History is Odd and Uneven: My Toe Tap into Primary Source Research

 Guest post by Bryan Rogers

For the museum tabling I spent a good amount of time in the March on Milwaukee digital archives, mostly poring through Lloyd Barbee’s seemingly endless papers. I also travelled to America’s Black Holocaust Museum and the Wisconsin Black Historical Society, not so much on a specific line of research as for general inspiration.

Last month, we had to take the Clifton Strengths assessment for a sustainable peacebuilding course and I discovered that my number one strength is called Input and involves the collecting, absorbing, classifying, and archiving of information. In other words, viewed through the Clifton framework, I’m a natural archivist and curator of information. Conducting primary source research for this course allowed me to discover the advantages and disadvantages of being, essentially, a wanton glutton for facts and figures. On the pro tip, it makes for wonderfully dense and compelling connections across themes, eras or geographies. On the downside, the process of distilling that ever-widening web of curiosity into something digestible, metabolizable, can feel at times Sisyphean.

Also, in the development of the historical composite character, Leonard Grant Jr., I ended up purchasing a trial for Ancestry.com so I could view photocopied yearbooks from North Division High School classes of 1961 - 1965. They’re stunning.

When I was living in Santiago, Chile I would visit the Museum of Memory & Human Rights at least once a month. They had this exhibit on the second floor, panel after panel after panel, fully composed of letters written to General Pinochet by loved ones of the disappeared. Kissinger just died and I always wondered how his resolve would’ve held up if he had had to walk through the museum. If he’d had to read a tear-soaked plea from a grandmother searching for her only living relative, a thirteen-year-old boy whose name happened to be Henry. For all the sleep Kissinger claims not to have lost while condemning millions to death by carpet bombing and the many millions more to displacement and desperation, it’s hard to imagine this kind of primary source material failing to produce at least a second thought, a widening regret, a reflective pause on the utter tragedy of our human tendency to destroy each other.

Coming into direct contact with the words, images, and people of the past - and especially the contradictions therein - makes a very compelling case for the idea that historical facts and the production of history are two very different yet interdependent phenomena. In all, my brief foray this semester into primary sources felt phenomenal and I see myself doing more of it when the time for history presents itself.