Arrival in D.C.

Emily and I have arrived safe and sound in the District of Columbia.  I had forgotten that the license plates here read, "Taxation Without Representation," a fact which gave me a chuckle.  

Our stay in New Jersey was pleasant.  We made a brief trip into New York City and I was happy to get a tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an experienced tour guide.

Tomorrow I will spend the day playing tourist with a friend of mine from Minnesota before meeting up with a couple of friends from Berkeley.  

Diving Back In

 I return to the archives this summer after devoting a semester to learning how to teach American history.  Admittedly, a part of me is apprehensive to dive back into my project, having grown comfortable in my routine.  And yet, I love research and writing.  The unmistakeable smell of archival documents will no doubt trigger some of the more sensitive synapses in my brain.  Unfortunately, my passion for my research is not yet reflective in my scholarly writing, which is still a work in progress.   

UC Berkeley's Department of History has asked us to complete a pre-dissertation prospectus. Our goal for this summer is sort of analogous to accepting a promise ring.  After this summer we will all be somewhat like a high school cheerleaders; we won't quite be engaged to our projects, but will certainly take a step in that direction.  

My planned dissertation, Making the Modern Museum in the United States: Art, Anthropology and the Desire to Understand Human Culture, intends to examine the history of anthropology and art museums in America past their foundations up to the post-Second World War Era. This summer, I will be conducting research at the National Anthropological Archives, a branch of the Smithsonian Institution.  The overarching theme of my research is to examine how the operation of institutions influence and shape ideas.  

This summer, I will specifically be looking at an archival collection documenting the transfer of human skeletal remains from the U.S. Army Medical Museum to the Smithsonian.  I have, for some time, been interested in the process of building museums collections and, moreover, deciding what types of collections belong where.  Does a Moche statue belong in an art museum or a natural history museum?  While these questions are pertinent to the process of founding museums, I am more interested in how museums continued these debates after they were already established. 

I am particularly sensitive to the idea of constructing collections of human remains in museums, having worked with these types of collections first-hand in several museums.  This summer, I don't anticipate any need to work with the remains themselves, instead attempting to understand the historical process of their collection and care over time.  

The collection could serve as a jumping off point for my dissertation.  The U.S. Army Medical Museum, in attempting to build an encyclopedic collection of the various kinds of battle injuries experienced by troops, starting collecting human skeletal remains around the time of the Civil War.  The institution eventually requested that Army field surgeons send skeletal remains from around the globe.  The museum was especially interested in obtaining examples of human remains from the Native Americans of the American West.   

After building a vast collection of human skeletal remains, the Army Medical Museum grew to be more interested in soft tissue samples.  The collection of skeletal remains was transferred to the Smithsonian between 1898 and 1904.  This summer, I will be studying how this process took place.  What was the rhetoric surrounding the transfer?  Who made these decisions and why?  How did the operation of these institutions shape the type of research that was conducted?  What type of legacy do these remains possess?

For more about my work, I'll point readers in the direction of my webstite, click here.

NARA San Bruno

I spent most of the afternoon yesterday at NARA's Pacific Region archive in San Bruno. At the outset I'll say that I think I'm more confused now, having gone to the archive, than before, but we'll get to that.

NARA San Bruno is a windowless space in an obscure federal building, sandwiched between a park and a newly developed housing complex. The first thing that shocked me about the site was the lack of security - no one checks your bags. They do require you to put your stuff in a locker, but really all I had to do was sign in and sign out, and no one really paid attention to what I was doing. (Even the New York Public Library searches your bags when you leave, not to mention every time you enter or leave a reading room.)

So why was I in San Bruno? Well, one of the collections I need to look at for my dissertation is the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) correspondence files. I had been warned in advance that the INS files are tricky to use, but wow was I not prepared for what I found: first of all, the correspondence files only run through 1957, so I already need to find a work around, since my project runs until at least 1968. Secondly, there is no finding aid. At all. What they do have is Record Group T458, a 31-roll microfilm subject heading list. Basically every time the INS added a box to the archival collection, they took a notecard, typed out what was in the box, and microfilmed it. Thankfully, at least these 31 rolls were in alphabetical order, but since the microfilm was created over the span of about 30 years, the keywords have changed (i.e. displaced person to refugee to political refugee,) not to mention the fact that a few of the key terms I expected to be there just weren't. On top of all of that, the microfilm only runs through about 1953, so I'm still not sure how to access 1953-1957. San Bruno happens to have a copy of T458, and archivists and researcher-friends told me I should look through it before heading to D.C. (especially since INS records have to be cleared in advance by the archivist in charge before you can look at them.)

So after spending a number of hours trying to come up with as many keywords as I could think of that would be relevant for my project (and hand-cranking the reals back and forth - they have the old style microfilm readers,) I now have a 5 page excel spreadsheet with what I think are box and file numbers. And even that I'm not quite sure about.

Next moves: Contact the NARA archivist in charge of the INS Collection, contact the USCIS Historian (formally the INS historian) for help, and find other collections for 1957-1968.

Welcome

This blog is meant for us to chronicle our experiences working in different archival collections in D.C. We'll be blogging about the state of the archives and collections, difficulties in doing primary source research, and hopefully some good finds.

Emily will be working at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sam will be working at the National Anthropological Archives.

and Phil will be working at NARA (Downtown and College Park), and the Library of Congress.

Feel free to let us know what you think!