Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History

Archive Stories brings together ethnographies of the archival world, most of which are written by historians. Some contributors recount their own experiences. One offers a moving reflection on how the relative wealth and prestige of Western researchers can gain them entry to collections such as Uzbekistan’s newly formed Central State Archive, which severely limits the access of Uzbek researchers. Others explore the genealogies of specific archives, from one of the most influential archival institutions in the modern West, the Archives nationales in Paris, to the significant archives of the Bakunin family in Russia, which were saved largely through the efforts of one family member. Still others explore the impact of current events on the analysis of particular archives. A contributor tells of researching the 1976 Soweto riots in the politically charged atmosphere of the early 1990s, just as apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. A number of the essays question what counts as an archive—and what counts as history—as they consider oral histories, cyberspace, fiction, and plans for streets and buildings that were never built, for histories that never materialized.

Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Marilyn Booth, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Peter Fritzsche, Durba Ghosh, Laura Mayhall, Jennifer S. Milligan, Kathryn J. Oberdeck, Adele Perry, Helena Pohlandt-McCormick, John Randolph, Craig Robertson, Horacio N. Roque Ramírez, Jeff Sahadeo, Reneé Sentilles

• Processing the Past: Contesting Authority In History And The Archives (Oxford Series on History and Archives)
• Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, 20th Anniversary Edition
• The Allure of the Archives (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
• Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (The Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era)
• The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction
• Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense
• Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Encounters: Cultural Histories)