Pop culture reviews, CIA covert ops, archival records, leaving the library profession dialog, and racism of the American populace
This week's "too long for email" newsletter will provide the latest news about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and more
Hello everyone! I hope you are all having a good week! I’ve been prolific, writing a post about the fictional library of George and Lance in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and asking whether Peridot, in one of my favorite series, Steven Universe, is an unintentional archivist, records management, or something else entirely. I wrote another review for Bubble Blabber. For The Geekiary I wrote several reviews. One was on the little-known indie animated series, Ollie & Scoops, which has a cat as one of its protagonists, and another about the comic, Odd Worlds. I was glad to see that the author of that webcomic said she was “super happy” to see a review of her webcomic. I wish her the best and hope to see more of her comics in the future. I also was pleased to see that the 1,824 document set from the NSA, CIA Covert Operations IV: The Eisenhower Years, 1953-1962, which “features thousands of declassified documents detailing the extremely active period of CIA clandestine missions throughout the Eisenhower presidency” is out, since it’s a set I worked on earlier this year! I especially worked on documents about the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala and the aftermath. With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter.
That brings me to archives. My colleagues at NSA highlighted a “declassified 1976 cable sent from Ambassador to Argentina, Robert Hill, to Acting Assistant Secretary of State Hewson Ryan…[which] warns against a potential meeting between Secretary Kissinger and Argentine military counterparts on the eve of the 1976 coup d’état against Isabel Perón as President of Argentina.” Otherwise, there were posts about a librarian who “helms efforts to make archival holdings accessible online” and hosts a radio show, an author who discussed how “feminist care ethics and collections as data research intersect in a digital humanities project,” community input for web archiving at small and rural libraries, and ethical approaches to youth data in historical web archives. There were additionally posts, such as Margot Note noting possible privacy concerns in archival records, Jennifer Snoek-Brown of Reel Librarians talked about the brief scenes in libraries and archives in the 2020 film Soul, especially noting the “soul archives” in the film, and another, from an archivist, about the story of the Tulsa Massacre in 1921 from archival records.
I enjoyed reading Kaye Lanning Minchew talk about an author who was once an archivist for 32 years, how a climate archive/record in Majorca can say something about “how sea level has risen significantly over the past 100 years after thousands of years of little change,” the importance of defining what records are, and the story, from archival records, of Madame Menaka and the Indian hockey team in Berlin in 1936. The same can be said about the Diplomatic Instructions, 1785-1906 and Consular Instructions, 1801-1834 records from the Department of State are now online and in the NARA catalog, SAA President Courtney Chartier talking about the value of strategic planning and a new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Work Plan, and putting the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials to work when “rearranging and inventorying the extensive photograph collection of the National Parks Service’s Southeast Archeological Center.” There were posts from the /r/Archivists subreddit about preserving a significant newspaper, favorite cloud-based software, referencing in catalogs, checking occurrences of dates, the best photo format for web diffusion, and materials to use for preserving records.
When it comes to libraries, there was interesting news in the past week. There was a letter by Wayne A. Wiegand which called out the ALA, as I noted on Twitter, “for whitewashing it's [sic] past problematic history, in an anti-racist statement, and calling for the ALA to establish a committee on racism.” Jasmine Lelis Clark had a thread about the “leaving the profession” dialog about those who are leaving the library profession, noting that those who eliminated benefits for library workers should be held accountable, stated that the trend for leaving the library profession trend is way of saying that people aren’t paid enough for the work they do, which is true. She concluded that librarianship was something many went into because “they liked its ideals (or didn’t hate them), the stakes were reasonable, the pay was more-or-less fine, & the drama was annoying at worst” but that changed, and people are protesting it. There were a plethora of responses and quote tweets to each of those tweets, which I am not going to summarize here, but I’d recommend you go through them all. Otherwise, I was intrigued to come across an American Libraries piece about decolonizing the catalog and antiracist description, interviewing Elizabeth Hobart, Staci Ross, Michelle Cronquist, and Kelly Farrell on this topic.
There are other stories about libraries which are worth noting. Jennifer Snoek-Brown shared reel librarian titles for December 2021 she has added to her blog, Reel Librarians, while We Here noted a four-week course they are offering about curating library exhibitions, and Mark Swenson talked about the cost of knowing our users. There were other assorted posts about librarians who serve youth in their communities, the “human library,” librarians and educators warning of organized book banning efforts, an improved library bringing joy of books to kids, and beach libraries. There was an always relevant post from April Hathcock, this one saying that some White professionals thought it was “too militant” to use the words “White supremacy,” adding that White people dislike the words racism, White supremacy, White privilege, or any reference to Whiteness. I’ll get more to that in the history section of this newsletter, which really shows those attitudes in full force.
On a different topic, the Library of Congress (LOC) had wonderful posts as always. They were about a 17th century Korean map of the world, tenement house committee maps, cotton mortgages and the Lehman Brothers, legal professions in Cambodia, “Pérouse”-ing the Pacific, and waiting with Jonathan Larson. What interested me more than these posts, was, as always, interviews with interns. This included an interview with Yunzhou Wang, a foreign law intern, and another with Jade Vaughan, one of the 2021 Music Division interns from the Archives, History and Heritage Advanced internship program. There were profiles of the remote metadata interns this past fall, specifically Heather Agnew, Julie Carlson, Elizabeth (Liz) Carter, Jamila Davey, Stephanie Duran, Krista Evilsizor, Brian Godfrey, Danielle Herring, Sabrina Holecko, Renée LaCapria-Harper, Rebecca Lemon, Sarah Lyons, Lucas Madrigal, Ivanna Moreno, Courtney Nomiyama, Gerald Perriman, Jill Pow, Hassna Ramadan, Hollan Read, Deborah Revzin, Hillary “Echo” Rue, Alya J. Sarna, Jericho Savage, Christinna Swearingen, Rebecca Vasquez, Mara Wessel, Stephanie Williams, and Reid E. Yaworski. Best of luck to all of them!
Having addressed some of the most important news about libraries, I’d like to move onto genealogy. Genealogy journal had an article on genealogy’s assumptions about written records and originality, along with others about topics such as: structural violence of schooling and development of the genealogical FamilySearch database. There were other scattered genealogy-related articles about connections between Georgia and Tipperary, Ireland, analyzing a complex challenge on a FamilySearch tree, finding a woman’s maiden name, the importance of a name, storytelling in Appalachia, and discussing family secrets with children. There were, again, more reviews of Kate Moore’s book about Elizabeth Packard, one of my ancestors.
We then come to history, the last section of this article before the end of this newsletter. The Civil Rights Movement Archive had a listing of public opinion polls on the movement from 1961 to 1969. Many are very disturbing. In May 1961, 61% of Americans disapproved of the actions of the Freedom Riders, 57% disapproved of sit-ins and claimed they would hurt Black people’s chances at integration. A few years later, 71% said they thought Martin Luther King, Jr. was moving at the right speed at getting equal rights for Black people, and many Black people said they would take part in a peaceful parade for that aim. At the same time, 60% said mass demonstrations by Black people supposedly “hurt” their cause, were unfavorable to the March on Washington, and felt riots by Black people in 1964 “hurt” their cause. Even worse was an October 1964 poll where 73% said that Black people should stop demonstrating, and even over 60% of Black people opposed school boycotts. Additionally, over 50% in March 1965 disapproved of clergy involving themselves in fighting for civil rights, wanted the demonstrations to be nonviolent, and almost 50% absurdly thought communists had been involved in the demonstrations. By December 1966, over 50% claimed that MLK was hurting the Black push for civil rights, said in January 1967 that Black people would be better off if “they would take advantage of the opportunities that have been made available rather than spending so much time protesting.” Almost 50% of Black folks in May 1969 said they would have taken part in a sit-in, a demonstration, and less than 50% said they would picket a store. However, over 70% said that “sit ins, demonstrations, picketing a store, stop buying at a store, going to jail” helped Black people “in their effort to win their rights.” Even so, many disapproved of Black students carrying guns on school campuses. Then, in June 1969, almost half of American men said that Black protesters are “looking for trouble”! This shows that anti-Black racism was very integrated into American society, even more than what some would like to admit.
There is much more than that one pdf. The Journal of American Revolution had articles about how race united the colonies and made the Declaration of Independence, the two sieges of Louisbourg, loyalist prisoners in the aftermath of Kings Mountain, how Ancient America is ignored, a review of a book on the Jewish world of Alexander Hamilton, how John Adams loved cider, and Major Robert Rogers and the American Revolution. Just as important was Paul Michael Warden’s article on yellow fever, the Antebellum Gulf South, and German immigration, the Mayflower compact and 17th century corporations (not the same as today’s corporations), and Nazis basing their elite schools on top British private schools, with a “blizzard of reciprocal exchanges between British and German schools” between 1934 and 1939. There were posts on child abandonment in England, 1741–1834, father role representations in the 1980s and the new millennium, and the fact that Johannes Gutenberg, was a source of printing, but “key innovations in what would become revolutionary printing technology began in east Asia, with work done by Chinese nobles, Korean Buddhists, and the descendants of Genghis Khan—and…their work began several centuries before Johannes Gutenberg was even born…Perhaps it should be Choe Yun-ui whose name we remember, not Gutenberg’s.” The same article says that “the fantastical idea that Gutenberg alone invented the printing press ignores an entire continent and several centuries of relevant efforts and makes no effort to understand how or why technology might have spread.” The commenters are moderately to extremely hostile to the article, but I thought it was an interesting read.
There are articles in the Smithsonian magazine, whether on bison in Canada, the vis-o-matic in the 1950s, a 18th century watercolor of a Black woman, bringing the forgotten history of Black firefighting to life with records and stories, a behind the scenes look at the new National Museum of the American Latino, the split a the 1977 Conference on Women’s Rights which continues to have ramifications, and reviving Indigenous food cultures. There were many additional articles on topics such as Black classical music composers, myths of the term “crusader,” scientific history of glass, archaeologists coming upon a map of the capital of the Mongolian empire, Berlin memorials which honor Black Holocaust victims, and climate change as the culprit in the collapse of Ancient Chinese culture.
There are articles which don’t fit neatly into the other parts of this newsletter. This includes a Teen Vogue article about the Boys' love genre, also known as yaoi, described as a queer fantasy which “chooses what to take or ignore from reality and how to incorporate real positives or negatives into the fantasy world,” and another about Barbados on the verge of planning a heritage district on transatlantic slavery. There were posts by Stitch about the importance of critically consuming media and not following the lead of those think that such criticism is hooey, along with her links on various subjects like Whiteness inherent in Lord of the Rings, debates about language to use to respect disabled people, framing fandom history, how Marvel is courting K-Culture, the story of Nine Mae McKinney, one of the earliest Black female stars in Hollywood, the fast food industry’s continuing pursuit to get Black people to buy into their products, and why people hate celebrities.
Apart from this, Al Jazeera noted that Biden called for intellectual property waivers on COVID vaccines while WTO negotiations are “deadlocked over a proposal by India and South Africa to waive intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19 vaccines and supplies,” with the E.U., UK, and Switzerland opposing that, and some criticizing the U.S. for not doing enough to provide vaccines to poorer parts of the world. Anime News Network reported that music from the popular Macross series will be available in November 2022, while others talked about human oversight of A.I. systems, how China’s imperial legacies are creating a new Chinese identity, the possibility of a Futurama reboot, trivia for the upcoming Adventure Time Fionna and Cake spinoff, impact of socioeconomic class on family life, and Disney characters which should get their own spin-offs. Hathcock, on the other hand, wrote about visiting Africa as a Black person, sometimes seeing neo-colonialism and White supremacy.
Smithsonian magazine has articles about the U.S. returning more than 900 artifacts to Mali, the world’s first “living robots” now able to reproduce, an analysis stating that the Arctic could become dominated by rain instead of snow within decades, a look inside the nests of prairie songbirds (which are on the decline), a new species of dinosaur unearthed in Chile, astronomers confirming an elusive third type of supernova, the Hubble Telescope’s photos of the solar system and outer planets.
There, as always, wonderful illustrations from The Nib, either about a Black people being called the n-word, how suffragists succeeded in the pandemic, family reunion, Teddy Roosevelt statue finding a home in North Dakota, the history of meatless meat, the history of the conflict in Palestine, the faultiness of self-care at times, payment processors cracking down on pornographic material, and changing seasons. Others focused on the not-so-secret nukes of Israel, story of person who claimed there was election fraud in 2020 voted twice, the problems with depending on the courts for “justice,” weak action on climate change, less popular gods and goddesses, post-pandemic fantasies, and people living in lands of delusion.
That’s all for this week! Hope you all have a productive week ahead!
- Burkely