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Liberty holding an American flag with "For the Union" written on it.
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Capturing the Civil War

The images, diaries, and ephemera in Grand Valley State University’s Civil War and Slavery Collection reveal the cold realities of Abraham Lincoln’s world.
by Susanna Ashton via JSTOR Daily on May 23, 2024
Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History by Laura E. Helton.

Black Archives, Not Archives of Blackness

On Laura Helton’s “Scattered and Fugitive Things.”
by Dorothy Berry via Los Angeles Review of Books on April 22, 2024
Rows of shelves in a historical archive.

Archival Shouting

Silence and volume in collections and institutions.
by Karin Wulf via Perspectives on History on April 10, 2024

Black Archives Look to Preservation Amid Growing US History Bans

Matter-of-fact accounting of the legal mechanism of slavery provides insight into American history and the country’s fraught present.
by Adria R. Walker via The Guardian on January 15, 2024
Collage of Louis Armstrong playing the trumpet, waving, and smoking, and a picture of his home in Queens.

Louis Armstrong Gets the Last Word on Louis Armstrong

For decades, Americans have argued over the icon’s legacy. But his archives show that he had his own plans.
by Ethan Iverson via The Nation on October 30, 2023
Portrait photo of Elsie Robinson.

A Woman Who Composed the First Draft of History Finds Herself Written Out of the History Books

Prominent institutions, such as the Smithsonian, have historically erased or omitted US women from archival records.
by Allison Gilbert via CNN on August 14, 2023
Illustration of McCormick at his desk, hunched over a typewriter.

Hellhounds on His Trail

Mack McCormick’s long, tortured quest to find the real Robert Johnson.
by Michael Hall via Texas Monthly on April 4, 2023
Vintage stereogram of Chinatown, San Francisco, ca. 1920s-30s.

How a California Archive Reconnected a New Mexico Family with its Chinese Roots

Aimee Towi Mae Tang’s Chinese American family never talked about the past. She decided to change that.
by Wufei Yu via High Country News on April 1, 2022
Dr Elhamy Khalil and Attorney Awny Barsoum's arrival in New York in 1963

Egyptians in New York: The Untold Stories of Early Immigrants to America

When the US relaxed immigration restrictions in the late 50s, a small Egyptian population emerged. Their early experiences are now available via a new archive.
via Middle East Eye on November 24, 2021
An old water tower stands near abandoned outhouses on the former site of a Firestone plantation in Liberia.

Corporations Are Hiding Vast Troves of History From the Public

You can work around some of the holes this lack of access creates, but it takes years.
by Gregg Mitman via Slate on November 2, 2021
A Historian looking at a document

An Archivist Sneezes on a Priceless Document. Then What?

What, exactly, does history lose when an archive-worthy text is destroyed?
by Olivia Campbell via The Atlantic on July 13, 2021
Illustration of a stick figure on a ladder adding to very tall stacks of paper

Living Memory

Black archivists, activists, and artists are fighting for justice and ethical remembrance — and reimagining the archive itself.
by Megan Pillow via Guernica on June 23, 2021
An African American woman standing on a porch with three young children

The House Archives Built

How racial hierarchies are embedded within the archival standards and practices that legitimize historical memory.
by Dorothy Berry via up//root on June 22, 2021
Glass with spilled rainbow alcohol

Chasing 'Phantoms of the Past': Gay & Lesbian Bar Archivists on Preserving LGBTQ+ Nightlife History

VinePair interviewed eight LGBTQ+ archivers around the country about documenting America’s gay and lesbian bars while they still can.
by Dave Infante via VinePair on June 15, 2021
One of Jerry Weller's photo albums, with notes that Patti May gave to GLAPN identifying people in the pictures.

The Precious, Precarious Work of Queer Archiving in the Pacific Northwest

Local legacy-keepers are working to ensure that the histories aren't lost or forgotten.
by Emma Banks via Atlas Obscura on June 9, 2021
A scrapbook of African American history

A Priceless Archive of Ordinary Life

To preserve Black history, a 19th-century archivist filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials.
by Cynthia R. Greenlee via The Atlantic on February 9, 2021
A mural of a woman cleaning a turnstile.

How to Remember a Plague

2020 was full of efforts to archive photos and artifacts of the pandemic — an impulse born of a sense of witnessing history, and a desire to speak to the future.
by Laura Bliss via CityLab on December 31, 2020
An abstract painting.

Working with Death

The experience of feeling in the archive.
by Ruth Lawlor via Perspectives on History on December 15, 2020
A picture of Trump going through a shredder.

Will Trump Burn the Evidence?

How the President could endanger the official records of one of the most consequential periods in American history.
by Jill Lepore via The New Yorker on November 16, 2020
Person holding up two cylindrical records

A Temple of Sound Awaits in the UCSB’s Collection of Early Music and Sound Recordings

The treasures include recordings of string quartets, spirituals, sermons and politicians who might have been startled to hear the sound of their own voices.
by Randall Roberts via Los Angeles Times on November 12, 2020

The Noise of Time

What does the past sound like – and can listening to it help us understand history better?
by Sanjana Varghese via New Statesman on February 19, 2020

The Way We Write History Has Changed

A deep dive into an archive will never be the same.
by Alexis C. Madrigal via The Atlantic on January 21, 2020

The Secrets of Lyndon Johnson's Archives

On a presidential paper trail.
by Robert A. Caro via The New Yorker on January 22, 2019

The Fascinating Story of the Texas Archives War of 1842

The battle over where the papers of the Republic of Texas should reside reminds us of the politics of historical memory.
by Sheila McClear via Smithsonian on October 9, 2018
original

A Refugee in Puerto Rico, 1942

Claude Lévi-Strauss and the burden of our personal archives.
by Benjamin Breen on October 6, 2017

Keeper of the Secrets

Is there a special value in archives that are not digitized?
by James Somers via Village Voice on September 20, 2017
A portrait of Major Ridge, an older Cherokee man.
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Revealed Through a Mountain of Paperwork

As the nation’s highest court debated Native sovereignty, I was in the archives, uncovering family stories entwined with those debates.
by Rebecca Nagle via HNN on September 24, 2024
A photograph of Waverly Woodson Jr. in his U.S. Army uniform.

The Forgotten Hero of D-Day

Waverly Woodson treated men for 30 hours on Omaha Beach, but his heroism became a casualty of entrenched racism, bureaucracy and Pentagon record-keeping.
by Garrett M. Graff via Politico Magazine on June 3, 2024
Emily Brooks.

When NYC Invented Modern Policing: On WWII–Era Surveillance and Discrimination

From the 1880s to the 1940s, New York City was transformed—and so too was the New York City Police Department.
by Matthew Guariglia, Emily M. Brooks via Public Books on April 2, 2024
Illustration of an AI machine reading a book.

How AI Can Make History

Large language models can do a lot of things. But can they write like an 18th-century fur trader?
by Josh Dzieza via The Verge on February 15, 2024
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