Missing records — in this case because of a recalcitrant former president seemingly in defiance of both the Presidential Records Act and other laws governing government documents — are only one of the many ways that archival records are incomplete. Both public (government) and private archives have often been biased and exclusionary, collecting and sharing primarily the materials of elite people or materials created from their perspective. Just as NARA is making a very public effort to secure the records of the previous presidential administration, archivists in the United States and indeed around the world have been pressing for ever more critical scrutiny of their own and others’ institutional practices.
It wasn’t always possible to locate let alone to use federal records. Though the U.S. government was always concerned with record-keeping, before NARA was founded in 1934, government records were kept in “various basements, attics, abandoned buildings, and other storage places with little security or concern for storage conditions,” the Archives’ own history reports.
Now headquartered in Washington, in an iconic building on Pennsylvania Avenue that houses federal records and also displays the Declaration of Independence, the Federal Constitution and the Bill of Rights, NARA also manages more than 40 facilities and regional centers across the United States. Since its origin via the National Archives Act, NARA lists the Federal Records Act of 1950 and the Presidential Records Act of 1978 among the milestone legislation that makes the agency responsible for managing materials produced by the federal government.
Governments have been largely interested in preserving records of their own activities, such as property records, licenses, meetings of government bodies, legislation, court decisions and so on. There are national archives in countries around the world. There are also state libraries and archives across the United States. Cities and counties often have public records offices or archives, too. In Rhode Island, for example, the state archives are managed by the secretary of state and are “home to more than 10 million letters, photographs, and important state documents that form a permanent, tangible record of Rhode Island’s rich history.” In Providence, the city archives hold an estimated 40,000 cubic feet of records providing a detailed window into the development and operation of city government since 1636.
And these are just the publicly managed and maintained archives. The 19th century was a particularly fertile period for the creation of privately run archival organizations. Regional, local and topical historical societies, universities and more have rich archival collections documenting the history of places, people, institutions and ideas. Founded in 1822, for example, the Rhode Island Historical Society has “the largest and most important historical collections relating to Rhode Island.” County and township historical societies, tribal nation archives and libraries, and community collections all provide places for collecting and sharing the materials and memories of the past.
Many of these institutions have been key defenders of public access to the materials that are critical to our nation’s history. The Massachusetts Historical Society, for example, founded in 1791, was the nation’s first historical society. Among its most significant holdings are the papers of presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It catalogued and preserved those papers, and worked with documentary editors to research and contextualize them, including their direct support for the Adams Papers Editorial Project. It then collaborated with the National Archives and other partners to make those materials available to anyone through the online portal Founders Online, which gives specialist researchers and the general public alike extraordinary access to these materials.
But as vast as these collections are, they are highly incomplete. Most public and private institutions have a much larger body of materials documenting the lives of White and elite people and political and economic histories, than those documenting the lives of Black or Indigenous people or cultural histories. Wealthy families often kept family papers and then contributed their family archives to local historical societies, for example, and public records often overrepresent wealthier individuals, keeping marginalized people, well, marginal. Scholars have had to work creatively to pull the histories of marginalized people out of elite sources.
Historian Erica Armstrong Dunbar, for example, wrote a book about Ona Judge, a woman enslaved by George and Martha Washington who ran for freedom and was pursued by Washington and his agents. While two invaluable interviews that Judge herself gave late in her life to abolitionist newspapers provided insights into this crucial history, Washington’s aggressive pursuit of Judge can be read in his letters via Founders Online.
It is not only the relative paucity of materials that has long weighted our histories in favor of elite stories, though. This disparity has also resulted from institutional collection and preservation priorities. In a frank statement in 2020, the state archives of Alabama acknowledged its role in perpetuating partial — and racist — history. The first publicly funded and independent state archives in the country, the Alabama Department of Archives and History was founded in 1901 “to address a lack of proper management of government records.” But, its archivists write, “for well over a half-century, the agency committed extensive resources to the acquisition of Confederate records and artifacts while declining to acquire and preserve materials documenting the lives and contributions of African Americans in Alabama.”
This statement came during intense public debates about why we learn, read and remember the histories we do. The tenacity of Lost Cause mythology is a stark example of how partial histories are centuries in the making.
Leaving explicitly and purposely wrong histories to one side, the partiality of history comes from telling some aspects of the past and not others, some people’s stories and not others. They result from having voluminous historical records about some people and groups, and comparatively little about others. And they are also the result of archival and library institutions having long collected and organized material that privilege some aspects, some people, some stories.
Just as it is important to take action to make the archival record as full as possible, it’s also important to understand why and how it became so partial. Archival records are a necessary component of an accountable, democratic government. The National Archives is, by its own definition, the “nation’s record keeper.” Incomplete and selective record-keeping leads to incomplete and selective history.
Thankfully, change is underway as archives and libraries reflect on their own institutional histories and practices. Trump’s efforts to occlude the historical record by evading the National Archives should not succeed. But his blatant efforts at distorting history offer a useful opportunity to consider all the ways our histories have been partial — and must be fuller.