Archival Communities
Constructing the Past in the Early United States
Derek Kane O'Leary
The story behind the creation of the first archives in the new United States
Archives, the foundational resource for historical research, do not emerge from a vacuum. The records, documents, and data that make up the historian’s quarry are never neutral but are themselves the product of historical forces and individual choices. What materials are included in the archive, and why? Whose voices are preserved for posterity, and whose are silenced? In recent years, scholars have increasingly made archives themselves the subject of investigation. With Archival Communities, Derek Kane O’Leary takes up this crucial task for the era of the early United States, arguing that key components of America’s archives emerged from within an Atlantic world of circulating scholars, evidence, practices, and ideas.
As he shows, US archives—and the historical narratives spawned by the documents preserved within them—drew their initial materials and meaning from this international context. And while demonstrating the disproportionate imprint of powerful men, O’Leary’s Atlantic frame reveals a far broader community of people who engaged in early archival efforts on the national, state, and local levels, including women who influenced the act of collection and public perceptions of the young nation’s historical record.
O'Leary presents a clear, accurate, and original discussion of American archives in an international context. From the very beginning, Archival Communities is engaging and informative, and O'Leary's writing is exceptional. An outstanding, much needed work.- Barbara Oberg, Princeton University, editor of Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World
A fascinating and engaging study of how both archives and the historical profession developed in the United States. O'Leary's narrative, based on impressive research and a commanding understanding of the era's intellectual currents, persuasively explains how early archivists, both men and women, thought about historical sources, the nation's place in the course of human civilization, and the role of history in uniting the people and shaping the republic's future course.- Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai, Massachusetts Historical Society, author of Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era
- H-Early-AmericaO’Leary’s book is a significant contribution to historical scholarship. Using his innovative model of frames of archival construction, he has helped add both clarity and nuance to the way in which archival collections in the United States formed in the early years of the republic. This work also makes major contributions to the archival literature, which tends to focus on the origin story of archives in the context of the establishment of larger formal institutions. O’Leary’s remarkable research shows the importance of how the lack of large formal institutions offered unique opportunities for a diverse set of records to be collected and brought across what he repeatedly calls the archival threshold. These opportunities offered interesting ways for more people to be involved in the archival enterprise and to participate in historical productions. No single book can answer all questions in the creation of archival collections in the diverse republic of the United States, but O’Leary has produced an exceptional book that can open up new lines of inquiry using his distinctive model. His work brings together scholarship that includes the creation of archival collections at the global, national, state, and local levels with the construction of American exceptionalism. This important book deserves a wide readership and belongs in every academic library and on the bookshelf of scholars who focus on the early republic.
Derek Kane O’Leary served as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of South Carolina and completed his Ph.D. in History at the University of California, Berkeley.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Envisioning American Archival Exceptionalism
2. Contesting America's Global Archive
3. Washington's National Archive
4. State of the Archives
5. All History Is Local
Conclusion
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Envisioning American Archival Exceptionalism
2. Contesting America's Global Archive
3. Washington's National Archive
4. State of the Archives
5. All History Is Local
Conclusion
Notes
Index
