Week 2: Appraisal Sheila O'Hare No unread replies. 3 3 replies. Thank you for your discussion posts. I will be reviewing them and posting my comments later this week.
For this week's forum, please answer ONE of the questions in the attached document:
Discussion forum questions, wk2Preview the documentView in a new window
You'll find the related readings (Braude, Gross, Attebery, Craft) linked from the Week 2: Objectives and Readings page.
Post response to the question and another student's post by 6/4 (end of day).
Discussion topic: Choose any ONE of questions 1-5 and discuss. There are no “correct” answers. You can reference the required readings, but also feel free to include your personal opinions. Any number of archives would turn down these collections or similar ones, and actually did just that!
The Gross article is an example of material that was amassed as part of administrative recordkeeping, but now has wholly different uses for scholars. Court, prison and other institutional records can give you information that has otherwise been entirely lost to history, since newspapers self-censor. If you use a sampling method in dealing with voluminous records, do you run the risk of losing stories like Henrietta Cook’s – and are these stories worth saving?
As explained by Millar, there are many reasons to use sampling and several methods with caveats that can be followed when dealing with large volumes of records including statistical sampling and targeted sampling (Millar, 193). Clearly, information will be lost. But until such time as information technology allows for super-human methods of digitization and reading of large archives, the constraints of space, time, and budgets will force choices onto archives when appraising their collections. Lacking the foresight to know what will be of value to future users of the archival materials, sampling methods should be intelligently applied and take into account anomalous historical factors that may bias future understanding of the sampled archive collection that is preserved. Ideally, the archivist should strive to maintain representativeness of the archival material – maintaining balance in record characteristics throughout the series of the archival collection.
Regarding Gross’s article on Henrietta Cook’s trial for infanticide, it is clear that the insights on a number of topics were of high evidentiary value and her story was worth preserving and highlighting for its historical and sociological value. Gross makes these assertions throughout the article. The intersection of numerous social spheres and identities illuminates the Progressive Era constraints of race, sexuality, criminality, ethical mores, reportage, and class are all given illumination through the lens of the case of Henrietta Cook. While Cook herself has not been of historical significance, Gross’s use of her story moves here beyond anecdote into a more symbolic figure – representing a nearly invisible subset of the larger population of underrepresented black women – the criminal, petty or murderous. The archival information in court, prison, and institutional records is often the only documented source of information for these women and many other groups that don’t traditionally find notice in the writings of historians. Thaddeus Russell, in his provoking A Renegade History of the United States, shows the value of scouring these types of records for a different narrative stream of American history – one that attempts to go beyond the traditional assertions of who shaped history to add back the criminal, the outcast, and the marginalized. As Gross asserts, “Equally important is the need to suspend judgment; the researcher must resist the urge to either demonize or instantly martyr the subjects.” (Gross, 57).
These records are absolutely worth saving. The American story of Henrietta Cook is worth saving and makes for fascinating points of comparison to current social practices as well as dissecting the intersection of various social constraints of the Progressive Era as they applied to white men, white women, black men and black women and the institutions through which they occasionally interacted.
Gross, K. N. (2010). Exploring crime and violence in early-Twentieth-Century black women’s history. In N. Chauduri, S. Katz, & M. Perry (Eds.), Contesting archives: finding women in the sources (pp. 56-71). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Millar, L. (2017). Archives: Principles and practices (2nd ed.). New York, NY: ALA NealSchuman.
Russell, Thaddeus. (2011). A renegade history of the United States: How drunks, delinquents, and other outcasts made America. [Place of publication not identified]: Free Press.