE SOUTH SINCE 1954
Waldo Martin: “Three Episodes: Archives as Repositories of Dreams and Memories”
[Martin presented his “three episodes” in such a disorganized, rambling fashion that it was hard for me to tell what he was saying. He was also the only male presenter who didn’t bother to wear a coat and tie – I suppose because he teaches at UC Berkeley. The three bullets, below, represent what I understood from his talk.]
• When the Greensboro, NC, school board announced plans to demolish the James B. Dudley High School, it sent shock waves through the local black community because it had been the “black school” during segregation days – and even though the school system was officially desegregated, that school building was the focus of memories for generations, and a symbol of black community. The school was, in a sense, a “repository for dreams and memories” of the living.
Timothy B. Tyson: Civil Rights Era Roots in WWII
Tyson argued that, although 1954 is traditionally the beginning odf the “Civil Rights Era,” all the elements of the civil rights movement were in place by 1947 – that, indeed, the civil rights era began with the end of WWII:
Tyson used an example of a 1947 incident that occurred in his NC hometown to illustrate his points. [Tyson is a dynamic speaker and excellent story-teller.]
John Hope Franklin: “Adventures in Archives”
“The [Jim Crow] South was utterly confused about what it should do about race. There were as many different arrangements as there were places.”
[John Hope Franklin is 90 years old this year. He related his experiences as a researcher in southern archives during the Jim Crow era beginning in 1939. I will not bother to write my version of his very entertaining talk, because Sally Greene has transcribed a large part of it verbatim at the link below. If you have read Franklin’s essay “The Dilemma of an American Negro Scholar” you are already familiar with most of these stories.]
Edward L. Ayers: History as Narrative and the Digital Archive
“History is valuable because it lets us think about change.”
“Narrative is our ally in telling stories; the preferred way to tell history is by telling stories. But –– history is not a story! It is all the information about every day before today.” It is data. The historian’s job is to make sense of the data. “We need to tell more about as many historical persons as possible.” Writing the narrative of history involves “expanding the cast of characters.”
All the individual stories that could be written would thrive in digital archives. Historians need to learn to use GIS [geographic information systems], interactive digitized maps, and dynamic maps that show movement. Imagine a map that dynamically shows migration patterns! Imagine computer-based reproductions of old places: imagine being able to walk down the reconstructed streets of antebellum Charleston! Think of how documents can be linked together on the internet. Think of a footnote on paper as a broken hyperlink – it doesn’t lead you anywhere. In the digital archive, it could take you to the digitized source!
I am not saying paper publishing is dead – paper will always be the appropriate medium for certain types of publications.
Genealogists – those people who occupy so many of the tables in the archives where we do our research [laughter] – we need to tap into their work!
We have heard how much material is in private hands. We can collect from individuals by scanning their documents, then give the materials back! We could put out a call at a location for people to bring materials to scan! We could greatly expand the sources available to us with digital archives!
[You may know Edward L. Ayers best for his digital project, Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War: http://valley.vcdh.virginia.edu/ ]
[The end of my words - any thoughts and comments on interaction between genealogists and historians?]
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