Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar

Front Cover
Francis Xavier Blouin, William G. Rosenberg
University of Michigan Press, Aug 2, 2007 - History - 502 pages
As sites of documentary preservation rooted in various national and social contexts, artifacts of culture, and places of uncovering, archives provide tangible evidence of memory for individuals, communities, and states, as well as defining memory institutionally within prevailing political systems and cultural norms. By assigning the prerogatives of record keeper to the archivist, whose acquisition policies, finding aids, and various institutionalized predilections mediate between scholarship and information, archives produce knowledge, legitimize political systems, and construct identities. Far from being mere repositories of data, archives actually embody the fragments of culture that endure as signifiers of who we are, and why. The essays in Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory conceive of archives not simply as historical repositories but as a complex of structures, processes, and epistemologies situated at a critical point of the intersection between scholarship, cultural practices, politics, and technologies.
 

Contents

Michelet and Derrida
4
of Control ཙ
61
Archives in the Production of Knowledge
85
Frank Mecklenburg
101
Social Oblivion
114
Archival Representation
151
Archives and Social Memory
165
on the Canadian Archival Information Network
182
Remembering the Future in a Revolutionary Past
301
Engaging the Archives at
321
The Real Thing for the Pepsi Generation
333
The Social Origins of Valencian
343
The Influence of Politics on the Shaping of the Memory of States in Western
353
The Role of the Swiss Federal Archives during Recent PoliticoHistorical Events
361
Nazism and World War II
368
Archives and Social Understanding in States Undergoing Rapid
379

Archives Heritage and History
193
How Privatization Turned Britains Red Telephone Kiosk into an Archive of
207
Particles of Memory or More?
215
The Public Controversy over the Kennedy Memorabilia Project
225
The Experience of
237
The Kennedy Car the Lincoln Chair and the Study of Objects
245
Archives Memory and Political Culture Canada the Caribbean
253
Confronting Oral and Written Sources
280
The Uses of the Past in the French Caribbean
291
Libraries Archives and Museums in Postcommunist
393
Refugee Memory and the Ethnography
402
Qing Statesmen Archivists and Historians and the Question of Memory
417
An Examination from the Perspective
427
The Case of the Menshevik Party in 1917
443
Writing Reports and Controlling Mass Culture under Stalin
459
Hesitations at the Door to an Archive Catalog
480
Contributors
497
Copyright

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