Traipsing through the forbidden stacks, creating inclusive archives, genealogical mystery, the drug war, and beyond!
This week, as always, there will be various stories about archives, libraries, genealogy, history, and more, building upon some of the stories I talked about last week. Enjoy!
Hello everyone! I hope you had a good week. Other than having a review of an intergalactic library in an animated series published on Tuesday, I was excited to watch an episode of The Owl House this weekend titled “Through the Looking Glass Ruins,” which I mentioned in my June 19 and May 23 newsletters. A screenshot of that episode is shown above this paragraph. Even though the original description implied that the episode would be primarily about the library, and the actual episode only treated the focus on the library as one of two stories, I still loved the episode regardless. Amity and Luz travel to the “Forbidden Stacks” of the Bonesborough Public Library to find a book by a human who came to Boiling Isles before Luz ended up there by accident. By the end, Amity and Luz strengthen their bond as friends, and companions, after Luz gets Amity’s job as a librarian back. That’s all I’m going to say about that episode, without giving away too much! With that, let me move onto the rest of my newsletter.
This week, there was a lot of archives-related news. In an update related to the departure of Maura Porter from the JFK Library as the lead Declassification Archivist, which I talked about last week, is a form letter from Joe Biden thanking her for 36 years of service. In a comment above the letter, Porter says that some at NARA were “secretly…thrilled” at her leaving. If that’s the case, it is terrible. On a more positive note, the most recent issue of The American Archivist was published earlier this week. Some of its articles highlight the limits of digitization of archival collections with occasional weak connections “between the virtual images and the physical materials they represent,” digital archives, mental health archives, and many other important topics. Moving on, there is an upcoming meeting of two SAA sections on June 12 at 2 PM Central Time (1 PM EST), the Women’s Collections Section (WCS) and Diverse Sexuality and Gender Section (DGSS). It will feature Eirini Melena Karoutsos presenting on the creating connections “through digital environments and…crossroads of access, restrictions, and queer digital spaces,” and Jordi Padilla-Delgado on approaching “aspects and points of interest about…[links] between institutional archives and community archives,” looking for LGBTQ+ memory within both. At the same time as the WCS/DGCS meeting, is a discussion of death in the archives, focusing on “literal, metaphorical, and affective presence(s) of death in the archives,” specifically noting the “complexities of access and use in archives that document death, and epistemologies of death and dying in community collections.” It will later be available on the YouTube channel of Archival Education and Research Initiative after the discussion ends, if you miss the original discussion.
On Friday, it was announced that lawmakers in Congress, specifically Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Don Young of Alaska, were proposing a bill to amend the Federal Assets Sale and Transfer (FASTA) Act by requiring “the federal government to consult with any federally recognized Indian tribe who might be affected by the potential sale of federal real estate,” which would prevent the sale of NARA’s Seattle facility in the future. The bill is titled “Assuring Regular Consultation to Have Indigenous Voices Effectively Solicited Act” which stands for the ARCHIVES Act. Jaypal noted that if the bill passes, it will be a step toward allocating the resources for the facility, like deferred maintenance and other needed improvements. Apart from all of this, Kate Hujda, Curator of Manuscripts at the Minnesota Historical Society, wrote about rethinking on-site appraisal (i.e. archival selection), and an archivist, Dorothy Berry, asked why physical copies of information are kept if no one is allowed to see it. Another piece relevant to archives in more ways than one, is a post by April Hathcock, who I talked about in my newsletter last week as resigning from the ALA because the institution, she argues, is ingrained with institutional racism. She says that while she supports openness, the “uncritical act of opening all things to all people is in and of itself an act of aggression and oppression” when it is “taking the works of the marginalized…and forcing it into (uncompensated) availability without their express consent.” This leads her to conclude that “openness is great, but like everything else, it’s only great when entered with full consent.” That opinion makes perfect sense to me and I’m not sure why anyone would disagree.
That brings me to libraries. NPR had an interesting review of a novel about the personal librarian of J.P. Morgan, titled The Personal Librarian. As it turns out, this story is real, and the librarian, Belle da Costa Greene, “ran the Morgan Library for forty-three years”! While she is well-known and prominent, she is somewhat controversial for her decision to claim she was Portuguese, when she was actually Black, resulting in her choosing to be “White passing.” This is when light-skinned Black people, not wanting to be discriminated against or for other reasons, live as White people. Some saw her actions as a betrayal, while others believed it was courageous. Moving on from her story, in the past week I came across Library of Congress blogs about: the release of 30,000 bills and resolutions from 1799 to 1873, the presentation of the 4th annual Summer Movies on the Lawn which are presented on Thursday evenings “at sundown between July 8 and Aug. 5 on the north lawn of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building,” description of Westinghouse works at the 1904 World’s Fair, and the life of George Westinghouse himself. Furthermore, the Association of Research Libraries released a brief on Section 230 of Communications Decency Act, a “1996 law that protects internet service providers and internet users from liability for content shared by third parties, and for content moderation practices,” the Law Library of Congress recently launched their improved website, law.gov, and the Bloomington PD in the spotlight for a tweet about supposed “thefts” from Little Free Libraries, which doesn’t make a lick of sense! Other than Hathcock’s post about her challenge of “the right of the privileged white male to speak his mind all over the place,” there was a post by Estefania Velez, Library Information Assistant, Woodlawn Heights Library, part of the New York Public Library about 15 books to celebrate disability pride on Disability Month. This was wonderful as I learned about the month from this post and the book selections were diverse and fascinating enough to make you want to read each of those books listed.
Just as valuable are stories on genealogy topics. Many are glad to hear about the re-opening of the Family History Library run by FamilySearch in Utah which closed in March 2020 due to the pandemic. It has been remodeled and changed, with a phrased re-opening which began on July 6 with limited hours, then hours expanding from the existing hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. I was excited to learn that new records were added online to the database of the Official Historical Archive of Parma as many of my ancestors, the Baccarinis, Lanfranchis, Bevilacquas, and many others, lived in Northern Italy. Additionally, some talked about Black genealogy and asked what bankruptcy records can tell us, while Jennifer Mendelsohn wrote a perspective in Washington Post about “records from before the Nazis are easier to find than many people realize,” and MEAWW noted how the complex lineage of Vanessa Williams “sparked a million Google searches.” Most valuable of all was a post by a White female genealogist named Beth Wylie back in August 2017 on “the complexities of having slave owning ancestors.” She noted, rightly, that a “false narrative has been created to intentionally cover up our most shameful moments and to romanticize a history that never really occurred,” adding that people should delve deeper into slavery, exposing the roles of our ancestors in this institution, not putting them up on pedestals, but “recognize they were flawed humans.” This is still a vital post for genealogists.
With that, let’s talk about history. As always, I enjoyed various articles in Smithsonian magazine about various topics, such as: possible changes to a gathering place in the state of Georgia of the KKK (Stone Mountain Park), an examination of how bad Nero was as a Roman ruler, the discovery of an old Vincent Van Gogh painting, the ancient history of eating kosher, and an Ancient Roman bath complex unearthed at a Spanish beach. The same can be said about articles in the Journal of the American Revolution focusing on: William Babcock and his inaccurate pension application and the Stockbridge Indian ambassadors’ dangerous peace mission to Canada in 1775, at the start of the Revolutionary War. I liked reading about artifacts from New Acadia in the 1600s and 1700s being unearthed, the history behind the 1781 painting “Thaïs of Athens with Torch” by Joshua Reynolds, and Sophie Michell, a death and crime historian, looking for information about the Ampthill workhouse riot in May 1835 in England. While there was an effort to draw hope from the Women Writing History Project, some are attempting to ban LGBTQ history in schools. In the latter case, the American Historical Association opposes any efforts to “restrict the teaching of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer history in elementary, middle, and high schools.” They have also called for “increased funding for the US Department of Education’s international and foreign language education programs.”
Finally, there are articles on topics which don’t neatly fit into existing categories of this newsletter but are still worth mentioning, nonetheless. The story of the suspension of Sha’Carrie Richardson which I talked about in last week’s newsletter for smoking marijuana before a qualifying race continues. In response to her suspension, Biden coldly declared “the rules are the rules and everybody knows what the rules were going in. Whether they should remain the rules is a different issue, but the rules are the rules.” This unsympathetic statement puts her at odds with those who said she should compete. Despite this, there is news that the White House is reportedly pushing the World Anti-Doping Agency to loosen “restrictions on the use of cannabis by athletes” while over 500,000 have signed a petition asking for Richardson to be reinstated to the US Olympic team, echoed by the Marijuana Policy Project and others. Meanwhile, Richardson has said she knows what she did, what she is “supposed to do and am allowed not to do, and I still made that decision,” adding “I’m not making an excuse. I’m not looking for any empathy in my case.” In unrelated news, some criticized the plateauing of vaccination rates in the U.S. with some wrongly believing the pandemic is over (it isn’t) and aren’t paying attention anymore, noted the repatriation of over 1,300 cultural artifacts to Costa Rica, the removal of Confederate statues from the U.S. Capitol (and recently the Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville), and the announcement that the remaining fence around the U.S. Capitol will be removed in the coming days. Some pointed out the unveiling of Chicago’s first monument to a Black woman (Ida B. Wells) and one person asking whether COVID-19 will disappear from public view like HIV/AIDS. In the case of the latter, I doubt it will be ignored and not talked about in public discourse, especially with the growing number of people refusing to take the vaccine, even though it is to their own peril.
Then there’s Hathcock’s post about the fears “white people have about screwing up when getting involved in race work” (i.e. anti-racist action). She argues that White people will screw up at some point, deserving the hurt, frustration, and anger of people of color toward them. She goes on to say that those who do this antiracist work will learn from their mistakes, experience fulfillment and joy in this work, but that this work is “not for the faint of heart,” as you will have the “comfy warmth of your white privilege and ignorance stripped away and laid bare.” A post worth revisiting, for sure, even though it was written in April 2016, over five years ago.
Last but not least are illustrations from The Nib about an Exxon lobbyist saying they have 11 Senators in their pocket, the problematic “game truck” operated by the NYPD which will likely keep your fingerprints in a hidden police database, and the disturbing decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Mast v. Fillmore to allow an Amish community who claimed that septic systems violate their beliefs! This decision builds upon the recent ruling justices made in Fulton v. Philadelphia that backed the right of a Catholic foster agency to reject LGBTQ+ adoptees as a violation of their religious beliefs. What I noted in my June 19 newsletter is still relevant, in that this case further strengthens the so-called “religious freedom” rights of religious institutions to be honored by government entities in the years ahead, which is troubling, to say the least.
No one should be applauding this decision. Rather, any reasonable person should be worried about the growing legal power of religious entities in this country, which is nothing new. In 2012, the court ruled that the selection of religious leaders by religious organizations is not bound by federal anti-discrimination laws. Two years later, the court ruled that privately held for-profit religious corporations are exempt from regulations their owners object to, in the infamous Hobby Lobby case. In 2017, the court required a state to, in the words of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, “directly fund a religious organization in a manner that assisted the spread of its religious message and views.” In 2018, the court narrowly decided that an anti-discrimination order from the Colorado Civil Rights Commission against a Colorado baker who refused to make a cake for a gay couple was unconstitutional. In 2020, the court had a rash of decisions, whether preventing state scholarships for private schools to discriminate against such schools, giving religious organizations the power to dismiss employees for various reasons in the words of the dissenting justices, allowing said organizations to opt out of the mandate in the Affordable Care Act for birth control for so-called “religious” or “moral” reasons, and stating that litigants can, at times, obtain monetary damages against federal officials if they violate the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. All of these is not outweighed by the dismissal of the lawsuit from Arlene's Flowers, “a florist who wouldn’t furnish flowers for a same-sex wedding.” What is mentioned above is, obviously, not all the cases out there, but is some of the ones that have expanded said rights.
That’s all for this week. I hope you all have a good week ahead!
- Burkely