Setting Your Pen to History
“History is written by the victors,” some people say. It isn’t quite true.
Oh, in the short to medium term it is. Textbooks and curricula are written by those who prevail. The victors’ version is fed to everyone in school, through the media and in an endless array of small features in everyday life. They make it the overwhelmingly dominant cultural myth. Most people are too busy going about their day to day lives to question it.
Most people.
But there are always some who seek to dig deeper. There are always some who want to know more.
Where do they find more?
In the personal, perhaps surreptitious records kept by people about what they lived through. You know my wife and I go to various events that revolve around the decoded diaries of Anne Lister. Through her copious journals and letters, we get a glimpse into what life was like for some women like us (well, some of them in the privileged layers of society) almost a couple of centuries ago. That’s just the tip of an iceberg.
Think about it. In school, we also learned about Anne Frank’s diary, but there are so many more. My brother talks with me about reading the published journals kept by a Jewish man who was married to a Christian wife in Germany. He began writing when Hitler rose to power and continued until the 1950s when he died. All the endless chipping-away of normal life by the Nazis is there. Jews can’t walk in the park. Jews can’t walk on the sidewalk around the park. Day after day, chip after chip, his life being saved by the chaos of the Dresden firestorm that let him steal another identity and slip away from deportation to a concentration camp… It’s all there.
In the short to medium term, history is written by the victors. But over time, tides change, the victors’ grip eventually loosens, and historians stumble upon the truth in such personal records. Gradually bits of uncovered truth replace doctrine.
I am barely young enough not to remember signs declaring which water fountains were for white people and which were not. I was brought up in Southern USA culture where we had lost The War Between The States, not The Civil War. (The former paints the Confederacy as a separate nation that was conquered and annexed. The latter paints the Confederacy as an insurrection which sought to split the nation.)
Recognizing that the central cultural story you grew up with is mostly wrong is hard to do. Learning more, sorting out what is true and what is not, can shake you to your core. Changing personal beliefs based on having better, more solid, more factual information is hard as hell.
It is also the essence of a scientific orientation. I love science and engineering. I love truth. When I know better, I feel obligated to believe better and do better. I had to grapple with the origin story of my culture. I had to correct it within myself.
Through my lifetime, many people have done the same about that story. Not enough yet, but I have lots of company in having gone through some big revelations and changes to my point of view over time—about the South, the War, other wars, politics, a great many things.
How Does Truth Get Preserved Against the Norms of the Day?
This is made possible by those who, for whatever reason, record what they experience and somehow leave their records for posterity to find. Historians love minutiae, the tidbits of insight provided by diaries and letters that provide depth and context for broad historical brushstrokes.
If you are a journal-writer, or if you have inherited a grandparent’s diaries and think they may be of interest to a historian sometime in the future, how can you put that material where it will be protected through generations of time? Or if you are interested in digging through such materials to understand a past era or movement or organization, where should you look?
Look to an archive center.
One of the best known collections about women in the USA is the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. However, it is not the only place that keeps such records. When I was active in the feminist movement, I persuaded the Texas chapter of the National Organization for Women to establish its collection at what was then the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center in Austin, Texas. The Center wanted to become a major source of archives about feminism in the American Southwest. Several prominent feminists in Texas later established their personal collections there, so Texas NOW helped start that ball rolling. In 2008 the facility was renamed the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History.
All this tells you a little about what to look for. If I had not edited much of my grandfather’s writings into a cohesive memoir and published it, those two archive centers would not necessarily have been the right place to establish a collection of his papers. If offered his papers, they probably would have recommended another archive center more suitable for a sea captain’s writings.
When you have found an archive center that seems appropriate, write to them about what you would like to give them for safekeeping and availability to historians. If they feel what you are offering is suitable, they will explain how to go about it. You will sign a contract formally donating the materials to them, and perhaps making provisions for you to easily donate more materials later (which can easily happen—going through papers in an attic takes time).
They will also coach you about how to treat the materials. For example, don’t write on the backs of photographs you donate. Most ink has some acid in it and will degrade the paper the photograph is printed on. Don’t put sticky notes on photos or documents either. Most adhesives also degrade paper.
You generally don’t need to organize the materials for them. Each archive center has its own way of organizing materials to help researchers and historians find what they need. Each sheet of paper or photograph or artifact will be carefully processed (by people wearing gloves to protect it from the oils on their skin). Any folders used will be acid-free. The temperature and humidity in the facility will be controlled to help materials age as slowly as possible. Lighting will be specially filtered to minimize exposure to ultraviolet radiation. The archivists know what to do. You don’t have to learn what they know.
You may think what you do or experience, or what your favorite volunteer group does or experiences, isn’t worthy of being remembered a few generations from now. But maybe it is and you simply aren’t in a position to realize it. Archivists have a knack for recognizing the material historians will someday want to see. Go ahead and ask.
If you write or take photos or keep records, even if it’s only for yourself, perhaps you could be setting your pen to history (or herstory). What seems mundane to you now won’t be mundane someday.
Go ahead. Be someone who quietly, without even making noise, writes what will someday correct a history book.