Pop culture, indie animation, archival research, LGBTQ archives, librarians under threat, the 1893 Hawaii coup, the value of fanfics, and beyond!
Happy Monday! Today I will be bringing you a selection of articles on archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and related topics.
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a good week! This newsletter is going out on Monday, unlike my last newsletter that went out on Tuesday the 24th. Apart from my candidacy to become a member of the SAA’s Issues & Advocacy Section’s Steering Committee, I have a number of posts I’d like to share. On August 25, I published a post about a library sale/adventure in two Steven Universe comics. A few days later, I analyzed Pale Cocoon on my blog, talking about digital archives and archivy themes in the OVA. In response to the post, Archives in Fiction told me that the series has some “potentially interesting discussion points…regarding archival standards and practices.” I can’t agree more! Then, two days ago, at long last, my post about the indie animation boom and crowdfunded animation was published. I hope to use it to build off and write reviews of different shows in the days, months, and years ahead. With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter.
There was a lot of chatter about archives this week, including a recent SNAP Section discussion about applying for archives jobs, so if you are interested in that, I recommend going over to their Twitter account and following the discussion from there. Related to that is a video on the SAA’s YouTube channel titled “Starting a New Position During a Pandemic?,” first noted by archivist, librarian, and public historian Marissa Friedman. Anyway, there were some archivist memes about ongoing relations with alive donors and the tension between archivists and historians. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend going through Courtney Chartier’s remarks on August 3 to the annual SAA Membership Business Meeting, which partially responds to the AHA’s badly-informed and deeply problematic letter to NARA, and makes other comments. Related to what I wrote about last week is a Reuters article on how Afghans are worrying that “biometric databases and their own digital history can be used to track and target them,” with suggestions on how to bypass biometric tools (wearing makeup, looking down), and Afghans trying to scrub their digital profiles. On a totally different subject is a post by Amanda May, Digital Conversion Specialist in the Library of Congress’s Preservation Services Division writing about how the division “maintains several tools for transferring data off of floppy disks, even items that are damaged or are in uncommon formats,” which was of interest to me since I found a bunch of floppy disks in my closet when cleaning it out this week!
In other archives-related news, there was an article about a researcher, Evert Kleynhans, who spent six years researching at South African and British archives to put together a “fresh account of the German intelligence networks that operated in wartime South Africa,” with the Nazis reaching out to the fascist political opposition group Ossewabrandwag in South Africa, with intelligence gathered helping to spread sedition within South Africa, and undermine the war effort of the Allies. Kleynhans also noted that these events all but vanished from the collective memory of South Africa, pointing at the “gatekeeper mentality at archives, missing documents and the removal of key evidence from public circulation combined to stymie further research on this topic.” As it should be clear, archives are not neutral and how documents are arranged, selected, and such, are all decisions which have an impact. Even with this in mind, archival documents can be employed effectively by historians, like a Japanese university professor, Hiroaki Takazawa, who used declassified U.S. military documents to reveal where Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo was buried, noting that his ashes were “scattered from a U.S. Army aircraft over the Pacific Ocean about 30 miles…east of Yokohama.” This mission was done in secret because U.S. officials wanted to ensure that he, and others executed with him in 1948, as part of a war crimes sentence from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, would not be glorified as martyrs. Takazawa said he plans to continue researching other executions. 920 convicted Japanese war criminals were executed post-WWII.
Other news included Falkland Islands government records manager Chloe Anderson-Wheatley talking about how she developed as a “young record keeping professional,” Collections Officer at the LOC’s Collections Management Division, Preservation Directorate, Beatriz Haspo, writing for LOC about the library’s use of a Collections Storage Facility in Maryland (which looks just like archival stacks) for the last 20 years, which allows for the best high-density storage of records, and a summary of a talk by archivist Madlyn Moskowitz at Walt Disney Family Museum, explaining how she started as a film archivist at Lucasfilm, learning “the art of packing and creating the items in the company’s collections,” assembled displays, exhibits, and calls her job “physical asset management,” making sure items in the company’s archives are properly stored and accounted for. James Draper of the Museum Director at Air Force Space & Missile Museum noted that the museum acquired “five massive bins of historic Cape Canaveral videos and films.”
William J. Shepherd, University Archivist and Head of Special Collections at Catholic University, shared a post about the Plan de Iguala, a rare document dated from 1822 that declares Mexican independence from Spain, and an article in The American Archivist reviewing Rebecka Taves Sheffield's monograph, Documenting Rebellions: A Study of Four Lesbian and Gay Archives in Queer Times, which studies “four archives that were constituted with a common desire to preserve the memory and evidence of lesbian and gay people”: The Lesbian Herstory Archives, The ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives, and the ArQuives: Canada’s LGBTQ2+ Archives. Finally, via a post by Robin Sampson, Community Archivist at Norfolk Record Office, were training videos for community archive groups on the Norfolk Record Office's YouTube channel:
That brings me to libraries! The most prominent story I have seen in the past week comes from LGBTQ Nation, of all places. In this story, a reactionary figure running for Congress, Derrick Van Orden, who is endorsed by the former traitorous president, reportedly threatened staff, like Kerrigan Trautsch, at a Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin library, for a pride display. In order to disrupt it, he got a library card, checked out every book in the display, declaring the books were “incorrect,” even though some were fictional, and even told a staff member they didn’t have a voice. He later called one of the books (a fiction about Mike Pence) "a clear attempt to paint Republicans as being not inclusive." his actions ultimately led to those who supported Van Orden to come to a board meeting of the library, complaining about the “LGBTQ agenda.” Later, Van Orden basically said the library staff were lying about what happened. Of course, Van Orden never apologized for this incident. Anyway, the major lesson I take from this is that libraries are NOT neutral spaces, but shaped by those who work there, the communities they serve, and those outside of that, at minimum. Libraries are affected by what goes on in the world around them. Anyone with sense that doesn’t believe the library “neutrality” mentality will recognize this. Beyond this, there was a post by Hannah Spring Pfeifer, a junior fellow at LOC, and an article in the San Francisco Examiner noting how staff shortages are hampering re-openings of San Francisco’s public libraries, as the library system has 141 employment openings, comprising about 15% of its workforce!
In other library-related matters was the temporary closing of a San Benito County Library after “a group of unmasked protesters entered the library” and refused to put on their masks or leave, an article in American Libraries asking if libraries can protect themselves from copyright suits, an interview with Greg Lucas, the California State Librarian, the Indianapolis Public Library CEO, Jackie Nytes, stepping down following discussion of racism and a toxic work environment, and growing momentum to eliminate bias and racism in the Dewey Decimal System. Otherwise there were stories about Indiana’s first Black librarian, Lillian Haydon Childress Hall, who managed two library branches, and how COVID has forced us to think of how library services can be offered to people with disabilities. Last but not least are two articles, one in Library Journal and another in MarketWatch, about calculating the value of library labor and public library. Of course, I can’t neglect to mention a post by Jennifer Snoek-Brown on Reel Librarians about banned books in Beautiful Creatures and April Hathcock, back in January 2017, writing about an “amazing moment of solidarity and activism with trusted, like-minded individuals who care…about fighting oppression in all its forms” at an ALA meeting, and problems of mainstream activism.
Then there is genealogy! Smithsonian noted how newly digitized Freedmen’s Bureau records help Black Americans trace their ancestry in an Ancestry database. I checked the database and there are 359 results for “Packard.” Are any of those people related to those in my family? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t mind looking into it to find out for sure. There were also posts about the discovery of the Essex County Massachusetts 1810 census, an attempt to get complete details on one person, and seven resources to search for someone’s maiden name. I also liked reading about the dúchas.ie folklore collection, solving genealogy mysteries step-by-step, tackling several genealogy projects on the fly, an online finding aid of French genealogy research, the value of fire insurance maps to genealogists, and Becky McCreary, member of Southern Arizona Genealogy Society, writing “genealogy doesn’t stop when you type ‘The End.’ There is always more to the story,” which is something I’ll agree with. I was interested by Avril Bell’s article in Genealogy about critical family history, which “illuminates societal relations of inequality through focusing on the experiences and trajectories of particular families,” with a focus on “unequal relations between white settler colonizers and indigenous communities within Aotearoa, New Zealand.”
On a connected note, is history, more generally. I came across William Hogeland writing about Bacon’s Rebellion, a podcast called AHR Interview which “presents brief discussions with historians whose work has appeared in the American Historical Review,” a new Oregon Trail game which features playable indigenous characters, and History Factory talking about the release of the first commercially produced digital computer in June 1951: the UNIVAC I, which correctly predicted “President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s landslide victory,” and was praised for the “success and accuracy of complex calculations.” It was also interesting to read about British attempts to convince troops in South Asia during World War II to eat “dehydrated whale meat,” reflections on disease and Indigenous communities, how Indigenous peoples in the South America and Georgia (the Creek) “raised chickens prior to the arrival of Spanish and French explorers in the 1500s,” with the post explaining the types of chickens there, when they came to the Americas, and so on, and History Factory writing about the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland, Ohio. There were also interesting stories such as history professor Tiya Miles arguing that the history of Black women is told in their handiwork, a short film which chronicles the lives of Ellen and William Craft, who disguised themselves to find freedom in 1848, and the history of the Portland Clinic, “Oregon’s oldest, private multi-specialty medical group in practice.”
There was also an article about how the 19th Amendment complicated the status and role of women in Hawai’i, as some women submitted their names for political positions but did not realize that “the right to vote didn’t automatically guarantee that women could also hold office,” since those in U.S. territories could “could vote in territorial elections…[but] not vote in presidential elections”! This is connected to the overthrow of the Hawaiian constitutional monarchy, which had more than 80 embassies worldwide by 1890, in a U.S.-backed coup in 1893, which deposed Queen Liliʻuokalani, and led to a provisional government led by Sanford Dole. The island became a U.S. territory, i.e., a colony, after Grover Cleveland left office, in 1898.
[dead video link: https[:]//youtu.be/gH5TJ5JTTFw] (remove the brackets) (note: it was active when this newsletter was originally published)
That brings me to a number of topics which don’t easily fit elsewhere in the other parts of this newsletter. There’s Hathcock rightly noting that “racism is everywhere. It is the norm. It is the foundation upon which every white colonializing country was built,” adding that White people, “by virtue of their race privilege, are racist,” an article in the New York Times about protests of the Chinatown museum by those who say it is supporting gentrification, and using “they” as a gender pronoun in communications. In science-related news are stories about a 'giant arc' stretching 3.3 billion light-years across the cosmos which shouldn't exist, the bond between Indigenous groups and bears in Canada, questions whether the world’s first space sweeper can make a dent at debris orbiting the Earth, and Russia seeing an increasing severity of wildfires in recent years because of rising summer temperatures and a historic drought. There’s also, in media-related news, the racism of the ‘hard-to-find’ qualified Black candidate trope and one user proposing that the cultural relevance of a film can be measured by “the number of fanfics on AO3…not the box office gross.” The latter noted that “fanfic writers are one small part of the wider pop culture conversation,” but it does note the foothold of some pop culture online. Related to this is Transformative Works and Cultures, a publication of the Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), with AO3 as a project of OTW, as Fanlore.
That brings me to the last part of this newsletter, illustrations from The Nib! They cover the beginning of psycho-pharamology, a loss of belief in America, the long war in Afghanistan, the ironies of Afghanistan, the border wall in Arizona in extreme disrepair (as would be expected), pundits blaming others and not themselves for the Afghanistan war, and a fictionalized “wake” for Afghanistan featuring George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Obama, the former traitorous President, and Biden.
That’s all for this week! Due to some prior commitments, Next week’s newsletter will be a double issue of two newsletters which would usually come out on 9/5 and 9/12. As such, the newsletter will come out on either the 9th or 10th of next week. With that, I hope you all have a productive week ahead!
- Burkely