Archives, documentation, and institutions of social memory : essays from the Sawyer Seminar / edited by Francis X. Blouin Jr. and William G. Rosenberg.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Blouin, Francis X., editor.

Rosenberg, William G., editor.

Michigan Publishing (University of Michigan), publisher.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Archives.

Documentation.

Memory--Social aspects.

Memory.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (ix, 502 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2010, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, artifacts of culture, and places of uncovering, archives provide tangible evidence of memory for individuals, communities, and states, as well as defining memory institutionally within prevailing political systems and cultural norms. By assigning the prerogatives of record keeper to the archivist, whose acquisition policies, finding aids, and various institutionalized predilections mediate between scholarship and information, archives produce knowledge, legitimize political systems, and construct identities. Far from being mere repositories of data, archives actually embody the fragments of culture that endure as signifiers of who we are, and why. The essays in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory conceive of archives not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies. Francis X. Blouin Jr. is Professor of History and Director of the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan. William G. Rosenberg is Professor of History, University of Michigan.

Contents:

"Something she called a fever" : Michelet, Derrida, and dust (or, In the archives with Michelet and Derrida) / Carolyn Steedman

The problem of publicité in the archives of Second Empire France / Jennifer S. Milligan

Not dragon at the gate but research partner : the reference archivist as mediator / Kathleen Marquis

Between veneration and loathing : loving and hating documents / James M. O'Toole

Archiving/architecture / Kent Kleinman

"Records of simple truth and precision" : photography, archives, and the illusion of control / Joan M. Schwartz

Out of the closet and into the archives? : German Jewish papers / Atina Grossmann

German Jewish archives in Berlin and New York : three generations after the fact / Frank Mecklenburg

Medieval archivists as authors : social memory and archival memory / Patrick Geary

The question of access : the right to social memory versus the right to social oblivion / Inge Bundsgaard

Past imperfect (l'imparfait) : mediating meaning in archives of art / Nancy Ruth Bartlett

An artifact by any other name : digital surrogates of medieval manuscripts / Stephen G. Nichols

The panoptical archive / Eric Ketelaar

Archival representation / Elizabeth Yakel

Remembering the future: appraisal of records and the role of archives in constructing social memory / Terry Cook

Creating a national information system in a federal environment : some thoughts on the Canadian Archival Information Network / Laura Millar

Archives, heritage, and history / David Lowenthal

How privatization turned Britain's red telephone kiosk into an archive of the welfare state / Patrick Wright

Archives : particles of memory or more? / Joan van Albada

Lookin' for a home : independent oral history archives in Italy / Alessandro Portelli

The public controversy over the Kennedy Memorabilia Project / Robert M. Adler

Classified federal records and the end of the Cold War : the experience of the Assassination Records Review Board / William L. Joyce

"Just a car" : the Kennedy car, the Lincoln chair, and the study of objects / Judith E. Endelman

Memories of colonization : commemoration, preservation, and erasure in an African archive / Frederick Cooper

Colonial archives and the arts of governance : on the content in the form / Ann Laura Stoler

The provincial archive as a place of memory : confronting oral and written sources on the role of former slaves in the Cuban War of Independence (1895-98) / Rebecca J. Scott

Maroons in the archives : the uses of the past in the French Caribbean / Laurent Dubois

Redemption's archive : remembering the future in a revolutionary past / Paul K. Eiss

Documenting South Africa's liberation movements : engaging the archives at the University of Fort Hare / Brian Williams and William K. Wallach

"The gift of one generation to another" : the real thing for the Pepsi Generation / Ian E. Wilson

Social history, public sphere, and national narratives : the social origins of Valencian regional imaginary in nineteenth-century Spain / Mónica Burguera

The influence of politics on the shaping of the memory of states in western Europe (France) / Paule René-Bazin

The role of the Swiss Federal Archives during recent politico-historical events and crises / Christoph Graf

Television archives and the making of collective memory : Nazism and World War II in three television blockbusters of German Public Television / Wulf Kansteiner

Revolution in the archives of memory : the founding of the National Diet Library in Occupied Japan / Leslie Pincus

The new masters of memory : libraries, archives, and museums in postcommunist Bosnia-Herzegovina / Robert J. Donia

Writing home in the archive : "refugee memory" and the ethnography of documentation / Penelope Papailias

Qing statesmen, archivists, and historians and the question of memory / Beatrice S. Bartlett

The role of archives in Chinese society : an examination from the perspective of access / Du Mei

Archives and histories in twentieth-century China / William C. Kirby

Archives and historical writing : the case of the Menshevik Party in 1917 / Ziva Galili

Russian history : is it in the archives? / Abby Smith

Archiving heteroglossia : writing reports and controlling mass culture under Stalin / Serhy Yekelchyk

Ethnicity, memory, and violence : reflections on special problems in Soviet and East European archives / Jeffrey Burds

Hesitations at the door to an archive catalog / Vladimir Lapin

The historian and the source : problems of reliability and ethics / Boris V. Ananich.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

Description based on information from the publisher.

ISBN:

1-283-03376-3

9786613033765

0-472-02672-0