#archivestories

[tildosacchinischool]

June 24, 1945

After 8 days of travel, Gastone Buzzoni comes home… only to find British officers living there. A postcard, a story of postwar Italy.

Gastone Buzzoni. 24 giugno 1945 - tildo sacchini school

24/6/45 Gent.ma Signora, Dopo un viaggio durato otto giorni siamo giunti a casa ove abitiamo con ufficiali inglesi ivi già sistemati. Nostro

[tynatunis]

#Repost @ricardolabougle @download.ins --- Inspired by the monolith from “2001 Space Odissey” @artadiarchitects designed this white geometrical beach club in a desert landscape in Peru’s coast @theworldofinteriors text by Ana Cardinale#archivestories#flashback https://www.instagram.com/p/B-2a7u_BAoM/?igshid=1pdufl308w5s5

[charlesandpatricialester]

These bay trees were used in a fashion show many years ago. Bit big for that now unless we did the show in the garden. #fashionmemories #slowfashion #archivestories #cpl50years

[archivestories]

For the past year and a half, I have been working with an amazing group of public historians, museum professionals, and activists on a project now titled States of Incarceration, organized and facilitated by the Humanities Action Lab. During the Fall semester 2015, a colleague, Robin Kirk (Co-Director of the Duke Human Rights Center) taught a course geared towards bringing undergraduate students together to produce a section of larger exhibit on over incarceration and the carceral state. Our group decided to focus on capital punishment in NC as a way to think about the many types of death (physical, social) that people face in the modern carceral state. For the exhibit, students researched images with the intention of illustrating some of key moments in the history of capital punishment in North Carolina. Much to our surprise, we learned that the North Carolina State Archives has recently closed the capital punishment files, restricting access to documents that had previously been open for decades. 

Pictured here is the headline for an op-ed piece that Robin wrote about her experience trying to negotiate the release of the picture below is of a young man named Allan Foster, the first person in NC to die by lethal gas, in 1936. It is also the picture the NC State Archive has told us is now classified, even though it is widely available in both print and on the internet. 

Read Robin’s op-ed on the situation, which she likens to George Orwell’s 1984, at the New & Observer, or see the text pasted below. 

************************************

In Orwellian move, NC State Archives blocks access to death penalty photo

By Robin Kirk 

In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” the luckless Winston Smith labors in a Ministry of Truth office where he “re-creates” the past by removing or changing historical documents to reflect Big Brother’s political demands.

Winston doesn’t know whether he’s changing a fact or a fallacy another worker has already introduced. He erases some people entirely after the Party executes them.

I couldn’t help but think of Smith’s grim legacy recently. Last month, I requested from the North Carolina State Archives a photograph of the first inmate executed by lethal gas. I’d first seen Allen Foster’s mug shot in a 2004 edition of the state’s authorized history journal and wanted a high-resolution copy.

But the Archives – the state agency in charge of safeguarding the primary sources of our history – refused my request.

I dug deeper. I discovered that the Archives is blocking access to all historical material related to executions. This is especially important at a time when we as a state and a nation are engaged in a vital discussion about the death penalty. By blocking access to information, the state is harming education, stifling debate and undermining free speech.

The photo I sought is 80 years old. Three conjoined panels depict 20-year-old Foster in custody in 1936. Foster allegedly robbed and raped a Hoke County woman in 1935. At the time, rape was a capital crime. Foster’s mother unsuccessfully pleaded with Gov. J.C.B. Ehringhaus to spare his life. On Jan. 24, 1936, the state executed Foster, an African-American, the first in the state to die by lethal gas.

At the time, officials considered gas more humane than hanging. Yet Foster died horribly. The January cold prevented the gas from working properly. As sociologist Trina Seitz described in the North Carolina Historical Review, Foster gasped for three minutes before losing consciousness. Then “he convulsed wildly.” In all, it took him 11 minutes to die.

Request denied

In her article, Seitz reproduced the photo I wanted, which she legally obtained from the archives more than a decade ago.

I requested the photo as part of work I was doing on a national exhibit on mass incarceration, coordinated by the Humanities Action Lab at New York’s New School. Along with 20 other universities, 16 Duke students, a colleague and I were preparing our contribution, a history of the death penalty in North Carolina. The students read Seitz’s article as well as a UNC-sponsored site that reproduces the photo from the NCHR.

Imagine my surprise when the state archivist replied that current interpretation of law prevented access. I reached out to other researchers and learned that the state archivist is denying access to all historical death penalty records.

Among the statutes she cites are GS 148-74 and GS 148-76, in part meant to protect prisoner privacy, a worthy goal for living inmates and their families. Specifically, GS 148-74 requires the state to “minimize duplication and maximize effective use of ... records and materials.” My students’ project achieves both goals. It’s an overreach to apply this to a case eight decades in the past.

GS 148-76 is meant to empower the Department of Public Safety to keep records that enhance the public’s safety, irrelevant in the case of a man executed before World War II.

Worthy of Orwell

Claims of confidentiality are equally spurious. Foster’s mug shot was public at the time of his execution as is the mug shot of every inmate in prison today. Just go the offender lookup page on the prison system’s website, or peruse The Slammer at a gas station.

But it’s not just one photo or a certain category of records. Suppressing historical documents on the death penalty is part of a wider effort by our current legislature to restrict or deny public access to information, an effort worthy of Big Brother. One new law shields the identity of companies that sell death penalty drugs to North Carolina. Another, which took effect Jan. 1, aims to silence whistle-blowers. Anyone who secretly gathers information in order to uncover and correct abuses can be sued by business owners for bad publicity and be required to pay a fine.

Newspapers like this one have and will continue to insist that the state release records that we as citizens have a right to. But why should we as citizens be content with a system that forces us to fight for every paper – or photo?

Foster’s execution and his photograph are our history. To deny access is tantamount to sending the past down the memory hole for destruction. And the only point of that is to suppress what should be robust and informed debate.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article58894128.html#storylink=cpy

[archivestories]

Submission from Prof. Anne-Maria Makhulu, making important connections between documents in the University of Witwatersrand’s archives and contemporary social movements #BlackLivesMatter and #FeesMustFall. 

As some of you know, I’ve been working in the archive at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg specifically, in a depository called Wits Historical Papers. Thank you to Kelly Gillespie for taking me there; it’s a wonderful place. In any event, for a few weeks now, I’ve been sifting through a collection of papers which the head archivist and I both agree looks like a CIA front operation. USAID is the funding agency and the project is something called the “Transition to Democracy Project,” which was inaugurated on September 26, 1991, following Nelson Mandela’s release, with approximately $8 million in funds. The monies went to a variety of “sub-grantees.” Prominent among these were the ANC and the IFP!@? Mortal enemies at the time, but OK. Perhaps more interesting, however, is the way that USAID stipulates that funding eligibility, above all, is understood as the refusal to turn to violence. And yet, as one can see from the marginalia no one can sort out what violence or non-violence might be. Hence the qualification “rallies?” Apparently we’re still having difficulty sorting out what violence or non-violence consists in! From #BlackLivesMatter to #FeesMustFall this seems to be the conversation.

[archivestories]

from the family archive

One of the best parts of #historianlife is the professional imperative to snoop through people’s things. This is especially satisfying, in my experience, when the things belong to my family. You know how it is so difficult to imagine your parents’ lives before you existed, to think about them as separate beings who did not know each other, who lived in a time before you even existed? I often find myself wishing that a movie existed of my parent’s lives in the decades before my existence. I could sit down and watch as a narrator explained to me their hopes and dreams, the difficulties they faced in their daily lives, the joys they felt and the jokes they made. 

Right now what I have is these photos and our conversations to help my piece together their pasts. Pictured here are my dad’s Indian passport for his initial trip to the United States to study at the University of Minnesota, dated 1969-1970 (you can listen to interview with him about his journey at the South Asian Digital Archive), and photo of my mom when she was a nun in the 1960s, which was pasted into her convent diary. 

Once I found the passport, I handed it to my dad - looking at the picture together, I commented “I look just like you,” and he replied “yes, yes you do.” The visa for Europe in the passport included most countries, including Turkey and the USSR, but NOT Portugal (which we quickly deduced was because of the conflict over control in Goa). Also in the passport was a page of personal information, penned by a government bureaucrat with precise handwriting. Under occupation, it says “employee in a firm.” 

While my dad was in India being employed in a firm, my mom was a Catholic nun: she joined right after high school, entering on September 8, 1963. In the first few months, she began making her own clothes, spent long hours learning to chant, attending masses, and playing volleyball in a habit. During her first year, JFK was shot. The funeral and national day of mourning was on her 19th birthday. She wrote that it was sad, and that the other sisters made her a fudge cake. Her final thought for the day: “I’m 19 now - so old.” 

[archivestories]

the city as archive, geography as history

[Photo credit! Eli Meyerhoff]

Pondicherry, a city of around 700,000 in south-east India, was a French territory, beginning in the late 17th-century, but without interruption between 1814 and 1954. I wrote my dissertation about Pondicherry, specifically the decolonization of Pondicherry. It will probably come as little surprise to many that almost all of the archival records for a project like this are in France (with some important addition in England). While Indian archives hold some copies of early Pondicherry records, and then official correspondence with the French after 1947, researchers of French-Indian history need to spend a great amount of time in France. Which is exactly what I did. 

Now, almost two years after finishing the dissertation, here I am, in Pondicherry, walking down the streets I have seen on maps for years, bearing the names of figures I have followed through countless government memos and "confidential" correspondence. One of the most interesting legacies of the decolonization movement is hardly visible on paper, but is incredibly present in the everyday life of Pondicherry today. Pictured here is Edouard Goubert, a politician of mixed French and Tamil heritage, who spent the majority of his life in Pondicherry. He was a Francophile, he served in the French military in the First World War, and by the late 1940s, he had started the French India Socialist Party, and was elected to the French Senate as one of the representatives from Pondicherry. As many groups called for the merger of Pondicherry into India and the end of French rule in the area, Goubert initially led the groups committed to staying within the French Union. 

Goubert is celebrated today in Pondicherry because he eventually changed his position and 1954 led the final charge to merge with India. Along with his political transformation, he changed his name, and his clothes. His statue, which stands in a primary location in the ville blanche (literally "white town" but now called on many maps "heritage town"), depicts Goubert in a typical Congress Party outfit, with a Gandhi cap and Nehru jacket, symbolizing his commitment to independent India. This image is striking in comparison to the majority of photos of Goubert from his life, where he is usually seen wearing a Western-style suit and tie.

In just about every history written of Pondicherry, no one has anything good to say about Goubert. The pro-French side thinks him a traitor, while various Indian political groups think he was a man inspired only by political ambition, with little thought of the people of Pondicherry. He is accused of running smuggling circles, hiring goondas to bully political opposition, and of being interested only in himself. 

Yet, Goubert's name graces what is perhaps the most important street in Pondicherry. Goubert Avenue runs alongside the sea, one of the main tourist attractions in the city.On weekends, hundreds, if not thousands, of tourists, primarily from the nearby megalopolis Chennai, but from all over India, with dozens of French tourists thrown in for good measure, descend on this road, which is blocked to car traffic at night, to walk, sit by the Bay of Bengal, and have snacks and chats with friends and family. 

Despite the prominence of Goubert’s name on the walls that line this road, every single auto-rickshaw driver I've encountered refers to is as “Beach Road.” While the post-colonial city planners gave a great amount of prominence to Goubert’s name, it’s not clear from daily interactions that he is remembered much at all.  Goubert Avenue, to my eyes, is the happiest road in Pondicherry, a strange fate for such a divisive figure, but perhaps a telling one. Goubert transformed his entire identity to fit his changing surroundings, an apt metaphor for post-colonial Pondicherry. 

[archivestories]

Photos from the Bulletin of Physical Education, produced and published by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. All photos here from issues published between 1950-1955. 

Sometimes the most interesting insights of working with material objects come from encountering their physicality - the journal pictured here, the Bulletin of Physical Education, was published out of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, located in Pondicherry, India. While looking through the first 10 years of the journal, dedicated to detailing the program of physical education in the Ashram, which ranged from body building to tennis to wrestling and the theater, I noted the many ways that readers had engaged with the publication. First, the cover, printed in a bright orangish-red with the circular symbol of the Ashram in the top third of the page, has been adorned with a swastika, sketched in blue pen. The swastika, while widely associated with European fascism and the German National Socialist Party, is an ancient symbol found in the Indus Valley region as well as across the Mediterranean. The common story is that the Nazi's "reversed" the swastika when the appropriated it for their  cause, although in this sketch, it's quite hard to tell what the intentions of the sketcher were. Did the holder of the blue pen want to adorn the Ashram insignia with an old symbol of Indian pictography, or did they find similarities between the Nazi regime of national masculinity and the pictures printed in the journal?

Which brings me to the second point: these journals are filled with pictures of men posing in body building positions - some mimic ancient Greek and Roman poses, while others are sheer celebrations of the male body. The writing in the publication focuses quite a bit on the importance of building strong bodies to participate in and defend the nation. Women are pictured alongside the photos of men, though rarely together. The women are almost never in close-up - their bodies are covered in shape-less shirts and shorts, the contours of their bodies hidden. Men and their bodies are highlighted over and over again. 

The bottom picture here shows that someone at some point has torn out one of the mal-posing pictures, revealing a jagged edge and the underlying picture of a group of children. Who tore this picture out, and why? Did they admire the man pictured? Did they strive to emulate him, to posses his picture, to gaze at it from the comfort of their home? Where was the person who tore out the picture - in India, in England, in the United States, in the University of Washington library (the holding library that sent me the journals through Interlibrary Loan?) There is something quite beautiful in knowing that somewhere in the world someone might be walking around with this photo in their pocket (but I DO NOT advocate tearing out pages from books! Obviously!)