TRUTHS IN THE ARCHIVES

History Workshop Journal, 2007

History of the Human Sciences, 2013

This article probes the relationship between archives and history by examining the archive policy on historical research in the first modern administration state of the German lands, the kingdom of Bavaria. Given the continuing tradition of the theory and practice of the arcana imperii in the 19th century, state archives served first and foremost the state. As a result, researchers’ interest in archival material was to undergo an administrative vetting procedure, in order to safeguard the interests of the state. By examining comparatively the cases of two petitioners supplicating for the historical use of state archives in Munich, the article showcases the policy of secrecy and the resultant administrative threshold separating the sphere of the arcana from the public. Caution guided the archive politics of state officials and, ultimately, their more or less explicit notions and concerns decided which material was finally to be released, in order to become a ‘source’ for historical s...

Archival Science, 2002

This article serves as the general introduction by the guest editors to the first of two thematic issues of Archival Science that will explore the theme, "archives, records, and power." Archives as institutions and records as documents are generally seen by academic and other users, and by society generally, as passive resources to be .exploited for various historical and cultural purposes. Historians since the mid-nineteenth century, in pursuing the new scientific history, needed an archive that was a neutral repositories of facts. Until very recently, archivists obliged by extolling their own professional myth of impartiality, neutrality, and objectivity. Yet archives are established by the powerful to protect or enhance their position in society. Through archives, the past is controlled. Certain stories are privileged and others marginalized. And archivists are an integral part of this story-telling. In the design of record-keeping systems, in the appraisal and selection of a tiny fragment of all possible records to enter the archive, in approaches to subsequent and ever-changing description and preservation of the archive, and in its patterns of communication and use, archivists continually reshape, reinterpret, and reinvent the archive. This represents enormous power over memory and identity, over the fundamental ways in which society seeks evidence of what its core values are and have been, where it has come from, and where it is going. Archives, then, are not passive storehouses of old stuff', but active sites where social power is negotiated, contested, confirmed. The power of archives, records, and archivists should no longer remain naturalized or denied, but opened to vital debate and transparent accountability.

The years around 1800 have often been regarded as being a fundamental epoch in European historiography, marking the point when history began to emerge as a modern professional discipline. In particular, the increasing accessibility of archives to historians has been regarded as allowing a more scientific historical methodology to develop. Yet archives have never been fully rational institutions or uncomplicated sites of knowledge, and in order to understand how they influenced historical writing it is necessary to study the practices of historians and other users, as well as the custodians and owners of archives. The articles in this themed issue all discuss the practices carried out by historians, researchers, and archivists in archives and libraries. In doing so, they reveal that there was a considerable continuity of practices that transcend the supposed divide of 1800.

early modern repositories of writing i.'! li i.:\ {{'i ;* {,:ir! tI l: ll iar' a} 1,1.1'|r}irlll} I '1 lntroduction: New perspectives for the history of archives

The archival turn in nineteenth-century historical scholarship – that is, the growing tendency among nineteenth-century historians to equate professional historical studies with scholarship based on archival research – not only affected the profession’s epistemological assumptions and day-to-day working manners, but also changed the persona of the historian. Archival research required the cultivation and exercise of such dispositions, virtues or character traits as carefulness, meticulousness, diligence and industry. This article shows that a growing significance attached to these qualities made the archival turn increasingly contested. As the case of the German-Austrian historian Theodor von Sickel and his critics shows, it was not the necessity of archival research as such on which historians in late nineteenth-century Europe came to hold different views. Sickel’s critics were rather concerned about the potentially detrimental effects that the increasingly philological ethos of archival studies could have on the historian’s character. What was primarily at stake in late nineteenth-century debates on the gains and losses of increased commitments to archival study was the persona of the historian – his character traits, his dispositions and the virtues and skills in which he excelled.

This article investigates the emergence of the archive as the primary venue for the production of historical knowledge in the 19th century. The turn to archival research, the article argues, may be considered as a response to the discussions about the problems of testimony that dominated 18th- and early 19th-century German writings on the methodology and epistemology of historical research. These discussions, especially regarding the epistemic virtues of witnesses, also helped create the particular culture of knowledge-making within German historical scholarship that enabled the archival turn. The article illustrates these developments through the examples of Johann Peter von Ludewig, who was one of the most prominent historians of the early German Enlightenment, and Leopold von Ranke, who is normally considered the founder of the modern historical discipline and the most important advocate of the 19th-century archival turn.

PS: Political Science & Politics, (Spotlight: Archives in the History of Political Thought), 57:1, 2023

, genealogy avoids imposing a preestablished meaning on a text and instead allows meaning to emerge from the text itself. The difference between documentary and genealogical approaches, therefore, is less one of archival practices than one of orientation to documents and history. Finally, some political theorists find their archive in space, architecture, and the built environment. Built structures serve as an archive in both the traditional and metaphorical senses insofar as they are collections of artifacts to be interpreted and a medium that "shapes what is salient within our visual and auditory field, habituates us to circulate in certain ways, affects who we are likely to encounter as we go about our daily affairs, and imparts meaning to what we do together" (Bell and Zacka 2021, 2). As Bernardo Zacka suggests in his contribution, the architectural features of bureaucratic institutions can be read not only with an eye to functionality and aesthetics but also for deeper insights about competing rationalities of welfare capitalism. To reveal these insights, archival work takes the form of an immersive observation that foregrounds the situated experience of the researcher and the people inhabiting spaces. This is a simultaneously descriptive and hermeneutic ethnographic practice that "interprets [ordinary people's] interpretations of the social world" (Herzog and Zacka 2019, 764). The distinctions suggested in this Spotlight introduction among documentary, digital, genealogical, and ethnographic approaches are not intended as a comprehensive system of pure types but rather as a preliminary heuristic device that may be useful for methodological self-reflection. Along with its immense benefits, archival work also poses difficult challenges. As Nancy Luxon and Kevin Olson describe in their contributions, archives are incomplete, partial, and limited and they contain silences. How can we discern such silences and what can be inferred from them? How can we respect the foreign context of a historical document while also making it relevant for our present? Whose history and present are we concerned with exactly? What types of translation, transcription, and transposition are necessary and possible? How are we to identify what is salient for our inquiries from the mass of available data? How do features of the researcher mediate access to and engagement with the archive? Moreover, for whom is this work? How we answer these questions depends on our particular understanding of and approach to archives, as well as on the ends to which we enlist them. These brief reflections can serve as a first step toward possible answers.

Archival Science, 2019

This article explores epistemological bases for debates over the nature of archival research and practice, and argues that the lens of historical epistemology helps us best understand the critiques of the so-called "archival turn" as well as continued interest in archives among the public. Close reading of the rise of "scientific" history in the nineteenth century and modern archival practice, as articulated in early twentieth-century archival manuals, offers a new theorization of principles like provenance, respect des fonds, and custody, as well as historians' "archive stories," as part of an overarching though usually unspoken epistemology of archives rooted in intellectual project of the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey to create an epistemological foundation of the human sciences. Following this line of inquiry, it suggests that we can reconceptualize the rise of archival research, the development of the modern archival profession, and the critiques of these trends through the so-called "archival turn" and the post-custodial era of archival practice as shifts that were not just methodological in character but also epistemological. Ultimately, approaching the history of archives through the framework of epistemology helps us make sense of new critiques and continued interest in archives. Despite a growing chorus of acknowledgement of archives' constructed nature, the instinct that documents provide access to the past with some kind of evidentiary value leads toward the value imbued into archives by professionals and the public alike and their continual contestation.

2017

Contents Igor Filippov Destruction of Archives and the Historical science 7 Flocel Sabaté Historical Archives: Function and Destruction 15 Françoise Hildesheimer La gestion archivistique de la Révolution française 27 Bruno Delmas Bouleversements administratifs et transmission des archives. Un aspect de la Révolution française 63 Pierre Santoni La Révolution française, les archives et la « théorie mimétique » 89 Serge Aberdam A propos des origines de la sous-série B II des Archives nationales (Votes populaires, Constitutions de 1793 et 1795) 111 Igor Filippov Through the Veil of Revolutionary Fires: What can we say about Medieval France despite the Mass Destruction of Archives during the Revolution of 1789 141 Stanley Fiorini The Survival of the Maltese Inquisition Archives during the French Occupation: 1798–1800 157 Christine Maria Grafinger Le transport des manuscrits vaticans et l’exportation des archives à Paris sous Napoléon 171 Flocel Sabaté Medieval Documentation and Archives in Catalonia after the 19th Century Upheavals 185 Evgueni Vassilievitch Starostine Revolution and Archives: the experience of the French Revolution of the late 18th century and the Russian Revolution of 1917 255 Zinaida Ivanovna Peregudova Political investigation and the Romanov family archives during the revolutionary days 1917–1920 269 Iryna Matyash Archives during the Ukrainian revolution of 1917–1921 277 Leonid Borodkin Economic Dimensions of GULAG: Evidence of the “Archival Revolution” 289 Jan Rychlik The Split of the State and Archives – the case of Czechoslovakia 307 William G. Rosenberg Revolutionary archives and the “archival turn” 313