On The Road: Radical Research Tips For Historians And Other People

The National Archives

Your favorite Radical is settled in at the  Rumor Mill in Culver City, an Internet cafe that has a convenient coin laundry next door.   Research trips lasting longer than a few days necessitate either big luggage or laundry.  I opted for the second, since I had a Sunday, and since my travel wardrobe consists mostly of black tee shirts I only need to do one load.  But laundry also gives me another opportunity, which is to hang out and see a little bit of where I am.  Last night I walked Abbot Kinney in Venice and had an outstanding dinner at 3 Square Cafe and Bakery (barbecued ribs and sweet potato fries, with a cucumber, watercress and yogurt salad to start) and spent the rest of the evening checking out tee shirts that cost between forty and sixty dollars.

I had spent the day at UCLA Special Collections in the Women Against Violence Against Women papers.  For those of you who haven't heard me give a paper or a talk lately, WAVAW was one of several radical feminist groups that became involved in the effort to curb the production and sale of pornography by the mid-1970s.  This grassroots movement was soon opposed by other feminists, civil libertarians and (of course) the pornography industry itself, and has become famous as the "sex wars" of the 1980s.  This is a history which intersects (and is often confused) with a second, conservative, movement to enforce obscenity laws which, I will argue in my book, is a crucial historical distinction that has been overlooked.  This latter story is partly told in political archives:   hence my repeated trips to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (RRPL), where records that lead up to and through the Meese Commission's national hearings on pornography in the mid-1980s are located.

But the difference between these two experiences led me to think that a quick post on research trips might be helpful, particularly for those of you just starting out in graduate school who are planning research, but also for scholars who may not have been to an archive in a while.  So with that, here are a few of the Radical's Research Tips:

Expense.  This is by far the greatest barrier to research nowadays, even for established scholars.  At Zenith, research money has actually decreased over time, not just because it has not kept pace with inflation, but because it is low hanging fruit and can be cut without affecting the entire faculty.  I find it easy to get the standard research awards from Zenith, but those now available from university coffers don't usually cover my expenses anymore. While costs can be cut by staying, or traveling, with friends, and driving rather than going by plane or train, a solo one to two week research trip that includes meals, transportation and hotel can't be budgeted at much less than $150.00 a day.  That is *with*  relatively modest priced accommodations that don't smell, Southwest getaway fares (often cheaper than a round trip train ticket in the Northeast), and the lowest priced rental car (a necessity if you are doing research in a city without reliable public transit.) 

What can help you out are research funds that are sometimes available from the collections themselves to help scholars make a trip.  History graduate students should also check out the American Historical Association's Awards and Fellowships for travel money that in some cases is specially designated for you.

Call ahead -- call way, way ahead.   Everything below follows from this, and anything you can plan prior to actually arriving at the archive extends the value of your research dollar.  Don't forget that archivists like you to use their stuff, and that they know more about any collection than you can possibly find on line.  They will always help you if you bother to ask.

Finding aids that aren't on line can usually be sent via email, and detailed descriptions of your project can sometimes elicit suggestions from the archivist about other collections you might want to look at.  The good archivist can often have several boxes waiting for you when you get there, and help you prioritize the documents you want to look at first.  Some collections may be off site and will take a couple days to retrieve.  Scholars working in presidential libraries established since the 1960s should also be prepared to have erratic access to political documents that have not yet been cleared for public use.  The process of clearing presidential materials slowed dramatically during the George W. Bush administration, and although the Obama White House has a far greater commitment to access, you will find that vast numbers of documents unrelated to national security matters have not been cleared yet.  Historians of the recent political past will also find that even though categories of materials have been cleared, memos from political advisers to the president have not, on the theory that advisers should be free to give advice without being castigated for it in their lifetimes.  So don't expect to find that "smoking gun" that you might find in, say, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library.

You also want to find out from an archivist what you have to do to get oriented, and how much time you need to build in for that on your first day.  It varies widely.  At the Reagan Library, for example, it takes about five minutes to get up and running; at the Library of Congress, getting your researchers card can take up to an hour, depending on how many researchers show up that day.  Find out what the restrictions are:  several decades ago, the New York Historical Society actually had a dress code that required women to wear skirts.  Feminism took care of that one, but other issues crop up.  For example, archives that require government issued ID cards often put trans people who have not yet (or do not ever wish to) officially transition to a gender other than the one they were given at birth are not infrequently put in the difficult position of disclosing their status to an uncomprehending person.  There are few good ways to handle this, as far as I can tell, and those who have dealt with this barrier to access might want to leave experiences in the comments section.

Finally -- and this may shock you -- there is limited seating in many reading rooms.  I have never heard of someone showing up and not getting a chair, but wouldn't that be a drag?

Getting and using the documents you need.  There is no such thing as standard archival practice when it comes to making pulls (for nubies, a "pull" is when they go and get your stuff.)  At the New York Public Library, for example, you can't put in a request ahead of time, and there are only a few pulls a day:  if you don't make the 11:00 pull, you are $hit out of luck until 1:00 -- which really means 1:30 when all is said and done.  At the Reagan, there are no rules about when you put you requests in, and the boxes appear within ten or fifteen minutes, but that isn't true at all NARA facilities.

Archives also have different rules about how many boxes you are allowed at any one time; whether you are allowed to have the whole box on the table or just one folder; and whether you have to wear little white cotton gloves to protect what you are looking at from the oil that naturally forms on the surface of your skin.  Theft of documents is a terrible problem, and you may be asked to jump through all kinds of hoops that seem like unnecessary obstacles to you but are important to keeping historical materials out of the hands of unscrupulous people who put them on the autograph market.

Copying is another variable:  National Archives (NARA) facilities have a pretty liberal copying policy, for example, although quite sensibly, they won't let you xerox documents that aren't in good shape.  The Schlesinger Library allows only 500 copies, per researcher, per year, on the sound principle that the extra handling, heat and light is too hard on the collections.

Digital photography has, I am glad to say, mostly solved these problems. I used to include a xeroxing budget in every research funding request, and I no longer do because most places will let you use a camera (with flash and sounds turned off) to photograph documents.  A cheap digital camera is possibly the best research investment you can make, and many people use a tripod, although I don't.  An iPhone produces surprisingly good reproductions, and I suspect that other smart phones do too.  Word to the wise:  even with a tripod, photographing documents can be really hard on your back.  Bring a computer in to download your research periodically and every night you should make some kind of back up.  I recommend your university server, Google's cloud, or Dropbox.  God forbid your electronics should be stolen, and poof! There goes even a couple day's work that has to be redone.

That said, I discovered to my surprise that in one of my archives, they don't permit photography, and xeroxing is almost $2.00 a page.  Be prepared to type, just like in the good old days:  most importantly, it is simply going to take you longer to make your way through a collection without copying, and you need to know that when you are figuring out how long you need to be there.  These documents should also be backed up at the end of everyday.

Check to see what is up on line first.  Increasingly, archives are preserving documents by making them available online.  Doing this work before you travel can get you oriented to the collection and give you a better sense of what, and who, you are looking for.  That said, always check the finding aid against the online collection. I was assured by one archivist that "most" of a collection I was using was available online and that I probably didn't need to make a trip to the archive:  matching the online listings to the finding aid allowed me to see that well over a third of the folders in the finding aid were not represented in digital form, and that many folders had not been reproduced in full.

What are the documents you won't find on line?  Ephemera, for one thing.  One thing I am interested in is what it cost to run a grassroots feminist anti-pornography group, and where the money came from.  Some of this information has to be cobbled together from handwritten notes, bank statements and receipts; other information can be found in IRS filings.  Neither of these is of interest to the general public, and IRS filings raise privacy issues, as does anything with a name and address on it.  The letter items are crucial to seeing who was involved, and what other groups they may have belonged to.  You also won't find the often intensely personal notes that activists wrote to each other ("Dear Sister....") that reveal interpersonal dynamics, conflict, euphoria, and burn out that radical feminist groups produced.

And finally, take time off to have fun.  I don't have to tell you how to do this, do I?  Get a guide to the city; use Yelp; buy tickets to something in advance (when traveling alone, a single ticket purchased at the last minute can be surprisingly cheap); eat at a restaurant you have always heard about; and make dates with friends, particularly in your final days when the archival work can get exhausting and mind-numbing.  Research is fun, but it can also be isolating.  You are traveling, after all:  take some time to be where you are.

Readers?

Politics Today: A New Feature on Tenured Radical

I am toying with thematic formats that will allow me to blog in a more moderate way on a few days of the week -- rather than devoting half a day to a blog post, or swear off blogging entirely so that I can get a chunk of work done before lunch. Moderation is what the Radical strives for, at least in some things. The truth is, part of my problem is that I begin the day by reading the New York Times, reading everyone else's blogs, and doing my email -- which transports me, mentally and intellectually, about as far from the nineteenth century and Civil War historians as I could be transported. It can take a while to get back, believe me, when my head is swirling with political scandal, academic gossip, wicked humor from my mostly pseudonymous colleagues, and the current plight of the Philadelphia Phillies.

But this morning I received a terrific video from a friend. I have tried to upload it here and failed (so do not click on the image and expect anything to happen) -- due to some combination of my technical inability and the fact that it would violate copyright six ways to Sunday. It is Walt Handelsman, the Pulitizer Prize-winning New York Newsday cartoonist, commenting on the political style of Nanny Dick:



Click here to view the video legally. Oh yes -- and Handelsman does comment on the archives question.

Could he be reading the Radical?

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For more political news of interest to historians in today's New York Times, see Enid Nemy's wonderful obituary of Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson, otherwise known as Lady Bird because she was "purty as a lady bird." For the real skinny on the Johnson marriage, and what Lady Bird actually put up with from the man who co-directed the last unwinnable war, you must go to Robert Caro's wonderful, readable, now three-volume biography of LBJ. In today's Times you can also read the latest on the transfer of the Nixon Presidential Library to NARA, including descriptions of eleven more hours of White House tapes released by our heroes, the archivists.

Oh for the days that President's taped themselves! Does anyone but me wonder who the first blogging President will be?

History Activism and the Bush Administration, Part III

In response to this post and this post on the attempts of the Bush Administration to keep itself from going down in history, Barbara Weinstein, President of the American Historical Association, e-mailed me to explain why the Executive Committee of the American Historical Association (AHA) is not currently storming the gates of the White House as I had requested. With her permission, I publish Barbara's response; in a nutshell, she reassures all of us that the organizations representing professional historians in the United States are not "sitting on their hands," as I put it, while the Administration passes a large magnet back and forth over the RNC server. Quite the opposite.

"I think Tony Grafton has already responded to your comments about the AHA and the OAH not doing enough to protest the machinations of Cheney, Bush, & Co. regarding government records," Barbara writes, "but I just wanted to add a few words. Although I personally feel like we're never really doing enough, given the size of the outrage, I'm afraid the staff wisely insists that we lodge our protests" through the paid professionals in Washington. "As Tony may have mentioned," Barbara continues, "the AHA is the largest contributor to the National Coalition for History, and we pay most of the salary for a full-time lobbyist (Lee White, a very energetic and determined guy, who has his office in AHA headquarters). I think OAH is the second largest contributor. The NCH website was the source of the HNN post, and Lee and Arnita Jones (AHA executive director) are always alert to any issue of this sort, and do what they can both to support those opposing executive policies, and to express the AHA's position as publicly as possible. Perspectives has also been full of articles decrying government secrecy (including my April column), most of which have been reprinted on other websites. The real problem is that our means of action are limited. With past administrations, expressions of outrage or simple exposure would sometimes be enough to get the government to reverse its policy. But these guys are shameless. So we work as closely as we can with Waxman and with whatever groups are bringing legal complaints, and hope Congress votes or the courts rule in our favor, since denunciations seem to have no effect. If you" -- that means all of you, readers -- "have any suggestions for other steps we might take, I'm all ears."

You might want to send your suggestions to the comments section at Tenured Radical 2.0, rather than spamming Barbara and proving once again that no good deed goes unpunished.

I am also pleased to say that the Southern and the Berkshire Conference are members of the NCH, so all of my dues everywhere are going to this effort. Yours too, assuming you paid them this year. And if you don't join these professional organizations because you think you can just read the journals in the library, and get the job ads on H-Net, and you aren't giving a paper at the annual meeting, reconsider your position, because this is one way of not sitting on your hands as the Bush Administration unimagines its own history.

The Perils of Nanny Dick: An Update on the Bush Administration Archive

According to the New York Times, Dick Cheney's office has consistently resisted any oversight of how his office handles classified materials: you can read about it here. That oversight normally comes from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), an agency that was established because of the advocacy of the American Historical Association in the last century. But here's the beautiful part: when the NARA office that deals with the preservation of classified records persisted in its attempt to do its job under the 1978 Presidential Records Act, Cheney shifted tactics from simple obstruction and tried to get the office itself abolished.

These. Bush. People. Are. So. Awful. And the mystery is -- why didn't they think they would ever get caught at this? Or did they think they might get caught, but they would have so effectively gutted the justice system by that time that none of their lying, filthy deeds would be prosecuted? And I have to tell you, it is one thing to go after prosecutors, but going after archivists is low. Not even Richard Nixon went after archivists.

History News Network has a post up that is a summary of today's New York Times article: you can see it here. But once again, I wonder why -- along with Gayprof, in a comment on a previous post -- the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians has been sitting on their collective hands? True, in March, the AHA urged all of us to write our congresspeople to support a bill reversing Executive Order 13233, W.'s original move against the historians. But I see nothing on the AHA's advocacy page about the hearings currently being held by Henry Waxman (D-California); to look at the scope of the Waxman investigation and why it should concern us as scholars and citizens, you need only go to the webpage of the Committee on Governmental Oversight. And I have received nothing from either of these professional organizations to which I pay hefty annual memberships (OK, because of size I am not counting the Southern and the Berkshire Conference, and I am letting the Historical Society, to which I do not belong, off the hook too) alerting me to the issues at hand and what we, as historians, might do to be heard in this matter. And, as Gayprof pointed out in a comment on a previous post, why are we six years into this Administration and this has not been a major professional organizing issue for American historians and our colleagues in other fields?

What gives? Make a difference here, bloggers. To write Representative Henry Waxman, either to express your personal concern or to bring in expert testimony from historians, go to this link. To contact Arnita Jones, Executive Director of the American Historical Association, click here (don't worry: this is not her personal email.)

The Bush Administration Has No History

I learned on National Public Radio this morning that the investigation of White House email practices, that began with an investigation into the firing of Federal prosecutors, has revealed a widespread practice in the Bush White House of erasing emails and evading the terms of the 1978 Presidential Records Act. According to NPR, there are only 130 emails remaining of any sent by Karl Rove in the first term. The Wall Street Journal reports that according to the House Oversight Committee chaired by Henry Waxman (R-California), 51 of 88 White House officials have been deleting their emails from the Republican National Committee server. You can read the full story here.

National Public Radio also reported this morning that lawyers for the RNC, who have acknowledged that White House advisors and staffers used RNC email accounts purposely to avoid going through the White House server and be subject to the terms of a federal statute (read: avoid public scrutiny and make prosecution more difficult), say that although they took steps to prevent the deletion of emails on the RNC server, a full four years of Rove's emails prior to 2005 have gone missing and cannot be recovered. “Republicans,” so the Wall Street Journal writes with a straight face, “said there is no evidence that the law was violated or that the missing emails were of a government rather than political nature.” Well, I’m glad we cleared that up, Chief. Only the political emails. Thank God.

These people are legendary in their capacity for corruption and their need to treat the rest of us like fools. I bet dead Presidents like Grant and Harding are laughing their heads off as they clear space in Presidential Hell to leave room for the Bushies.

But I am going to suppress the incipient political rant and insert a history rant instead. Because, as Ron Hutchenson points out in the Kansas City Star, each Presidential administration has a legal obligation to preserve its own records. For those of us who rely on Presidential Libraries and other government archives, the increasing use of portable telephones and email has been a worry for this reason and other less nefarious ones. Why add the problem of portable phones? I'll tell you why. Remember how, on the West Wing, Josh Lymon did a great deal of his important business walking from place to place talking urgently on the phone? I'll tell you what you did not see: Josh Lymon taking out a notebook and making a memorandum of what transpired during the call. And yet, at least as late as the Reagan administration (I have not yet been to the G.H.W. Bush Library yet), telephone calls were recorded in some way, and ended up in memorandum form. I have spent most of my time at the Reagan Library working in the Elizabeth Dole papers, and there are tons of memos that she sent to the White House that are accounts of telephone calls she made doing the President's business. All of Reagan's advisors did -- and this is a practice I can vouch for going at least as far back as the FDR White House. And it isn't just that they needed a record of who had been spoken to and why to hold people to account or keep a policy discussion going; they had an acute sense of history. This sense of history was bolstered by people like Johnson and Nixon who taped things both so that they could screw people (I mean this figuratively, of course) and so they could have a full record of their ability to steer the country through perilous times.

OK, so cell phones disrupt this practice significantly. Why? Because the calls can't be recorded, and no one is tied to a desk where they can jot down a few notes or call in a secretary to jot down a few notes.

Email poses a different sort of problem, and it isn't clear how it will affect archival collections or the use of archives. By its sheer volume and ease, email creates the potential for a more significant and dense written record than we are used to -- one that is potentially even unwieldy -- by making a face-to-face meeting unnecessary, or by allowing people to do business they might normally do over the telephone, or by expanding the time available to do business. Look at how much email traffic any college professor creates in the course of a day: it is downright nineteenth century. In 1890, you could drop someone a line in the morning, and by 1:00 they would have told you whether they were coming to dinner or not. Email has, ironically, revived an epistolatory style that had vanished for several decades. So presumably, with email, we would have a denser sense of how political people live, whom their friends were, how policy documents developed as they were sent back and forth, and so on. Of course, you would have to have the tenaciousness of a Carolyn Eisenberg to knit all that information together in a way that makes sense, but it can be done, it is done, and very fine, useful political history is written this way. Knowing what people actually did while making policy, as opposed to what you assume they did because they were “like that” ideologically is what we call good history. Not leftist history, or conservative history, or unbiased history. Good. History.

But emails are far more fragile, even if you aren’t destroying them deliberately. The problem with email as a record, or potential archive, is the problem with all computer technologies: it becomes harder to access any electronic file the older it gets. How many of us have tried to open a Word Perfect file from six or seven years ago and found that it is inaccessible because the program itself is no longer compatible with the version that created the file? And at least many of us print those documents out. Who prints their email? I ask you.

Of course, archivists are working on these things, but they can’t preserve what they don’t have, and they don’t have access to servers that politicians don’t want anyone to know about, or emails that have been successfully deleted. Now it is Congress and the public that the Bushies are primarily concerned about, but it is historians as well. Their idea of an historical legacy is one that apparently is untroubled by the facts of what actually happened. It is not news that the Bush administration has declared a Cold War on historians: in his first year as President, W. issued a Presidential order that made access to modern Presidential collections far more restrictive, and cut off access to a great many documents that have nothing whatsoever to do with National Security and would have been released to the public in a timely manner as they were processed. The Act was also retroactive, and made the Freedom of Information Act Process more prolonged. I filed FOIA’s for domestic policy documents a year and a half ago out at the Reagan that I haven’t heard a thing about; as I understand it, three years is not an unusual wait for domestic policy documents. Documents of government agencies are also affected by this administration's zeal for concealing things. Those of us doing research in Justice Department papers at National Archives II in the first months after the Bush Administration took over had a lot of trouble getting an archivist’s attention, much less a table to work at, because Bush flunkies were busy reclassifying documents that had been released, and classifying documents that had never been secret in the first place. And to add insult to injury, National Archives funding has been cut even as Presidential libraries are becoming privately financed entities. There are documents you can't get that haven't been restricted: there just aren't the financial resources available to pay trained people to process them.

Needless to say, the archivists at most federal facilities are beside themselves: at one Presidential library I visited I was asked to take the time to request documents I have no earthly use for, only because large numbers of what are called “piggy-backs” will push a FOIA up the priority list. In other words, archivists are working within what is left of the system to get as much to historians as possible. But I hope that the American Historical Association will have an opportunity to testify before Congress about what is happening, because historians should be beside themselves too. And I would like to see conservatives like David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh (not to mention a certain political historian who seems to be obsessed with college athletics), who have criticized liberal and radical historians for crimes of facticity, step up to the plate here. It isn’t unrealistic to imagine that what Bush and his cronies has done will damage political record keeping, and the ability to use political records in a timely manner, for some years to come, and it will certainly prevent any but the most superficial and ideological accounts of this administration from being written any time soon.