Archives are for me always a happy place to be. I fully subscribe to all the numerous epistemological concerns that historians and other scholars have expressed about the archive as an idea and an institution—among other things, it is impossible in reading written exchanges between high-level government officials to be unaware of how much of what they said to one another is not in the archive, whether because it remains classified or because it was verbal. And yet I think it’s unbelievably important that we have archives, both governmental and private, and are in the habit of archiving what is written (and sometimes even was was spoken), in part simply because at the scale of information creation from the 19th Century on, there is no way that even the most controlling authority could hope to prevent all sorts of interesting things from ending up stored in boxes and folders.
Archives are often an interesting halfway house between storage facility and memorial. Sometimes you find yourself sitting in a featureless room with a few other people who are quietly intent for days or weeks at a time on a set of boxes or old books. Perhaps there’s a few younger research assistants who are maniacally triggering a camera to capture thousands of pages for some other scholar to peruse later on. I do remember the unfortunate week where I was in a small archival room in southern Africa and one older man was coughing with what turned out to be pertussis and another scholar who I knew moderately well was suffering from unending flatulence.
Today I am more fortunate: alone except for the skilled and helpful staff of the U.S. National Archives, with a beautiful view.
I have also just had the tragic experience that befalls us all in archival work: a memorandum that promises an enclosure that is just what you want to see, only to find that the enclosure isn’t in the file folder and there’s no hint of where it might be instead. (Though I do have some ideas, and unfortunately the two best ideas suggest that the promised enclosure is either in Durham North Carolina or in College Park Maryland. There’s always another archive around the bend of any project.) So it goes.