Nuclear bombs, archives in pop culture, libraries under stress, genealogy, and more!
This week, I'll be talking about, as always, archives, libraries, genealogy, and history, along with some thoughts on what is going on in Cuba and Haiti, and other topics.
Good evening everyone! I hope you all had a good week. On Tuesday, I published a review of a public library in an animated series I like. This week I have been slowly working on a post about my ancestor, Samuel Packard, a Rhode Islander who participated in the transatlantic slave trade in the 1790s even though it was illegal. Hopefully, I’ll publish that post in the coming week, meaning it will be in next week’s newsletter. My friend tells me that they are working on a new fictional work, which may be published tomorrow. With that, let me get on with the rest of my newsletter.
There was a lot of archives-related news this week. For one, William Burr, one of my colleagues at the National Security Archive, edited a post focusing on how concerns about future U.S. reliability influenced the British quest for Trident missiles in the 1970s and 1980s, in an attempt to improve their capability to “bomb Soviet targets, including major cities, without having to depend on the United States.” This post was informed by records within the Digital National Security Archive (which I index records for), the Nixon Presidential Library, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library, Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, CIA FOIA database, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the National Archives in the UK, and a State Department FOIA release. So that’s cool. Samantha “Sam” Cross, a premier pop culture reviewer in the archives field, has a new article where she, in her words, “over-analyzes an issue of X-Men and the Micronauts that features a character called The Archivist.” Cross first gives some background of comics in the 1980s and notes the problematic parts of the story (which would make anyone cringe). The character known as “The Archivist” stands on “the corner, observe[s] the atrocities, and transmit[s] them to Karza's headquarters”! Yikes! He stays alive and aware until he dies in an explosion. Unfortunately, this archivist isn’t really an archivist. Recording and seeing something doesn’t make you an archivist, you have to curate or preserve something, giving context to observations to those who will view the records in the future. She was also annoyed that this so-called archivist sat on the sidelines and did nothing while the villain attacked the heroes. She rightly criticized those who “honestly believe that Archivists should just be agents of neutrality.” The problem is that neutrality is a choice. She noted that it should be “the job of the archivist to advocate and fight for inclusion” because when that doesn’t happen, “the more biased the records become, which typically favors one group…over another.” This connects to a recent Twitter thread by Cross where she talked about an article she is writing on “invisibility of archives and archivists,” relating it to the company she works for and pop culture itself. I really look forward to reading that!
Otherwise, there was news that the Nelson Mandela Foundation acquired the Jakes Gerwel Archive, with Gerwel as the “Director-General in the office of President Nelson Mandela, and as Mandela's Cabinet Secretary” and an announcement by the SAA’s Committee of Public Awareness of their Open House on Thursday, July 22nd, 3:30-4:30 pm CST, which will give more information about the committee, allowing people to ask questions and meet committee members. On July 16, NARA announced limited reopening of research rooms, with “research visits…by appointment only…[with boxes of records will be pulled in advance…[and] research appointments will initially be for 4-5 hours total,” with a number of measures to “ensure the safety of our researchers and staff.” On July 26, the Archival History Section will hold its annual meeting via Zoom at 11:00 am-12:30 pm CT (beginning 12:00 pm EST, 10:00 am MT, 9:00 am PT). I enjoyed reading about something which has kept the staff of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies “connected, supported, engaged…throughout the pandemic”: a project organized around a Twin Cities public access television show, named GAZE-TV. While the over 230 videos had been digitized and made available, they were only “described in only very rudimentary ways,” so efforts were made to describe the contents of each episode, with the collection valuable to all sorts of people, including those within the LGBTQ community. I also learned this week that the new Maryland state archivist, Elaine Rice Bachmann, previously deputy state archivist, will take the place of Tim Baker, state archivist since July 2015. She took her position as state archivist on July 1 and will also be the commissioner of land patents.
That brings me to libraries. I was excited to see a recent episode of Mira, Royal Detective centered around a bake sale trying to raise money for a mobile library (literally a library on wheels) to buy more materials which the public could use. In other pop culture news, Jennifer Snoek-Brown had a fascinating review on her Reel Librarians blog of John Lahr’s 1978 biography, Prick Up Your Ears. I’d definitely recommend it as something to read. Although the death threats forcing a trans magician to cancel her library shows are terrible, even worse is a story in Truthout about how “right-wing groups are trying to stop public and school libraries from promoting racial justice and queer acceptance.” It is another attempt by these reactionary forces to control what people can find out about the past, present, and future, restricting what people can find to what suits to their narrow, and bigoted, mindset. The story itself is chilling. It shows the challenge ahead in trying to fight such reactionary forces in our society, whether by electing people to library boards or mobilizing support of the community. These reactionary forces are trying to cut back services and take them over to achieve their own ends. This is not unique. Libraries, as pointed out in the article, were under pressure during the Cold War, with some claiming they were spreading “communist propaganda,” even though they obviously weren’t. While engaging in this fight, one should take into account what April Hathcock, who I’ve mentioned in the past couple of weeks in this newsletter, wrote about in 2016. Everything we do has “emotional and physical and intellectual components,” as she puts it, and all of it is labor, even if it’s something we love doing. She says this should be recognized as work and that you should be paid for it. I agree with that completely. It makes sense to pay someone for all their labor and for that pay to be fair.
More promising is the stories of librarians stopping thieves, how libraries are a popular attraction, the patrons who place library holds but don’t pick them up, and the 2021 title for Librarians and Archivists with Palestine’s international reading campaign, One Book, Many Communities: a two part story titled Minor Detail by Adania Shibli. Their campaign draws inspiration for “people in local communities come together to read and discuss a common book.” I liked reading about library learning analytics, an upcoming webinar (on July 21) from the Library of Congress on COVID-19 and our environment, and the presidential papers of 23 presidents, from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, are now all online and digitized. This is after the work of many staff and volunteers since the 1990s, which has been described as a “godsend in an era of shrinking academic research budgets and dwindling travel funds.” All the papers on presidents from Hoover onward are under the custody of the National Archives and Records Administration, within specific presidential libraries.
That brings me to genealogy. There were more articles about the recent book on Elizabeth Packard (The Woman They Could Not Silence) which I talked about last week. More than that, I loved the continual integration of chain codes into the story of Star Wars: The Bad Batch, and the strange mention in a review of a Star Wars film of ancestry, declaring: “…from a dramatic perspective, you’re working against yourself if you argue that all of your character’s personal experiences are minimized by a discovery on Ancestry.com.” Not really sure what to make of that. There were articles about indigenous communities fighting questionable ancestry claims, the “pandora’s box” of DNA testing, tips for family research (including remembering that FamilySearch does not index many of their records), and the continued popularity of genealogy during the pandemic. It was inspiring to read how an ancestral discovery inspired an Oklahoman woman to not stay silent about racial inequities. Also, an article in Adval showed the power of Ancestry. In this case, a Turkish group was boycotting the company after “results on the website highlighted how non-Turkish groups in Anatolia assimilated over time into modern Turks,” claiming Turkey is being demonized. While this nationalist viewpoint is pure garbage, it makes clear that Ancestry has a privileged position as a company that many use, giving it an ability, unlike others, to influence public perceptions.
Then, we get to history. I had to laugh at the story of a Schrewsbury house filled with concrete foam to save it from collapse. Of course, there were assorted articles about the brief surfacing of a medieval Italian village, the anniversary of Bastille Day (on July 14), how 420-million-year-old fish might have emerged in Madagascar, researchers uncovering traces of a medieval Scottish town that had been razed, and the role of the American Red Cross in the Tulsa Massacre of 1921. Even more important than those stories, and those on documenting the iconic Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans, following the footsteps of botanist John Bartram who explored Florida in the 1770s, or how the North Carolina governor, Thomas Burke, was captured in 1781, were two items. The first was a dramatic victory for the Yakama Nation, “affirming the reservation status of 121,465 acres within the southwestern corner of the Yakama Reservation, including Mt. Adams and the Glenwood Valley.” Second is Illinois becoming the first state to mandate that Asian-American history be taught in schools!
There are a number of stories which don’t fall into the other categories of this newsletter. There is a lot of talk about the protests in Cuba. The reactionary Cuban exile community in Florida grumble about Cuba all the time, represented by people such as Marco Rubio, and are demanding U.S. intervention whenever they can. The Biden Administration, on the other hand, along with various politicians, media outlets, and public personalities, are declaring their solidarity with the people supposedly fighting for “freedom” on the island. Others claim that both sides (Cuba and the U.S.) are to blame. All these perspectives are wrongheaded. None of them recognize current U.S. plans to meddle in the island’s affairs, past U.S. history of extensive intervention over and over again, primarily in the 20th, and now 21st, century. The fact is that removing the embargo and lifting travel / migration restrictions, which the big businesses and their lobbies want to disappear, would promote “freedom” which will never be gained from sanctioning the island’s population to death. Whether you agree with Cuba’s socialist model or not, they should solve their own problems without interference from the United States.
Undoubtedly, the country is under a lot of economic strain due to the embargo and pandemic-related economic contraction, meaning that the protests are understandable. However, supporting them while screaming that the country is a “dictatorship,” or some silliness like that, is never going to accomplish anything. Instead, it will make you look like a fool. Furthermore, with all the problems within the U.S., the long and disturbing history of worldwide interventions, the U.S. government has no moral authority to dictate how other countries should treat their populations. It’s that simple.
Speaking of U.S. intervention in Latin America, there seems to be some indications of possible involvement in the death of President Jovenel Moïse in Haiti, leading former Bolivian leader Evo Morales to call it part of “a new US Plan Condor,” referring to what my colleagues at the NSA describe as “a cross-border conspiracy of dictatorships in the 1970s and 1980s to "eradicate 'subversion.’” News outlets have reported that some of those who assassinated him had received U.S. military training in the past, FBI agents assisting in investigation of the assassination, and one of those arrested, in connection with the assassination, previously working as a DEA informant! This is something that organizations should request documents for, through the relevant agencies. With that, I loved this illustration about the topic.
The Columbia Journalism Review had an article about the never-ending issue of link rot (i.e. external links become dead when “the linked web pages or complete websites disappear, change their content, or move without HTML redirection,” as described by Wikipedia) in New York Times articles from 1996-2019. The Washington Post described, on June 28, how workers in the U.S. are exhausted and burned out, with some companies beginning to notice. On July 9, CNN had an opinion piece on the story of one White woman publicly declaring she cares diversity when she is actually racist, and how this is true on a much broader scale. Some time ago, Ashley Dawson wrote about the movement to push museums to end their ties with Israel, which is occupying the West Bank and Gaza with an iron fist. Others said that academics should become more involved in the struggle for open access.
In a disconcerting note, tourism in Hawaii has picked up after travel restrictions have been loosened. Native Hawaiians are urging tourists to not visit the islands until they are safe, with brewing anger at tourists unequally squandering resources and how the economy of the islands is based on tourism. In closing, there were wonderful illustrations in The Nib, as always. They focused on an anti-Jewish supporter of the former president, the weakness of “sensible” liberals, how cities should design roads for people, not cars, letters by various people affected by the pandemic, the obvious problem with guns in the U.S., the association of the GOP with the Confederacy, Justice Samuel Alito getting his comeuppance for ruling in favor of Arizona’s restrictive voting laws, and full-time minimum wage workers not able to afford rent anywhere within the U.S. All are disconcerting, but illustrations are a good form of expressing these ideas.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a good week ahead!
- Burkely