Archival silence, racism in fandom spaces, book preservation, Biden's slaveowning ancestors, a failing White genealogist, and the woman who created "Monopoly"
There's a lot of ground to cover since last week's newsletter and this week I write a great deal about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and other topics. Enjoy!
Good afternoon, all! I hope you are all doing well. In the past week, I published a post about an unnamed librarian in a webcomic I like, and found out about a film named The Watermelon Woman. This 1996 mockumentary is the first feature film directed by a filmmaker, Cheryl Dunne, who is a Black lesbian, and is, of course, about Black lesbians. I was intrigued when one site described the film as focusing on “how black queer actors and stories were often ignored and how navigating archival records in attempts to look for those stories can be excruciating,” thinking it could shine a light on archival silence. Although some described the film’s archivist, played by Sarah Schulman, as flustered, said that she “displays little respect for the fragile nature of audio-visual archiving” (that can’t be good) and a “humorless, borderline fascist” who is part of a feminist archive collective, cheekily named the “Center for Lesbian Information and Technology,” I’m still interested in watching the film. If The Watermelon Woman seems poignant enough in terms of connections to archival concepts, which I’m expecting it will, I’ll likely submit an article to The American Archivist Reviews Portal on the subject. That’s my plan. With that, onto the rest of my newsletter, which Substack is telling me is “too long for email.”
This week there’s a lot of archives-related news. My work colleague Lauren Harper asked “does anyone know if NARA has done any larger studies on the impact of CC on their facilities?” after seeing a notice that NARA’s Access to Archival Databases system was offline (it’s now online) because of flooding at their network provider. That is a question I’m not sure how to answer, but anyone that does know should respond to Lauren about that. She also urged Biden to not let the clock run out on what she called “critical transparency fixes.” On a totally different subject, I read an article by a Black woman, Stitch, with interest. She asked where Archives of Our Own(AO3)/Organization of Transformative Works (OTW) is when it comes to anti-racism, saying AO3 continues to be a “space that will do more to protect racist fanworks and the racists that create them than fans of color,” with those who report racist fics getting brushed off by the Abuse team, and saying that the site still “protects racists in fandom…[and] punishes people of color that dare to speak up about racism in fanworks and from fellow fan[s].” She goes onto say that even Twitter had a better response than OTW and AO3, and hopes that in the future, there will be a stronger offensive content policy. Although she recognizes AO3 as a hosting platform and for the work it does for “incorporating old archives of fannish work,” she says that she will not be holding her breath when it comes to AO3/OTW engaging in any anti-racist action against racist fanworks or racism in fandom spaces. This article really hit home for me as a person who reads AO3 fan fics. I’m encouraged to recommend writers to place a notice atop their stories supporting her proposed changes.
There are some fascinating recent NARA blogposts. The first of these tells the story of a Black man, Ben “Bennie” Reeves, who was later incarcerated at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. Others are about how the National Archives at Philadelphia is situated on the ancestral lands of Lenape, the enslaved women of Confederate nitre works, Charles Michelson’s campaign against Herbert Hoover, and that the Federal Records Center in Fort Worth is “situated on lands that are rich in the history of numerous indigenous peoples.” The American Archivist, for its part, had articles about re-imagining instruction in special collections and providing restricted access to mental health archives. The Washington Post talked about the closing of the Minnesota Tobacco Document Depository, an archive which revealed many secrets about Big Tobacco, with many of the documents online currently and the physical copies will be destroyed, which is bad archival practice. Margot Note outlined strategies for archival advocacy, the Library of Congress (LOC) noted that Nicole Saylor who “led a team of archivists, ethnomusicologists and folklorists that curates the nation’s largest ethnographic archives,” the American Folklife Center, from 2012 to this year, is moving to a new position as head of LOC’s Digital Innovation Lab.
There is also some news about libraries and the library field. I liked reading the guest post by two virtual Preservation Research and Testing Division interns (Kimberly Chancellor and Heidi Vance), at LOC, trying to prevent paper deterioration as part of the ongoing database which is assessing the physical condition of books from “five large research libraries in distinct regions of the United States.” This project will ultimately “objectively assess the condition of the books held in the United States,” with a representative sample from those five research libraries. Beyond that internship, Tania M. Ríos Marrero, 2021 Junior Fellow at LOC, was interviewed, about her work with the Farm Security Administration photographs of Puerto Rico, which is “one of the largest visual archives of mid-twentieth century Puerto Rico,” and her work on the Library’s web archiving initiatives, selecting and nominating sites for preservation. Other posts examined Native claims settlement acts, described as a “somewhat complex area of U.S. indigenous law,” noted that two new research guides about Latin American composers have been published, and a new collaboration between LOC and Harvard University on Islamic law collections. Other articles argued for people to support libraries in Scotland (for those living there), the reasons libraries are “awesome,” the role that Black librarians play in the Indianapolis community, and Dine College being the first tribal college to grant “faculty status to their librarians.” There were an assortment of other articles about a program in Hawaii County to loan out ukuleles, preserving computer and video games, on how library fires have often been tragedies (no shock there), the Schaumburg Library having an exhibit which explores “implicit bias to help us all become aware of our own bias,” the impact of Hoopla borrows on libraries, publishers, and creators, and how Controlled Digital Lending can unlock a library's full potential.
This past week, there was one story that really caught my attention. It wasn’t the appointing of Amazon and Facebook executives to the board of Ancestry, Inc. (they are all in the same club), or the California Information Privacy Act heading to the desk of Governor Newsom, but rather the ancestry of Joe Biden. The Winter edition of American Ancestors had an authoritative genealogy on him, called an “Ancestor Table,” authored by two White male genealogists: Alexander Bannerman and Gary Boyd Roberts. However, Bannerman recently told a Politico reporter that “some of Biden’s ancestors enslaved people,” specifically Marylanders Jesse Robinett and Thomas Randle, using census records to make this clear. That isn’t really much of a surprise, but what disturbed me was the fact this was NOT included in the “authoritative” genealogy in American Ancestors because it was “common for Americans with colonial-era roots on the continent to have ancestors who enslaved people.” Strangely, Biden’s distant tie to the wife of Jefferson Davis, Varina Anne Banks Howell, was pointed out, but NOT his connections to slaveowning ancestors, even though Jefferson Davis owned as many as 113 people. Bannerman said Biden’s ties to slavery were modest, declaring there was “not a lot of ancestors, and not a lot of slaves.” The Politico article never followed up on the implications of what Bannerman was saying, only noting that Mitch McConnell and Beto O’Rourke also had slaveowning ancestors and said something that White people don’t like to hear: “tens of millions of Americans have ancestral ties to enslavers or the Confederacy.” The article then stated that this could be “a political problem” for Biden and noted that Bannerman did not confirm that Biden had slave-owning ancestors until after the election.
I have some serious issues with Bannerman’s logic. His justification for excluding slaveowners from genealogy is laughable. Why should that information not be mentioned? Does it really matter whether the number of humans your ancestor had in bondage were “modest” or not? If I went by Bannerman’s logic, then I should have never written about my slave-owning ancestors either, since those they had in bondage would be considered “modest” from his perspective. Furthermore, his argument does not reflect well on genealogy itself, especially White genealogists. Taken to its extreme, his argument would invalidate the need for Black genealogy in the first place, even though more diverse genealogy from those other than White people is sorely needed.
There are other issues, like Snopes claiming that Thomas Randle’s slaveowning was “unproven” (their claim was later changed to true) but it is disturbing, but not at all surprising, to see this argument come from a well-educated White male genealogist. His co-writer, a Senior Research Scholar Emeritus of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, which publishes American Ancestors, is also a White man and once had a Wikipedia article which was deleted for not being “notable” enough. He may also have a similar opinion. And if they aren’t including Biden’s enslaved ancestors in their “authoritative” genealogy, what else is being excluded? Can this “Ancestor Table” even be considered “authoritative” at all?
On a related subject were articles on Irish national education sources relating to the 19th century, the top “social history” websites, a sample research plan, five genealogy systems to keep you organized, and the continuing challenge of immigrant research with a short Q&A with frequently asked questions. I found a post by Pauleen Cass about how you decide what should be kept “as part of the family archive, what needs to be recycled, and what can be culled entirely” as helpful. The same can be said about James Tanner explaining incorrect changes made to family trees on FamilySearch. He argued that genealogists should not “make a change unless you absolutely know what you are doing.” Donna Moughty, on the other hand, noted how to find women in your family tree. Alison Spring makes a valid point that a “whole new route of ancestral exploration can be opened up if you know what your relative’s occupation was.” I’ve experienced that first-hand, through my genealogy research up to this point, so this is a completely valid argument. Judith Batchelor had a great post about finding information about ancestors with blindness and deafness, suggesting that people look more into such ancestors as part of their family histories, and conducting a deep dive into some of her ancestors. There were also posts about the history of Irish people in India, what can be found in an Irish birth record, the purpose of indexing genealogy records, tips for a family history research trip, and how poor research leaves a permanent error on a family tree, especially when people do not understand naming practices and declare fictitious middle names of their ancestors.
That brings me to history. The Metropole, the blog of the Urban History Association, had a post about Black space, agency, and community building in the Jim Crow South. Davis Dunavin of WSHU talked about the Garden State, and the “secret behind the monopoly board.” The predecessor to Monopoly was patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie and was called the Landlord’s Game. She used it to “promote an economic ideology called Georgism, named after Henry George, a 19th-century economist and social reformer,” with the idea that land should belong equally to everyone. Although the game spread across the country, with people making changes along the way to make it easier to play with their kids, she never got credit for making Monopoly’s predecessor, even Parker Brothers denying her role. The article also said that Atlantic City changed since the Monopoly game debuted in 1934, with casinos moving in during the 1970s, and some said that the board itself is a “record of Atlantic City’s history of segregation.” Quoted in the article is an archivist who works at the Atlantic City Free Public Library: Jacqueline Silver-Morillo. Perspectives on History and Smithsonian magazine had articles on topics such as documenting disaster, a monastery run by an early medieval queen in England, human remains showing a battle-to-the-death by farmers in Chile, how to give a virtual book talk, noting that everything has a history, and a snapshot at the public’s view on history. Other than this was a post on Medgar Evers’ role in civil rights law, the value of steampunk for historians, a professor uncovering new information about the ties of Jane Austen’s family to slavery, an interview with Dr. Marcia Chatelain on fast food history, and articles in the Journal of the American Revolution. That publication focused on the articles of Massachusettensis in 1774, the 2nd Connecticut Regiment at Edge Hill, the Battle of East Guilford, the final engagement in Connecticut, in May 1782, and the story of a donkey, a suit, and a quixote for George Washington.
Then we get to a number of articles which aren’t specifically about archives, libraries, genealogy, or history. The Artifice had posts about the storytelling layers of literary merit and the ambiguous morality of Œdipus Rex’s Iocastê. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives noted their extensive collection of two million volumes “in subjects ranging from art to zoology and forty-four thousand cubic feet of archival records that chronicle the growth and development of the Smithsonian throughout its history.” Crooked has a podcast on how “the far right is using Native children to attack American Indian tribes and advance a conservative agenda,” the Chronicle of Higher Education has a philosopher explain the best way to “do public humanities,” and Chinese Progressive Association and Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus noted that workers at a popular restaurant in San Francisco's Chinatown (Z & Y) won a $1.6 billion dollar settlement for wage theft. Also of note were articles on why helical seashells resemble spiraling galaxies and the human heart, the significance of graffiti art, why companies keep folding to copyright pressure, that although earthquakes and storms are natural, “Haiti’s disasters are man-made, too,” and pointing out the slow pace of correcting errors in scientific publishing while papers are published rapidly, especially when it comes to COVID-19 research. The latter calls for a formal process to catch mistakes in scientific papers. Smithsonian magazine had articles on truth behind some unsettling works of art about human impact on the planet, the discovery of the world’s smallest dinosaur, a study suggesting that 150 years may be the upper limit of the human lifespan, how millions of microscopic fly carcasses left dark stains on people’s feet at New England beaches, and the extinction event which almost wiped sharks out of existence.
Finally, there’s illustrations in The Nib. Some made a good point, like a cow declaring that “maybe humans should regulate their beef intake instead of my poop,” in response to the MooLoo, paranoia and accusations abound in the far right, “horse sense” for pandemics, a story of how NYPD’s police union is suing over a vaccine mandate, methods to try and get rid of tax havens, similarities between corporate work and prostitution (both are selling your body), and how anti-regulation attitudes ruled the “world of food” before the FDA. There were others illustrating human destructiveness of the Earth (if we treated our homes like we do the Earth), Afghans reacting to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan from their own perspective, the cognitive dissonance of supporters of the former president, unemployment benefits expiring without any push back from Biden, a time traveler failing to stop the war in Afghanistan, and last, but not least, one about Eric Clapton’s new single voicing his anti-vaccine sentiment (some say it “appears to be a musical rant against pandemic restrictions and vaccines”) and racist comments in 1976, calling England a “white country” made “for white people” (he says he has since changed).
That’s all for this week. Until next week! Hope you all have a good week ahead!
- Burkely