Taking time to teach hidden histories in the archives

This essay is part of a slow research series, What is Research?

The students stand, pencil and paper in hand, before the display window in the Harry Ransom Center’s seminar room. Behind the glass are an array of objects from the Center’s archives: Arthur Miller’s handwritten notes on a draft of Death of a Salesman; a journalist’s photograph of Mexican Bracero workers bent over in the fields; a massive book for young homemakers published by Better Homes and Gardens; a condescending letter from Norman Mailer to the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry; a photograph of a white, middle-class mother braiding her tomboy daughter’s hair in their postward, suburban back yard. The students are often so engrossed in observing these objects that I have to remind them not to lean on the glass.

For the past five years, students in my “Introduction to American Studies” course have visited the Ransom Center to examine objects related to our course theme of “home.” The course functions as a selective survey of American history and culture since the late-19th century and “home” helps to direct our focus.

In this class, we define home in three major ways—as a literal dwelling place, as a metaphor for the nation, and as an ideological space where ideas about gender and sexuality are taught and enacted. The seemingly disparate objects students in this course examine at the Center all speak to this theme, to the post-World War II section of our course, and to several of our class readings: Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006).

Because of this class’s large size—roughly 200 students—we must keep the archival objects behind glass, which is not ideal. But even with this constraint in place, the students always manage to connect with the objects on display. I have been routinely surprised by the extent to which they slow down, look carefully, and think deeply when confronted with these items from the past. And the stillness and deep concentration the students demonstrate when examining these materials contrasts sharply with their typical in-class behavior.

In our lecture hall, feeling invisible in a sea of students they noisily shift in their seats, chat with their peers, check their phones, and sneak snacks. But the transformation that overtakes these students once they enter the Ransom Center, remove their hats and shelve their belongings, never fails to impress me. With its imposing space and the endless possibilities within it, the Center generates reverence. It quiets students and stills their movements. It demands their full attention.

When the students in this course come to the Ransom Center, I ask them to pick one archival object and complete a primary analysis worksheet, designed by undergraduate interns Chris Mendez and Jenny Townzen, which requires them to examine this object closely and analyze it as a researcher might. The questions on this worksheet are drawn from library and information professionals Elise Nacca and Charlotte Nunes‘s teaching aids. “Describe exactly what you see. Act as if you are explaining the object to somebody who has never viewed it before.” “How does this object challenge or reinforce your understanding of course material?” “Why do you think this item is in the archive?” “What questions do you have about the artifact?”

In answering these questions and others, the students turn their papers sideways and write in tiny print in order to create more space to convey their thoughts and ideas. They have routinely taken so long to complete these credited but ungraded worksheets that I’ve had to shoo them out of the room to their next class.

I bring students to the Ransom Center because I want to humanize the past by putting them into close contact with items from the historical events and transformations we are learning about in class. But I also want them to recognize the partiality and limitations of the archive. I hope to demystify the process of scholarly research and empower them to ask their own questions and tell their own stories about the past.
—LAUREN JAE GUTTERMAN

It is in part because of the ways the Ransom Center compels students to slow down, look closely, and think deeply, that I bring almost every group of students I teach into the archives at some point. In another, much smaller Signature Course for first year students, “Motherhood in America: A Cultural History,” we look at an entirely different set of materials from the Ransom Center’s collection: a forbidding letter from Grace Hemingway to her adult son, Ernest; Dorothea Lange’s famous photographs of a family of impoverished pea pickers in California during the Great Depression; a marked-up, typewritten draft of Mary McCarthy’s best-selling novel, The Group (1954); muralist John Thomas Biggers’s stunning series of lithographs illustrating Maya Angelou’s poem “Our Grandmothers” (1994); Dominican writer Julia Alvarez’s personal essay, “Imagining Motherhood,” published in the pages of Latina magazine in 1997.

One of the central goals of this course is to challenge conceptions of motherhood as natural, timeless, and universal. By examining these objects in the Ransom Center students can see for themselves how the definition of a “good” mother has changed over time, how racial and economic inequality shape experiences of motherhood, and how women have personally wrestled with the pressure to become a mother and to mother in the “right” way.

Despite my own deep love for the archives, I harbor no illusions about their infallibility. As an historian of the LGBTQ past, I am readily versed in the silences of the archive as well as the exclusions built into such spaces.

My first book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage (2020), tells the stories of wives who desired women in the United States since World War II. In crafting this history I depended heavily on research materials I gathered in scrappy, grassroots archives including the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco and the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn. Such archives emerged to document the histories of LGBTQ individuals and organizations that better-funded university archives historically either considered to be unworthy of preservation or actively sought to erase from the past. But even despite the willful blindness of many institutional archives, I found traces of the lives of wives who desired women in several such spaces including the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute, and the Special Collections at Stanford University.

I bring students to the Ransom Center because I want to humanize the past by putting them into close contact with items from the historical events and transformations we are learning about in class. But I also want them to recognize the partiality and limitations of the archive. I hope to demystify the process of scholarly research and empower them to ask their own questions and tell their own stories about the past.

In class, we question together why certain objects have been included in the archive, and we muse about the items that have been left out. I know, from personal experience, that we can find evidence in the archives of histories that have been hidden. But we’ll only see them if we take our time.

Top Image: Unidentified photographer, [Braceros eat lunch by a roadside], 1963. New York Journal-American: Photographic Morgue, B213, Harry Ransom Center.