Archives, heritage, and history

Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 193-206

  Lowenthal, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84894934816     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Chapter

References (170)

1. Sumerian inscription quoted in Naissance de l'écriture: Cunéiformes et hiéroglyphes, ed. Béatrice André-Leicknam and Christiane Ziegler (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1982) 326.
2. Elisabeth Kaplan, "We Are What We Collect, We Collect What We Are: Archives and the Construction of Identity," American Archivist 63 (2000): 144 147.
3. Richard Cohen, "Buy Patriotic Socks at the Library," International Herald Tribune 15 February 2001.
4. Sarah Bird's Alamo House: Women without Men, Men without Brains (New York: Norton, 1986)
5. mocks Lyndon B. Johnson's presidential library as the repository not of secret letters from Ho Chi Minh and "blueprints of the Great Society" but of copies of brownie recipes and public responses to the time LBJ lifted his dog by her ears (Arlene Schmuland, "The Archival Image in Fiction: An Analysis and Annotated Bibliography" American Archivist 62 [1999]: 50).
6. José Saramago, All the Names (London: Harvill 1999).
7. Cited in William J. Miller, "Archives, Archivists, and Society" American Archivist 61 (1998): 259.
8. Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Polity 1987).
9. Donald R. Kelley, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) 207-8.
10. Quoted in Naissance de l'écriture 336.
11. Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge (London: Polity, 2000) 139-46. Vatican refusal in 2001 to allow full archival access led a historians' commission to suspend its study of the Church's role in the Holocaust.
12. Krzysztof Pomian, "Les Archives: Du Trésor des chartes au Caran," in Pierre Nora, Les lieux de mémoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-92) III:
13. Les France 3:
14. De l'archive à l'emblème 181-90;
15. Michel Duchein, "The History of European Archives and the Development of the Archival Profession in France" American Archivist 55:1 (winter 1992): 14-25;
16. Simone Balayé, La Bibliothèque Nationale des origines à 1800 (Geneva: Droz 1988);
17. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading (New York: Penguin, 1996) 239-40.
18. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869; Cambridge: University Press, 1960) 210;
19. Aldous Huxley, "On the Charms of History and the Future of the Past," in his Music at Night and Other Essays (1931; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1950) 190.
20. David Vincent, The Culture of Secrecy: Britain, 1832-1998 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) details the crumbling of public trust as growing erosion of privacy accompanies persisting secrecy in government.
21. Geoffrey Stilwell, quoted in Christopher Koch, "Archival Days-An Afterword," in Tasmanian Insights: Essays in Honour of Geoffrey Thomas Stilwell, ed. Gillian Winter (Hobart: State Library of Tasmania, 1992), 230. Only lately have Tasmanian gentry begun to treasure rather than trash archival evidence of lowly origins. Enthralled by records of low-life forebears, one well-born young man told his father, who turned pale. "Yes, my boy, that's all very well; but you must never let the aunts know" (Geoffrey Stilwell, personal communication 1977).
22. Athan G. Theoharis, "Introduction," 12, and "The Freedom of Information Act versus the FBI," 30, in A Culture of Secrecy: The Government versus the Public's Right to Know, ed. Athan G. Theoharis (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas 1998).
23. Page Putnam Miller, "Why We Can't Read Our Own Mail: Access to the Records of the Department of State," in Culture of Secrecy, ed. Theoharis 207-8.
24. Philip Aftergood, Federation of American Scientists, quoted in Elisabeth Bumiller, "Bush Orders a 3-Year Delay in Opening Secret Documents," New York Times 28 March 2003.
25. Celestine Bohlen, "Whose History Is It, Anyway? The Public's or the Officials'?" New York Times 24 February 2002;
26. Bruce Craig, "Records Withdrawn from Public Access" American Historical Association Perspectives 40:5 (May 2002): 16;
27. Bruce Craig, "State Secrets, Advisory Committees, and the CIA" American Historical Association Perspectives 42:2 (February 2004): 14-16;
28. Bruce Craig, "Combating Government Secrecy-An Update" American Historical Association Perspectives 42:7 (October 2004): 15-16.
29. On Canadian culture-ofsecrecy issues, see Jay Gilbert, "Access Denied in The Access to Information Act and Its Effects on Public Records Creators" Archivaria 49 (spring 2000): 84-123.
30. Quotes in Eric Lichtblau, "Material Given to Congress in 2002 Is Now Classified," New York Times, 20 May 2004 A18;
31. "Emerging Threats: Overclassification and Pseudo-Classification, " congressional subcommittee hearing, 2 March 2005, reported in National Coalition for History, Washington Update 11:9 4 March 2005.
32. For an overview, see Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York: Norton 2004).
33. Anthony Burton and Keith Mathieson, quoted in Alex Wade, "Everything You Want To Know," The Times (London), 24 August 2004 T2: 23.
34. Geoffrey Humble, "Out of Harm's Way," letter, The Times (London) 29 July 2004.
35. Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (London: Allen Lane 2002);
36. Martin Drury, "The Restoration of Calke Abbey" Journal of the Royal Society of Arts 136 (1988): 497.
37. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (New York 1889);
38. David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 63-66.
39. Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953) 310-19;
40. Paul E. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959) 4. Such documents were not intended for archival perpetuity but for burial in consecrated ground.
41. Pierre Nora, "Entre mémoire et histoire," in Lieux de mémoire, I: La République (1984) xxv-xxviii.
42. Daniel Boorstin, "The Enlarged Contemporary" (Reith Lectures, 1975)
43. The Listener, 11 December 1975 788;
44. John Carlin, "Records Everywhere but How Are They Going to Survive?" The Record 5:1 (September 1998): 1-3.
45. Diane Vogt-O'Connor, "Archives-A Primer for the 21st Century," Cultural Resource Management 22:2 (1999): 7;
46. "Clogging the Archives," International Herald Tribune 1 April 1998.
47. See also Abby Smith, The Future of the Past: Preservation in American Research Libraries (Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources 1999).
48. Museum of London director Simon Thurley, quoted in Nigel Hawkes, "Archives Are Bursting as Past Catches up with Present," The Times (London), 20 March 1998 11.
49. See also Simon Tait, "Too Much Stuff? Disposal from Museums," The Times (London) 17 November 2003.
50. Robert Burton, "Anatomy of Melancholy" (1621)
51. quoted in Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 36-37;
52. Denis Diderot, "Encyclopaedie" (1751-52)
53. quoted in Daniel Rosenberg, "Early Modern Information Overload" Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 1.
54. Rosenberg, "Early Modern Information Overload" 9.
55. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979);
56. James J. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word from Papyrus to Cyberspace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 70 90.
57. Kurt Kleiner, "Search Engines Can't Keep Up," New Scientist, 19 July 1999 11;
58. "Brain Drain" and "No Stopping the Megabytes," The Times (London), November 1 2003.
59. Neil Postman, Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future (New York: Viking, 1999) 89-92.
60. Geoffrey J. Giles, "Archivists and Historians: An Introduction," in Archivists and Historians: The Crucial Partnership, ed. Geoffrey J. Giles (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute 1996).
61. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel" (1941)
62. in his Collected Fictions (New York: Penguin, 1998) 112-18;
63. Manguel, History of Reading 292.
64. Stanislaw Lem, The Cyberiad (1967; New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1985).
65. Georg Simmel, "The Concept and Tragedy of Culture," in Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1997) 73;
66. originally published in Logos 2 (1911-12).
67. Xerox ad in Microform Review, July 1976
68. quoted in Nicholson Baker, Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper (New York: Random House, 2001) 31.
69. Robert Darnton, "The Great Book Massacre," New York Review of Books, 26 April 2001 16.
70. Baker, Double Fold 54;
71. Nicholson Baker, "Discards," in The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber (London: Chatto and Windus, 1996) 157.
72. John H. Ottemiller, "The Selective Book Retirement Program at Yale," Yale University Library Gazette 34:2 (October 1959)
73. quoted in Baker, Double Fold 88-89.
74. A more recent and benign glimpse of book conservation at Yale is given by Jonathan Spence ("Save That Book!" American Historical Association Perspectives 42:8 [November 2004]: 3-5).
75. T. Coraghessan Boyle, "Filthy with Things," New Yorker, 15 February 1993 76-87.
76. Not all share this view. Which imagined scenario promises a wiser future: one where every document created is kept and can be promptly retrieved, or one where a neutron bomb has destroyed (only) all record repositories? No one has polled responses to the query posed by Leonard Rapport twenty years ago ("No Grandfather Clause: Reappraising Accessioned Records" American Archivist 44 [1981]: 150;
77. but see the demurral by Karen Benedict, "Invitation to a Bonfire" American Archivist 47 [1984]: 43-49).
78. Johannes Trithemius, De laude scriptorum (1492)
79. cited in O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word 81.
80. Richard Morrison, [untitled], The Times (London), 10 May 2001 7.
81. H. R. Woudhuysen, "Vandals of Colindale," Times Literary Supplement, 18 August 2000 14.
82. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word 48.
83. A 1986 laser disc version of the Domesday Book is already unfathomable because the computers made specially to read it have become obsolete (ArtWatch UK Newsletter 15 [Spring 2002]: 21).
84. For a summary review, see Susan S. Lazinger, Digital Preservation and Metadata: History, Theory, Practice (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited/Greenwood, 2001) 5-16.
85. Brewster Kahle, "Setting the Stage," in Time and Bits: Managing Digital Continuity, ed. Margaret MacLean and Ben H. Davis (Santa Monica, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Trust, 1998) 39;
86. Diane Vogt-O'Connor "Is the Record of the 20th Century at Risk?" Cultural Resource Management 22:2 (1999): 21;
87. Paul Andrews, "The Virtual Dead Live on in Museum of Web Failures," International Herald Tribune, 25 May 2001 13;
88. Jim McCue, "Can You Archive the Net?" The Times (London) 29 April 2002;
89. Shannon Henry, "Dot-Com Era's Froth to Be Kept for Posterity," International Herald Tribune 29 June 2002;
90. Roy Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era" American Historical Review 108 (2003): 735-62.
91. Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand, quoted in Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999) 84.
92. Gerhard L. Weinberg, "The National Archives and Records Administration: Goals for the Future," in Historians and Archivists: Essays in Modern German History and Archival Policy, ed. George O. Kent (Fairfax, Va.: George Mason University Press, 1991) 319.
93. Katie Hafner, "A Preservation Jam for the Digital Age," International Herald Tribune, 11 November 2004 18.
94. James Billington, quoted in Joel Achenbach, "Is the Information Age Making Us Any Wiser?" International Herald Tribune 16 March 1999.
95. Baker, Double Fold 39.
96. Tina Brown, "Even with the Washington Marine Corps Band, Star Power Is Lacking in the Bush Administration," The Times (London), 1 May 2003 T2:3.
97. O'Donnell, Avatars of the Word 95.
98. Sebastian Mallaby, "Libertarians No Longer Rule the Net," International Herald Tribune 4 September 2000.
99. A 2000 federal ruling made it illegal to browse certain electronic documents, depriving digital information users of rights open to users of printed data in reference libraries (Federal Register, 27 October 2000
100. cited in American Historical Association Perspectives 39:1 [January 2001]: 19-20).
101. Mike Featherstone, "Archiving Cultures" British Journal of Sociology 51 (2000): 178.
102. McCue "Can You Archive the Net?"
103. Rosenzweig, "Scarcity or Abundance?" 737 744.
104. Darlene Roth, "The Mechanics of a History Business" Public Historian 1:3 (spring 1979): 36;
105. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) 515.
106. On business destruction of potentially sensitive corporate information, see Gord Rabchuk, "Life after the "Big Bang': Business Archives in an Era of Disorder" American Archivist 60 (1997): 40.
107. Stephen O'Regan, "Maori Control of the Maori Heritage"
108. David J. Butts, ""Nga tukemata: Nga taonga o Ngati Kahungunu' (The Awakening: The Treasures of Ngati Kahungunu)," in The Politics of the Past, ed. Peter Gathercole and David Lowenthal (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 95-106 107-17;
109. Evelyn Wareham, ""Our Own Identity, Our Own Taonga, Our Own Coming Back': Indigenous Voices in New Zealand Record-Keeping," Archivaria 52 (fall 2001): 41-42.
110. Stephen Farrell, "Collectors Blamed for Looted Antiquities," The Times (London) 13 March 1997;
111. Colin Renfrew, Loot, Legitimacy, and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology (London: Duckworth, 2000), 30-31 78.
112. Phil Cohen, "Totems and Taboos," New Scientist, 29 August 1998 5.
113. Linda Shopes, "Institutional Review Boards Have a Chilling Effect on Oral History" American Historical Association Perspectives 38:6 (September 2000): 54-57.
114. In September 2003, the U.S. Office for Human Research Protection excluded most oral history research funded by the Department of Health and Human Services from IRB review requirements; other federal agencies were expected to follow suit; Yet many university IRBs continue to scrutinize and vet oral history research (American Historical Association Perspectives 41:9 [December 2003]: 13 22; 42:6 [September 2004]: 9; and 42:9 [December 2004]: 11-12).
115. Pomian, "Les Archives: Du Trésor des chartes au Caran," 171-75 222.
116. Frank G. Burke, "The Future Course of Archival Theory in the United States" American Archivist 44 (1981): 40-46;
117. Helen Wood, "The Fetish of the Document: An Exploration of Attitudes towards Archives," in New Directions in Archival Research, ed. Margaret Proctor and C. P. Lewis (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Centre for Archival Studies, 2000) 20-48.
118. Sarah Shoenfeld, "An American Treasure, the Way It Was," New York Times 23 September 2003.
119. Bret Schulte, "How They Keep History Alive," Washington Post 6 July 2002.
120. Richard Morrison, [untitled], The Times (London) 29 June 1999.
121. Posthumous copyright under French law and European Court of Justice rulings has added thirty or more years of putative life to the estates of artists and writers, such as Charles Péguy and Alain-Fournier, who died untimely (Julian Barnes, "Letter from Paris," Times Literary Supplement, 21 December 2001 13).
122. On the almost limitless bloating of copyright, see Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House 2001).
123. Nora Lieux de mémoire;
124. Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, vol. 1
125. Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London: Verso 1994);
126. Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf 1991).
127. See also David Lowenthal, "Distorted Mirrors" History Today 44:2 (February 1994): 8-11;
128. David Lowenthal, "History and Memory" Public Historian 19 (1997): 31-39.
129. The politics of archival access, exclusion, sequestration, and destruction feature in two special issues of History of the Human Sciences, 11:4 (November 1998) and 12:2 (May 1999)
130. notably Richard Harvey Brown and Beth Davis-Brown, "The Making of Memory: The Politics of Archives, Libraries and Museums in the Construction of National Identity" 11:4 (1998): 17-32;
131. Wolfgang Ernst, "Archival Action: The Archive as ROM and Its Political Instrumentalization under National Socialism" 12:2 (1999): 13-34;
132. Michael Lynch, "Archives in Formation: Privileged Spaces, Popular Archives and Paper Trails" 12:2 (1999): 65-87.
133. Matthew Battles, Library: An Unquiet History (New York: Norton, 2003) 156-91;
134. James Raven, Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity (London: Palgrave 2004).
135. Siegfried Lenz, The Heritage (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) 458.
136. Vogt-O'Connor "Is the Record of the 20th Century at Risk?"
137. Donna Longo DiMichele, "The Archives and Special Collections of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation" Cultural Resource Management 22:2 (1999): 15-17.
138. Kaplan, "We Are What We Collect," 126 147.
139. William St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles, 3d rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 281-313;
140. William St Clair, "The Elgin Marbles: Questions of Stewardship and Accountability" International Journal of Cultural Property 8 (1999): 391-521.
141. St Clair, "The Elgin Marbles" 453-54.
142. St Clair, Lord Elgin and the Marbles 307-8;
143. St Clair, "The Elgin Marbles" 449.
144. Roland W. Force, Politics and the Museum of the American Indian: The Heye & the Mighty (Honolulu: Mechas, 1999), 120 239-43.
145. Jeff Benedict, Without Reservation: The Making of America's Most Powerful Indian Tribe and Foxwoods, the World's Largest Casino (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 99, 113-16, 118-23, 126-37 251-53.
146. Henry Taylor, The Statesmen (1836; Cambridge: Heffer, 1957) 65.
147. Jonathan Steinberg, "Gold, the Holocaust, and the Deutsche Bank," paper presented at the twelfth conference of the Australian Association for European History, Perth, Western Australia 6 July 1999.
148. See also Jonathan Steinberg, The Deutsche Bank and Its Gold Transactions during the Second World War (Munich: Beck 1999);
149. Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, "Giants Who Lie in the Shadow of the Swastika," The Times (London) 5 September 2000;
150. Richard J. Evans, "History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness" History and Theory 41 (2002): 327.
151. F. Gerald Ham, "Archival Strategies for the Post-Custodial Era" American Archivist 44 (1981): 207-16.
152. This issue is elaborated in David Lowenthal, "Dilemmas and Delights of Learning History," in Knowing, Teaching, and Learning History: National and International Perspectives, ed. Peter Stearns, Peter Seixas, and Sam Wineburg (New York: New York University Press, 2000) 64-82.
153. Alethea Hayter, "The Rise and Fall of Clio" (review of Carl Schorske, Thinking with History), Spectator, 18 July 1998 38.
154. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (London: Methuen 1930);
155. Raphael Samuel, "One in the Eye: 1066 and All That" (1990)
156. in his Island Stories: Unravelling Britain (London, 1998) 209-12.
157. Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (New York: Ballantine, 1994) 19-20.
158. Harry Belafonte interview by Mary Willis Modern Maturity 45:3 (May-June 2000): 87.
159. To the dismay of souvenir merchandisers, once-famed pop icons (Frank Sinatra, Janis Joplin, Bob Marley) remain in popular memory only briefly. Even Marilyn Monroe and James Dean are hardly known by today's young, who take no interest in legendary old-time celebrities (Jeffrey Zaslow, "Yesterday's Icon; Today's Nobody," Wall Street Journal 2 May 2002).
160. David Hochman, "In Searching We Trust," New York Times, 14 March 2004, Sunday Styles 1-2.
161. Ernst Gombrich, The Tradition of General Knowledge: Oration at the London School of Economics and Political Science (London: LSE, 1962), 11 21. Gombrich blamed this loss on academic overspecialization and dread of "smattering."
162. Robert Louis Stevenson, The Ebb-Tide (1894; London: Heinemann, 1912) 3.
163. Stella Rimington, "A Hidden National Asset: Archives Can Speak to Us across the Centuries," The Times (London), 2 December 2002 7.
164. Schmuland, "Archival Image" 42-45;
165. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 87-91.
166. Carolyn Steedman, "Something She Called a Fever: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust" American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1168-72;
167. Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2001).
168. George Perkins Marsh to Henry Charles Lea, 22 June and 1 August 1870, University of Pennsylvania Library Special Collections, Philadelphia; David Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of Conservation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000) 331.
169. Saramago, All the Names 7-9.
170. Derrida, Archive Fever 180.