Anna Smith, Special Collections Librarian at Charleston Library Society, digs into both the logistics and ethics of making a digital database from asylum records. Her post features a presentation at the Society of North Carolina Archivists on UNC-Chapel Hill's Community Histories Workshop.
Read the post in its entirety here.
If you are attending any of the above conferences in April, the HRA Section Blog could use your help! It's not as hard as it sounds, and it's a great way to add a publication to your resume. The post can be a simple summary of the issues discussed at a certain session, or you can get a little opinionated and say what you thought was most productive about the session or not as productive. Here are two examples of sessions covered in the past year. If you're interested in covering a session at...
First Look Media announced Wednesday that it was shutting down access to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s massive trove of leaked National Security Agency documents.Over the past several years, The Intercept, which is owned by First Look Media, has maintained a research team to handle the large number of documents provided by Snowden to Intercept journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.But in an email to staff Wednesday evening, First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news...
On the 43rd anniversary of the military coup in Argentina, the Argentine government of Mauricio Macri has announced that the Trump Administration will provide “the largest delivery of declassified documents, in size and file quality, to another nation”—formerly secret U.S. records relating to human rights abuses committed during under the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. The official transfer of the records is planned for mid-April during a visit by Argentina’s minister of justice...
As the French President Emmanuel Macron tours East Africa, he is certain to get a cordial welcome. If everything goes to plan, it will be all smiles and few uncomfortable questions. However, this should not be the case. Macron has called for an international conference on the return of African art and artefacts looted during colonialism. But art and artefacts are not the only things that should be returned.
The colonial archive, the thousands of official records and documents that trace the...
The Immigration History Research Center Archives (IHRCA) offers Grant-in-Aid Awards to support a visit in order to conduct research in our collections. Awards are available through co-sponsorship from the Immigration History Research Center and the IHRCA through the ethnic and general funds. This award is open to scholars of all levels, including independent scholars, and supports a research visit of 5 days or more. Typically, awards are for $1,000, and four awards are given each year. The...
In March 2019, The Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives changed its name. Today, we are known as The ArQuives, a name we believe more accurately reflects the diversity of our communities, the people and communities that are already represented in our collection. We spent 6-months reaching out to our stakeholders and recognized the growing number of underrepresented people; most notably trans, queer, bisexual, and 2-spirited folks. Read the rest of this post here and read about the new ArQuives...
The Nelson Mandela Foundation partnered with the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI) today in launching the exhibition Insurgent Citizens: Reflections on Protest in Democratic South Africa at the Foundation’s Centre of Memory. Keynote speaker for the event was former Public Protector Advocate Thuli Madonsela.
The exhibition is designed to provoke discussion on South Africa’s constitutionally protected right to protest, the limits to that right, and appropriate ways of participating in...
Renowned Nigerian art curator Okwui Enwezor has died at age 55 after a battle with cancer. Enwezor was the director of the Haus der Kunst museum in Munich, Germany, until last year. He was also an art critic, educator, editor and writer. He worked to put African art and artists center stage, as well as women artists. In 1994, he founded Nka, a magazine for contemporary African art. His exhibit “The Short Century,” celebrating African art and independence movements, was hailed as a landmark...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the April newsletter, please send you submission by April 23, 2019.
If you are attending any of the above conferences in May, the HRA Section Blog could use your help! It's not as hard as it sounds, and it's a great way to add a publication to your resume. The post can be a simple summary of the issues discussed at a certain session, or you can get a little opinionated and say what you thought was most productive about the session or not as productive. Here are two examples of sessions covered in the past year. If you're interested in covering a session at...
In a 1995 interview with Linton Weeks of the Washington Post, the Howard University librarian, collector and self-described “bibliomaniac” Dorothy Porter reflected on the focus of her 43-year career: “The only rewarding thing for me is to bring to light information that no one knows. What’s the point of rehashing the same old thing?”
For Porter, this mission involved not only collecting and preserving a wide range of materials related to the global black experience, but also addressing how...
We are delighted to announce that the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s late photo archivist, Lucia Raadschelders, is to be honoured posthumously by the Presidency for her role in South Africa’s freedom struggle.
Raadschelders passed away on 19 November 2018 after a long battle with cancer. The Presidency will honour her with the Order of the Companions of OR Tambo in Silver.
Elinor Sisulu, who nominated Dutch national Raadschelders, said that she had “devoted most of her life to the struggle for...
Documenting the Now is accepting applications from US-based social justice activist organizations that would like to benefit from a free community-based digital archives workshop in their city or town in 2020. The workshops will focus on helping activists to develop the skills and to use available tools to collect, preserve, and share their web, social media and other types of digital content in their own digital archive.
Our hope is that activist communities, in creating their own archives...
After years of failed attempts, the front-facing staff at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum have finally announced their decision to unionize. In a vote held Monday, April 15, the workers voted in favor of joining Local 2110 UAW (United Auto Workers) by a 96% margin.The new union members include employees in the education, retail, and visitor services departments. The workers report low wages, scarce benefits, and unstable working conditions. These inadequate conditions, the organizers say,...
Who has the right to own photos of slaves? We speak with Tamara Lanier, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Papa Renty, the enslaved man whose image was captured in a 19th century photograph currently owned by Harvard University. She is suing the school, accusing it of unfairly profiting from the images. We also speak with her attorney, Benjamin Crump.
Watch the interview here.
In the early 1920s, the director of the Bristol Museum in Britain received a package containing two human skulls. The donation came from Alfred Hutchins. He had left England seeking brighter horizons and by the late 1800s was living in Southern California. There he became an amateur archaeologist, excavating Native American graves on the Channel Islands. He offered the museum this collection, apparently in honor of his son, who perished during the First World War.Last week in a ceremony,...
On International Roma Day, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum welcomes efforts in Congress and in US embassies around the world to recognize the genocide against Europe’s Roma at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, to honor the Romani community and culture, and express concern about continuing violence directed against Romani populations.
In light of the history of the persecution of Roma, which culminated during the Holocaust when at least 250,000 Roma were targeted and...
Something important to you missing from this newsletter? Send a submission my way and let me know what you would like to see.Please submit newsletter items about archives and human rights (writ broadly) to hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com. These can be recent publications, upcoming events or exhibitions, opportunities and scholarships, or something else entirely as long as it connects to archives and human rights. For the May newsletter, please send you submission by May 24, 2019.
In the latest on our blog, Eira Tansey relates how historians put today's politics in historical context. Eira, Digital Archivist/Records Manager at the University of Cincinnati Libraries, reflected on her experience as an archivist attending the Organization of American Historians Conference. Her piece touches on issues of racial justice, labor and surveillance. Read the post here.
If you'd be interested in writing for the Human Rights Archives Section blog, email hilary.h.barlow@gmail.com...
At last month’s “Vision & Justice” convening hosted by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, luminaries from Harvard and beyond came together to consider the most pressing problems at the juncture of justice, arts, and race. In particular, the conference description characterized the “foundational right of representation in a democracy” as “the right to be recognized justly.”So it was peculiar that neither the event nor the subsequent publicationreferenced the ongoing struggle of...
Esther F. arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau in August 1944 — a period when the camp’s crematoriums were operating at full capacity. Esther, a physician, was held for five days before being transported to Guben, a labor camp in Germany where she was assigned to care for Jewish factory workers.
At Guben, a sub-camp of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in eastern Germany (present-day Poland), a female Nazi officer instructed Esther to produce a list of medical supplies she needed. Mentally and...
The National Security Archive, along with 15 other media organizations, filed a “friend of the court” brief on April 29 in the lawsuit Barr v. Redacted challenging the FBI’s authority to issue national security letters (NSLs) without any judicial oversight and under indefinite gag orders. The letters demand business records from a wide array of organizations for national security investigations, and their accompanying gag orders prohibit the recipient from speaking with anyone about the NSL,...
In August 2017 an exhibit titled A Campus Divided: Progressives, Anti-Communists, Racism, and Antisemitism at the University of Minnesota, 1930-1942 opened in Elmer L. Andersen Library, the home of Archives and Special Collections at the University of Minnesota. The exhibit was a culmination of years of original research pulling from archival materials to tell the story of racism and surveillance of students on campus during the interwar years.
My involvement, as Archivist for the Upper...
The decades-long history of the two-spirit movement here in Manitoba and throughout North America is now being saved and preserved at the University of Winnipeg Archives. The collection — mostly donated by long-time Winnipeg two-spirit activist Albert McLeod — will be on display at the archive's launch Monday, kicking off the school's Pride Week celebrations. Believed to be the most comprehensive collection of two-spirit materials in Canada, Mcleod says the archives will be used by researchers...
