West Tennessee History Day: Archive of the Month, August 2019
A Shout Out to Our State Archives
Rather than focus on a single archive this month, I want to give a shout out to a group of archives: those maintained by our fifty state governments. Usually located in the state capital and sometimes called state libraries or state libraries and archives, these institutions are different from state historical societies, which are usually private institutions, and from the archives maintained by universities and colleges, all of which I will address in future posts.
Organized to be the official repositories of all documents pertaining to state and government business, state archives are still the place to go for birth, death, and marriage records; legal and court records; tax records; property records; official and government correspondence; voting registrations; legislative records; county and municipal records; and penitentiary records. In a few cases, that’s about all a state archive will contain. But in most cases, they hold a whole lot more, materials their staffs have been collecting for generations.
Here in the Volunteer State, for instance, our Tennessee State Library and Archive is rich in resources pertaining to the Civil War era, Native American history, African American history, military history, and women’s history. To make the collection more easily accessible, many of these records have been digitized and then organized thematically around popular topics. For instance, the archivists have gathered into one easy-to-find location all the petitions submitted by citizens to the Tennessee General Assembly between 1799 and 1850. If you have a student interested in any aspect of the early development of Tennessee, there’s no better starting place than this collection. Read together, these petitions allow us to take the pulse of a youthful state and to find out what mattered to whom, when, and why. A sharp-eyed researcher might even find a barrier breaker hiding inside these petitions.
The Tennessee Virtual Archive (which is a digital repository within the Tennessee State Library and Archives) contains thousands of pages of historical sources, including collections pertaining to Alvin York, Andrew Johnson, and Andrew Jackson as well as a collections on topics ranging from educational outreach to the Revolutionary War and Reconstruction. If you have a student interested in women’s rights, point them in the direction of the TeVA collection on the Women’s Suffrage movement in Tennessee. This set is packed with revealing gems, including the circa 1920 broadside to the left, which warns its audience of the awful things that could go wrong were women given the vote.
Other state archives offer equally as rich collections of resources. And like those found in the Tennessee State Library and Archives, they often reflect their own state histories. Thus, for instance, the digital part of the California State Archives features an exhibit commemorating 150 years of transcontinental railroad history as well as a collection devoted to California’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Both histories are replete with barriers making them suitable for this year’s National History Day theme. In the railroad case, there were labor barriers and geological barriers, all of which needed to be established and/or razed before the final spikes were driven into the ground. Japanese internment was about barriers of a different order – racial barriers, political barriers, and economic barriers as well as the barriers made of barbed wire and erected to incarcerate entire communities of American citizens solely on the basis of their ancestry.
Life is full of barriers and people who want to pull them down. Do you have a student interested in the men and women who suffered broken bones, bruises, and sometimes death in order to improve the lot of American workers? Direct their attention to the Mining and Mother Jones in Mount Olive collection at the Illinois Digital Archives or to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Local 105 whose records can be found at the New York State Archives and which document women’s efforts to secure higher wages, pensions, and paid holidays.
If you have a student interested in the Civil Rights Movement and the thousands of women and men who strove to improve the lives of African Americans and the barriers they ran into repeatedly, there is no better starting point than the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Its digital library contains the records of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state's official counter civil rights agency from 1956–1973 as well as collections devoted to Americans who advocated for black people’s civil and political rights. These latter materials include the Foner (Thomas) Freedom Summer Papers and Speak Now: Memories of the Civil Rights Era. Other materials are available by special order, including the Citizens’ Council Forum Films. According to the catalog description, these were short weekly films created by another of Mississippi’s counter civil rights groups to “persuade public opinion regarding two main issues: integration and communism.” And there you have it: barrier builders and barrier breakers.
Often state archives contain their own slice of a much larger story. This is especially true of the historical processes that effected many people in many places. Take, for example, the Japanese American internment camps I mentioned earlier. We often think of California when we think of internment camps. But while California has been the most visible part of the story, it was never the whole of the story, and we can see that when we rummage through the Arkansas State Archives. Japanese-Americans were locked up in that state too, and no research on Japanese-American internment camps is complete without digging into You Fought Prejudice and Won: Japanese-American Internment in Arkansas.
It’s easy to overlook our state archives, and it’s short-sighted too. They are among the oldest repositories in the country. Their holdings allow us to understand a big historical process from multiple perspectives. They enable us to burrow deep into local and state histories. And the records contained in our state archives are almost always unique, not to be found anywhere else. This means that in failing to see what’s waiting for us in Nashville, Little Rock, Sacramento, Raleigh, Salem, Boston, Albany, and Atlanta, we fail to see big chunks of our history too. Yet getting into those institutions has never been easier. All it takes in many cases is internet access and the click of a mouse. But if you and your students live within commuting distance of a state archive, I urge you to visit in person! The records digitized by our state archives represent only a fraction of their immense holdings. There’s way more behind the doors. Moreover, who better than an archivist to help us find the primary sources most likely to hold answers to our research questions. They know their collections intimately and I’ve yet to meet an archivist who isn’t eager to share that knowledge. They love to see historians at the door. But if that’s still not reason enough to visit a state archive, consider this: Many state history day organizations, Tennessee included, give prizes to students who do research in state libraries and on state or local topics. So let’s do it! There is nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain when we take advantage of the primary sources that await us at our archives and libraries.
A Shout Out to Our State Archives
Rather than focus on a single archive this month, I want to give a shout out to a group of archives: those maintained by our fifty state governments. Usually located in the state capital and sometimes called state libraries or state libraries and archives, these institutions are different from state historical societies, which are usually private institutions, and from the archives maintained by universities and colleges, all of which I will address in future posts.
Organized to be the official repositories of all documents pertaining to state and government business, state archives are still the place to go for birth, death, and marriage records; legal and court records; tax records; property records; official and government correspondence; voting registrations; legislative records; county and municipal records; and penitentiary records. In a few cases, that’s about all a state archive will contain. But in most cases, they hold a whole lot more, materials their staffs have been collecting for generations.
Here in the Volunteer State, for instance, our Tennessee State Library and Archive is rich in resources pertaining to the Civil War era, Native American history, African American history, military history, and women’s history. To make the collection more easily accessible, many of these records have been digitized and then organized thematically around popular topics. For instance, the archivists have gathered into one easy-to-find location all the petitions submitted by citizens to the Tennessee General Assembly between 1799 and 1850. If you have a student interested in any aspect of the early development of Tennessee, there’s no better starting place than this collection. Read together, these petitions allow us to take the pulse of a youthful state and to find out what mattered to whom, when, and why. A sharp-eyed researcher might even find a barrier breaker hiding inside these petitions.
The Tennessee Virtual Archive (which is a digital repository within the Tennessee State Library and Archives) contains thousands of pages of historical sources, including collections pertaining to Alvin York, Andrew Johnson, and Andrew Jackson as well as a collections on topics ranging from educational outreach to the Revolutionary War and Reconstruction. If you have a student interested in women’s rights, point them in the direction of the TeVA collection on the Women’s Suffrage movement in Tennessee. This set is packed with revealing gems, including the circa 1920 broadside to the left, which warns its audience of the awful things that could go wrong were women given the vote.
Other state archives offer equally as rich collections of resources. And like those found in the Tennessee State Library and Archives, they often reflect their own state histories. Thus, for instance, the digital part of the California State Archives features an exhibit commemorating 150 years of transcontinental railroad history as well as a collection devoted to California’s incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Both histories are replete with barriers making them suitable for this year’s National History Day theme. In the railroad case, there were labor barriers and geological barriers, all of which needed to be established and/or razed before the final spikes were driven into the ground. Japanese internment was about barriers of a different order – racial barriers, political barriers, and economic barriers as well as the barriers made of barbed wire and erected to incarcerate entire communities of American citizens solely on the basis of their ancestry.
Life is full of barriers and people who want to pull them down. Do you have a student interested in the men and women who suffered broken bones, bruises, and sometimes death in order to improve the lot of American workers? Direct their attention to the Mining and Mother Jones in Mount Olive collection at the Illinois Digital Archives or to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Local 105 whose records can be found at the New York State Archives and which document women’s efforts to secure higher wages, pensions, and paid holidays.
If you have a student interested in the Civil Rights Movement and the thousands of women and men who strove to improve the lives of African Americans and the barriers they ran into repeatedly, there is no better starting point than the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Its digital library contains the records of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, the state's official counter civil rights agency from 1956–1973 as well as collections devoted to Americans who advocated for black people’s civil and political rights. These latter materials include the Foner (Thomas) Freedom Summer Papers and Speak Now: Memories of the Civil Rights Era. Other materials are available by special order, including the Citizens’ Council Forum Films. According to the catalog description, these were short weekly films created by another of Mississippi’s counter civil rights groups to “persuade public opinion regarding two main issues: integration and communism.” And there you have it: barrier builders and barrier breakers.
Often state archives contain their own slice of a much larger story. This is especially true of the historical processes that effected many people in many places. Take, for example, the Japanese American internment camps I mentioned earlier. We often think of California when we think of internment camps. But while California has been the most visible part of the story, it was never the whole of the story, and we can see that when we rummage through the Arkansas State Archives. Japanese-Americans were locked up in that state too, and no research on Japanese-American internment camps is complete without digging into You Fought Prejudice and Won: Japanese-American Internment in Arkansas.
It’s easy to overlook our state archives, and it’s short-sighted too. They are among the oldest repositories in the country. Their holdings allow us to understand a big historical process from multiple perspectives. They enable us to burrow deep into local and state histories. And the records contained in our state archives are almost always unique, not to be found anywhere else. This means that in failing to see what’s waiting for us in Nashville, Little Rock, Sacramento, Raleigh, Salem, Boston, Albany, and Atlanta, we fail to see big chunks of our history too. Yet getting into those institutions has never been easier. All it takes in many cases is internet access and the click of a mouse. But if you and your students live within commuting distance of a state archive, I urge you to visit in person! The records digitized by our state archives represent only a fraction of their immense holdings. There’s way more behind the doors. Moreover, who better than an archivist to help us find the primary sources most likely to hold answers to our research questions. They know their collections intimately and I’ve yet to meet an archivist who isn’t eager to share that knowledge. They love to see historians at the door. But if that’s still not reason enough to visit a state archive, consider this: Many state history day organizations, Tennessee included, give prizes to students who do research in state libraries and on state or local topics. So let’s do it! There is nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain when we take advantage of the primary sources that await us at our archives and libraries.