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  2. Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar

Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar

Francis X. Blouin, Jr. and William G. Rosenberg, Editors. 2006
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As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, artifacts of culture, and places of uncovering, archives provide tangible evidence of memory for individuals, communities, and states, as well as defining memory institutionally within prevailing political systems and cultural norms. By assigning the prerogatives of record keeper to the archivist, whose acquisition policies, finding aids, and various institutionalized predilections mediate between scholarship and information, archives produce knowledge, legitimize political systems, and construct identities. Far from being mere repositories of data, archives actually embody the fragments of culture that endure as signifiers of who we are, and why. The essays in A_rchives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory_ conceive of archives not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies.
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ISBN(s)
  • 978-0-472-03270-9 (paper)
  • 978-0-472-02672-2 (ebook)
Subject
  • History
Citable Link
  • Table of Contents

  • Stats

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • Contents
  • Preface and Acknowledgments
  • PART I. Archives and Archiving
    • Introduction
    • “Something She Called a Fever”: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust (Or, in the Archives with Michelet and Derrida)
    • The Problem of Publicité in the Archives of Second Empire France
    • Not Dragon at the Gate but Research Partner: The Reference Archivist as Mediator
    • Between Veneration and Loathing: Loving and Hating Documents
    • Archiving/Architecture
    • “Records of Simple Truth and Precision”: Photography, Archives, and the Illusion of Control
  • PART II. Archives in the Production of Knowledge
    • Introduction
    • Out of the Closet and into the Archives? German Jewish Papers
    • German Jewish Archives in Berlin and New York: Three Generations after the Fact
    • Medieval Archivists as Authors: Social Memory and Archival Memory
    • The Question of Access: The Right to Social Memory versus the Right to Social Oblivion
    • Past Imperfect (l'imparfait): Mediating Meaning in Archives of Art
    • An Artifact by Any Other Name: Digital Surrogates of Medieval Manuscripts
    • The Panoptical Archive
    • Archival Representation
  • PART III. Archives and Social Memory
    • Introduction
    • Remembering the Future: Appraisal of Records and the Role of Archives in Constructing Social Memory
    • Creating a National Information System in a Federal Environment: Some Thoughts on the Canadian Archival Information Network
    • Archives, Heritage, and History
    • How Privatization Turned Britain's Red Telephone Kiosk into an Archive of the Welfare State
    • Archives: Particles of Memory or More?
    • Lookin' for a Home: Independent Oral History Archives in Italy
    • The Public Controversy over the Kennedy Memorabilia Project
    • Classified Federal Records and the End of the Cold War: The Experience of the Assassination Records Review Board
    • “Just a Car”: The Kennedy Car, the Lincoln Chair, and the Study of Objects
  • PART IV. Archives, Memory, and Political Culture (Canada, the Caribbean, Western Europe, Africa, and European Colonial Archives)
    • Introduction
    • Memories of Colonization: Commemoration, Preservation, and Erasure in an African Archive
    • Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance: On the Content in the Form
    • The Provincial Archive as a Place of Memory: Confronting Oral and Written Sources on the Role of Former Slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98)
    • Maroons in the Archives: The Uses of the Past in the French Caribbean
    • Redemption's Archive: Remembering the Future in a Revolutionary Past
    • Documenting South Africa's Liberation Movements: Engaging the Archives at the University of Fort Hare
    • “The Gift of One Generation to Another”: The Real Thing for the Pepsi Generation
    • Social History, Public Sphere, and National Narratives: The Social Origins of Valencian Regional Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century Spain
    • The Influence of Politics on the Shaping of the Memory of States in Western Europe (France)
    • The Role of the Swiss Federal Archives during Recent Politico-Historical Events and Crises
    • Television Archives and the Making of Collective Memory: Nazism and World War II in Three Television Blockbusters of German Public Television
  • PART V. Archives and Social Understanding in States Undergoing Rapid Transition (China, Postwar Japan, Postwar Greece, Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans)
    • Introduction
    • Revolution in the Archives of Memory: The Founding of the National Diet Library in Occupied Japan
    • The New Masters of Memory: Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Postcommunist Bosnia-Herzegovina
    • Writing Home in the Archive: “Refugee Memory” and the Ethnography of Documentation
    • Qing Statesmen, Archivists, and Historians and the Question of Memory
    • The Role of Archives in Chinese Society: An Examination from the Perspective of Access
    • Archives and Histories in Twentieth-Century China
    • Archives and Historical Writing: The Case of the Menshevik Party in 1917
    • Russian History: Is It in the Archives?
    • Archiving Heteroglossia: Writing Reports and Controlling Mass Culture under Stalin
    • Ethnicity, Memory, and Violence: Reflections on Special Problems in Soviet and East European Archives
    • Hesitations at the Door to an Archive Catalog
    • The Historian and the Source: Problems of Reliability and Ethics
  • Contributors
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