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 October newsletter, please send you submission by October 24, 2017.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was officially appointed chancellor of Germany. His rise to power ushered in Nazi control of the country and led to the horrors of the Holocaust. Among those targeted by the Third Reich were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. LGBTQ people would be sent to concentration camps alongside Jews, the disabled, and many more — but one of the Nazis's first shows of force against Germany’s LGBTQ community was an attack on information.
On May 6, 1933...
The Octavius V. Catto Memorial Fund was created in 2004 and among his champions is Mayor Jim Kenney, who has been determined to memorialize the South Philadelphia scholar, educator, and athlete. Born in 1839, Octavius V. Catto’s many accomplishments include the successful desegregation of horse-drawn street cars in Pennsylvania, the recruitment of Black soldiers for the Civil War and a get out the vote effort that had black men waiting in line at the polls to cast their ballot on Election Day...
In 1989 Redstockings established the Archives for Action to make the formative and radical 1960s experience of the movement more widely available. Below, Annie Tummino (organizer and archivist) and Carol Giardina (organizer and historian) reflect upon how the archives have contributed to their feminist work.
Read more of this article here. Read more of Acid Free, a quarterly publication of the Los Angeles Archivists Collective, here.
Forty-four years after the U.S.-supported military coup, the Santiago Museum of Memory and Human Rights has inaugurated a special exhibit of declassified CIA, FBI, Defense Department and White house records on the U.S. role in Chile and the Pinochet dictatorship. The unusual exhibit, which officially opened to the public on September 5, is titled Secretos de Estado: La Historia Desclasificada de la Dictadura Chilena—Secrets of State: the Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship.Curated...
France's top constitutional authority says presidential archives on Rwanda should remain secret, thwarting a genocide researcher.
In 1994 France backed Rwanda's ethnic Hutu leaders at the time of the genocide by Hutu militias. Some 800,000 people - mostly Tutsis - were killed.
The Constitutional Council says a 25-year block on ex-president François Mitterrand's documents is legitimate.
A researcher, François Graner, had sought permission to study them.
Read more here.
Archival work requires an ethics of care for the deeply personal and the deeply political. My former boss at the Center for the Study of Political Graphics often said that all art is political. The same can be said about archives and archival work. Record creation, keeping, obstruction, or misrepresentation are all acts of identity and power. Who gets to be remembered and historicized by way of record creation? Who is forgotten or purposefully silenced in history by way of omission or...
When the latest barrage of bad news out of Washington batters your hope for the future, it’s time to plan a trip to Interference Archive in Brooklyn.This place is the Smithsonian of dissent, the Louvre of political organizing—a vast treasure of pamphlets, posters, banners, flyers, photos, buttons, film clips, newspapers, t-shirts, ‘zines, audio recordings and other artifacts from movements that changed the world.You’ll find troves of boxes, files, stacks and shelves shining light on anti-...
Syria's civil war has been one of the modern world's most brutal conflicts and one of its most heavily filmed. Hundreds of thousands of amateur videos uploaded to YouTube document every heartbeat of the war over the past seven years, from momentous events like cities under bombardment to intimate scenes like a father cradling his dead children.Syrian activists fear all that history could be erased as YouTube moves to rein in violent content. In the past few months, the online video giant has...
Election results are in! Your 2017-18 SAA Research Libraries Section Steering Committee includes:
Lisa Carter, The Ohio State University Libraries: Chair, 7/29/2017 - 8/18/2018
Vakil Smallen, George Washington University: Vice Chair/Chair-Elect, 7/29/2017 - 8/18/2018
Daniel Cavanaugh, University of Virginia’s Claude Moore Health Sciences Library: 7/29/2017 - 8/7/2019
Anton duPlessis, Texas A&M University Libraries: 8/6/2016 - 8/18/2018
Jean Green, Binghamton University Libraries: 7/...
CPS will hold a special election to fill a vacant seat on the CPS Steering Committee. Biographical information and responses from the two candidates are below:
1. Rebecca Denne, Special Projects Archivist, University of South Carolina, South Carolina Political Collections, M.L.S., M.A. Public History
What is your experience with congressional papers?
My experience with political papers began with graduate research in the Mayoral Archives in Indianapolis which houses the collections of local...
You asked and we delivered. The new SNAP Student Chapter Manual is now available under "Resources" on the right-hand sidebar of the SNAP webpage.
You can also access the Student Chapter Manual here.
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 September newsletter, please send you submission by September 22, 2017.
Who is this Guide for?
You are a human rights activist, a small or grassroots human rights organization, or media collective;
You are creating or collecting digital video to document human rights abuses or issues, and;
You want to make sure that the video documentation you have created or collected can be used for advocacy, as evidence , for education or historical memory – not just now but into the future….
But you are not sure where to begin, or you are stuck on a particular problem.
If...
A researcher of visual history, Sela uncovers records of Palestinian existence and culture hidden in Israeli archives.Rona Sela, a researcher of visual history and a lecturer at Tel Aviv University, first began studying the history and culture of Zionist and Israeli photography more than 20 years ago.
Read more here.
The archive of lesbian musician Gretchen Phillips, co-founder of the trailblazing band Two Nice Girls, sheds light on what it was like to be gay in the 1980s – before the internet helped create communities and at a time when gay lives were rarely visible.Now part of Cornell University Library’s Human Sexuality Collection, the video recordings of Phillips’ shows, reviews and news articles, fan mail and more that Phillips collected over three decades will be available to researchers interested in...
A new Freedom Trail marker honors those who helped break down the doors of segregation in Jackson.
Nine African-American students from Tougaloo College held a "read-in" at the old Jackson Municipal Library on March 27, 1961.
When the all-white library staff told them to leave, they stayed, and when the police did the same, they didn't move.
Read more here, and read a June 2017 American Libraries story about the Tougaloo 9 and library desegregation here.
The Archives of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva has created the new blog CROSS-files! This blog aims at promoting the contents of the rich audiovisual archives, library collections, general archives and what the ICRC calls the “Agency Archives”. This great collection of books, sound recordings, films, videos and photos illustrate and document the activities of the ICRC from the end of the 19th century up to the present day.
These archives and library have been...
In the Holocaust era, countless ordinary people acted in ways that aided the persecution and murder of Jews and other targeted groups within Nazi Germany and across Europe. The Museum’s current special exhibition, Some Were Neighbors: Collaboration & Complicity in the Holocaust, examines one vexing question: what prompted average people to commit extraordinary crimes in support of the Nazi cause? The seminal research of Dr. Christopher Browning, the author of Ordinary Men, and Dr. Wendy...
Writer/activist/educator/poet Walidah Imarisha delivered the opening keynote address at The Liberated Archive: A Forum for Envisioning and Implementing a Community-Based Approach to Archives at ARCHIVES 2017 in Portland, OR. Imarisha discussed the role of a community archives in telling community stories—and making sure that all stories are told.
Listen to her keynote in its entirety here, and read a full transcript here.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently asked the National Archives and Record Administration (NARA), which instructs federal agencies on how to maintain records, to approve its timetable for retaining or destroying records related to its detention operations. This may seem like a run-of-the-mill government request for record-keeping efficiency. It isn’t. An entire paper trail for a system rife with human rights and constitutional abuses is at stake.
ICE has asked for permission to begin...
We were lucky enough to have not one, but two writers contribute SAA 2017 coverage to the HRA Section blog. Both posts covered sessions in the Liberated Archives Forum. Jeremy Brett covered the #ArchivesForBlackLives session, which featured the Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia Movement.
Jennifer Eltringham covered the Dismantling Barriers and Indigenous Sovereignty session. While conversations in this session were to be anonymous, Jennifer deftly summarized the discussion while...
New BAS Education Chair Jennifer Johnson discusses her plans for next year.
The 2017 SAA Business Archives Section (BAS) Annual Business Meeting took place on Friday, July 28, 2017, at the Oregon Convention Center, with about 90 attendees.
Among the highlights:
-Outgoing Chair Jamie Martin (IBM) announced the BAS election results and introduced the new steering committee members: Incoming Vice Chair/Chair Elect Greg McCoy (Procter & Gamble), Incoming Vice Editor...
Power Point slides from the PLASC meeting at SAA17 are available here.
