For close to 12 years I ran my organization’s Twitter feed. Every week I posted links to archival resources including online databases, websites with a history focus and events focused on history or archives. My goal was to inform. To give people tools they could use to learn more about a particular subject, dig deeper into a family mystery or to explore something completely unexpected.
I love the hunt for information. It is exciting. It is challenging. It is so much fun for me. So finding new tools or records that will help in the next search, whatever it is, is that much more thrilling. However, the true driver of my hunt for information is sharing it with someone who needs it. Research doesn’t feel complete to me unless I can share it with someone, someone who will find it useful.
Substack (the platform I use to send out this newsletter) has just started a new thing called Notes, which from what I can tell is like Twitter or Facebook, allowing writers to post content and connect with other writers and readers. I am not one for posting about my life on social media, but I do love to share resources. So it occurred to me that I could start posting archival resources and links to records on Notes to fill my need to share.
I have lots of favorite records and databases, which might sound odd to some people but is very on brand for me. As an Archivist I do not claim to be an expert or an authority on a particular subject. I don’t believe I have all the answers nor do I feel driven to convince people of my point of view. My goal is not to educate but to create space for exploration. No one ever changed their mind because someone told them to, but if you give people space to learn on their own and in their own time they may indeed change their mind. Or they might not.
The information is out there, waiting for us to discover it or rediscover it or reinterpret it. I often said to researchers that history changes every day, which irritated quite a few Historians, but my point is that we learn new facts, new perspectives and new context every day. Each person brings the whole of their knowledge to the new information. To me that is exciting.
This week I posted a link to the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality website where you can learn more about “red lining” and its history across the United States. Maybe this is something you knew already and maybe it is new information, either way you can do your own reading and figure out what you think and where you stand.
From the website:
“Over the last thirty years especially, scholars have characterized HOLC's property assessment and risk management practices, as well as those of the Federal Housing Administration, Veterans Administration, and US. Housing Authority, as some of the most important factors in preserving racial segregation, intergenerational poverty, and the continued wealth gap between white Americans and most other groups in the U.S. Many of these agencies operated under the influence of powerful real estate lobbies or wrote their policies steeped in what were, at the time, widespread assumptions about the profitability of racial segregation and the residential incompatibility of certain racial and ethnic groups. Through HOLC, in particular, real estate appraisers used the apparent racial and cultural value of a community to determine its economic value. Mapping Inequality offers a window into the New Deal era housing policies that helped set the course for contemporary America. This project provides visitors with a new view, and perhaps even a new language, for describing the relationship between wealth and poverty in America.”