Archives are places of loss and silence, of allergy and hay fever. They are dwellings and, most famously, a site, even a cause, of fever. Historians and scholars have used these metaphors as a way of challenging the archive as a repository of objective historical truth, revealing the power structures and violences that have fed into it and upon which the archive is built. Drawing from the interventions made by postcolonial scholarship, feminism and gender studies, historians have broadened our understanding of what an archive is, what it does to our historical subjects, and how we—as historians—can read archival sources.
- Jane Freeland (December 21, 2020). "The Allure of the Archive: On Frustration and Comfort in the Historian’s Craft." German Historical Institute London Blog.
If you only accept the archive as the way to tell history, a huge part of the human experience is lost - and it's the history of the oppressed and the marginalized that disappears. (Not to mention, you wouldn't be able to do the history of Antiquity or that of oral societies.)
