The World as Archive

When historians speak of "archives," they usually mean collections of documents that accumulated as the by-products of the operation of organizations (often governments) and business firms. Although gatherings of this kind may contain drafts of published texts, in general they consist largely of material not intended for publication. Obviously such collections have been subject, from their origins, to the same vicissitudes that affect the survival of all other artifacts. The inventory of any given group of documents is the product not only of accidents caused by human beings and natural forces but also of human decisions. Chance causes some things to be annihilated by fires, floods, and other catastrophes; and people intentionally destroy evidence for many reasons, such as the belief that certain items are too unimportant to justify the space they occupy, or the desire to control the conclusions that will be drawn by persons who later examine a particular archive. And of course archives suffer not only depletion but also inflation, when documents are created after the fact either in a misguided attempt to be helpful or in an effort to rewrite history. Randolph Starn's piece, "Truths in the Archives," offers a learned array of examples of archival manipulation over the centuries, examples that are interesting but not surprising.

Historians recognize that archives must be used with caution and that attempting to reconstruct the past from archival documents requires incessant acts of judgment. But historians do not always avail themselves of all the evidence that archives have to offer. There is an irony in the fact, as noted by Starn, that the nineteenth-century professionalization of historical study coincided with a growing tendency to relegate the examination of physical evidence to specialists. This indefensible split can only be condoned by those who fail to understand the inextricability of verbal texts and their physical settings. Reading any document with a critical eye involves extracting meaning from the object (the paper, the ink, the structure of the leaves, the placement of the words, and so on) as well as from the language. Yet historians tend to think of primary sources as language alone, rather than as artifacts; thus they imagine, when they use a photocopy of an archival document instead of traveling to where the original is located, that they have employed a primary record. In doing so, they are being as naive in their own way as if they had not recognized the need to approach an archive critically in the first place. And when as professors they require their students to use archival evidence but allow the students to rely on microfilms, they are failing to make a coherent case for the role of critical judgment in evaluating archival documents.

Not only that: treating archives merely as collections of words and numbers shows no awareness of the fact that every physical characteristic of every document is the trace left by a human action or a natural event in the past. The artifact has its own story to tell, one that can never be separated from what the words say or what the text as a whole signifies in social terms. That historians commonly prize quotations from archival documents more highly than extracts from printed books is paradoxically a by-product of their frequent obliviousness to physical evidence: one text may be thought superior to another, but how can one physical object be superior to another as testimony to its own existence at a past moment? Nevertheless, there seems no doubt that historians do often regard archival sources as more desirable than published ones. Starn, for instance, says that "archives have been primary sites of the labor and legitimacy of professional historians," and he speaks of "the issue of truths in the archives" as "the rallying point of modern historiography."

Why not "truths in published books" as well? It is one thing—and not objectionable—to have an intense interest in archival sources because they are unpublished and may add new details to the mix...