Privacy and the past : research, law, archives, ethics / Susan C. Lawrence.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lawrence, Susan C., author.

Series:

Critical issues in health and medicine

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Privacy, Right of--United States.

Privacy, Right of.

Historians--Legal status, laws, etc.

Historians.

History--Research--Law and legislation.

United States.

History--Research--Law and legislation--United States.

History.

Historians--Legal status, laws, etc--United States.

Physical Description:

x, 169 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

New Brunswick, New Jersey : Rutgers University Press, [2016]

Summary:

"In 2006, a HIPAA Compliance Officer in a rural Iowa county wanted to shut down a graduate student's research on a manuscript register of those admitted to a poor farm in the nineteenth century. The reason? It contained sensitive health information that could affect the well-being of living county residents. The 2003 HIPAA Privacy Rule did, in fact, protect this document from historians' prying eyes. In Privacy and the Past, Susan C. Lawrence explores why she found this experience so troubling. In the process, she explores historians' ethical obligations to their research subjects, both the living and the dead. She queries the extent to which we do and should control access to information about people as historical actors and as unwitting participants in past events. She questions who gets to decide what is revealed and what is kept hidden in decades-old records. She examines laws and court cases, and tackles archives and archivists. She looks at how demands to maintain individual privacy both protect and erase the identities of people whose stories make up the historical record. She encourages historians to vigorously resist any expansion of regulatory language that extends privacy protections to the dead. This book offers a critical analysis of the ways that broad privacy concerns shape how and when historians can understand individuals' lives as they created our collective American past."-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction : The Historians, the County, and the Dead

Research, Privacy, and Federal Regulations

Historians, the First Amendment, and Invasion of Privacy

Archivists at the Gates

Managing Privacy : Historians at Work

Conclusion : Resistance.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 153-164) and index.

ISBN:

9780813574363

0813574366

OCLC:

930257361