Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0809328402
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This collection of highly readable essays reveals that research is not restricted to library archives. When researchers pursue information and perspectives from sources beyond the archives—from existing people and places— they are often rewarded with unexpected discoveries that enrich their research and their lives.
Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process presents narratives that demystify and illuminate the research process by showing how personal experiences, family history, and scholarly research intersect. Editors Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan emphasize how important it is for researchers to tap into their passions, pursuing research subjects that attract their attention with creativity and intuition without limiting themselves to traditional archival sources and research methods.
Eighteen contributors from a number of disciplines detail inspiring research opportunities that led to recently published works, while offering insights on such topics as starting and finishing research projects, using a wide range of types of sources and methods, and taking advantage of unexpected leads, chance encounters and simple clues. In addition, the narratives trace the importance of place in archival research, the parallels between the lives of research subjects and researchers, and explore archives as sites that resurrect personal, cultural, and historical memory.
Beyond the Archives sheds light on the creative, joyful, and serendipitous nature of research, addressing what attracts researchers to their subjects, as well as what inspires them to produce the most thorough, complete, and engaged scholarly work. This timely and essential volume supplements traditional-method textbooks and effectively models concrete practices of retrieving and synthesizing information by professional researchers.
Huston-Tillotson Alumna Honored.” Austin American-Statesman, July 29, 1999. LexisNexis. 19 Being on Location Serendipity, Place, and Archival Research Gesa E. Kirsch For several years now, I have been studying the life and work of Dr. Mary Bennett Ritter (1860–1949), a physician, women’s rights advocate, and civic leader active in California at the turn of the twentieth century.1 During one of my trips to the Bancroft Library Archives at the University of California, Berkeley, I learned
had questions regarding citations. The University of Michigan–Dearborn supported conference trips that led to my conversations with Gesa about this project. My mentors at the University of Illinois—Gail Hawisher, Peter Mortensen, Paul Prior, and Bill Kelleher—also helped me when a graduate student and now in spirit, as also do my fellow graduate students: Joyce Walker, Karen Lunsford, Mary Sheridan-Rabideau, Renee Thomas Pyrtel, and Amanda Shepard. Thanks to other friends who supported my
became history with a capital H. I broke the burials into decades starting in 1840 and stretching until 2000, sixteen decades in all. My primary interest was in the 365 burials in the nineteenth century. This was the time that most corresponded to the “frontier” period of Illinois history. Most of those people had either settled the land themselves or were the children of those who had. Using their death records to compare their lives with the lives of those who came after them could be
written in English that is about Albizu. It dates to 1971. One must wonder how that can be. From here, I follow the trail. It’s still ahead. But this much I know: 85 Victor Villanueva Albizu’s Context Pedro Albizu Campos was—is—seen as a revolutionary. But there was no revolution; there will be no revolution. Revolution requires unity. Unity means a clear understanding of one’s status. But Puerto Rico’s status, its identity, is a discursive whirlwind. A rhetorician reels at the obfuscation.
obligation to and alliance with the land are the central practices through which my presence there is negotiated. So, whether harvesting wild garlic or Eastman’s writings, in that geographical space, I am engaging in an already established alliance with the physical and emotional needs of the land, an alliance that requires care, respect, and gift-giving for the things that I take away. And because the land, at least, remembers its obligations, I needed to remember, and honor, mine. One of the