After taking a bus to the train station, then a train to the Mall, then a shuttle to the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center, I began work in the archives this morning. The trip takes a little over an hour. I plan on trying a different route tomorrow to shorten things up.
Getting started was a pretty painless experience, given the fact that the Smithsonian is a big place and the archives there are pretty vast. The people have been exceedingly friendly and helpful.
This morning I dove into the Army Medical Museum files. Combing through this material is somewhat like looking for needles in a haystack, except that I find a needle every couple of hours. So maybe it is more like buying a bunch of lotto scratch tickets, winning big from time to time, and winning just enough to buy more tickets with a few others. The general narrative of the transfer of human remains has been laid out pretty clearly by other scholars, but little has been done to illuminate the details of how this collection was brought together and later transferred to the Smithsonian. Some of the details, as I learned today, are more than a bit gruesome and bring to light some of the more painful legacies of the racial struggles of our nation's history.
As a side note, this project is also giving me an opportunity to work on reading 19th century penmanship. If you have any words of wisdom on reading mid-to-late 19th century writing, I would love to hear them.
No comments:
Post a Comment