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The Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress seeks to preserve personal papers and organizational records that document the course of America's national experience. Its more than 10,000 collections with more than 40,000,000 manuscript items touch upon every aspect of American history and culture. Collections containing labor-related material are considerable and constitute a major archive for labor history research. Some of the organizational records in the library includes the American Federation of Labor Letterbooks, American Friends Service Committee Work Camp Diary, Brotherhood of the Sleeping Car Porters, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, National Association of Railway Postal Clerks, National Child Labor Committee, National Consumers League, National Women's Trade Union League of America, and People's Legislative Service. Some of the personal papers included in the library are of Henry J. Allen, former governor of Kansas, Otto S. Beyer, a consulting engineer and labor-management relations specialist, Warren K. Billings, a labor militant, William E. Borah, a former U.S. Senator from Idaho, and Andrew Carnegie, a labor activist in the late 19th century.

This article focuses on the archive of the Washington Female Orphan Asylum, founded in 1815, and places the study of philanthropy in conversation with scholarship on the archive in histories of slavery, colonization, and trauma. It argues, first, that philanthropic and reform institutions such as the asylum were domestic sites of empire and that their archives reveal the reach of statecraft into the intimate lives of women and families. The article explores, second, the role of emotion in archival research, which can highlight an archive's construction and its silences. The relinquishments within the asylum's records provoke emotion; as fragmentary evidence, they testify to trauma and demand the historian's care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses manuscript collections that document the history of African-American women. Reason behind African-American women's reluctance to donate personal papers to manuscript repositories; Highlights of the General Collections of the Black Women in the Middle West Project; Two repositories in Washington, DC wherein the most impressive and significant collections of manuscripts for African-American women's history are found.

The American labor movement has been heavily Catholic for more than a century, both in its rank and file composition and top leadership. From its inception in 1948 the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Catholic University of America, Washington D.C., has therefore devoted a substantial portion of its holdings to collections in the field of American labor history. Many of these collections were acquired with the help of clerical faculty who had themselves been important figures in early 20th century social reform. The records of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Catholic Interracial Council of New York, and the National Council of Catholic Women/National Council of Catholic Men contain much material on Church welfare work, Catholic social programs, and efforts to influence government social and economic policy. The National Catholic War Council undertook extensive social surveys among the Catholic urban population with particular emphasis on the conditions of women and child laborers, extent of immigrant citizenship and health conditions at home and in the armed service camps. The John Brophy papers is the most consistently useful of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) holdings. The Philip Murray Collection covers the period 1943 to 1952 when Murray was simultaneously president of the CIO and United Steelworkers of America.

In 2017, the Russian Embassy in Washington DC protested that officials had carried away Russian diplomatic archives from their San Francisco Consulate-General, without supervision of Russian diplomats. The objective of this article is to analyze critically the meaning of the legal doctrine of the inviolability of diplomatic archives. The research question is what distinguishes documents in the form of a diplomatic archives from a solely organic arrangement. The Cardinal Rule of Provenance, applied to diplomatic archives, transforms the status of the documents so that diplomats have a sole right to act on them, so to make reasoned judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides an update on the Polanyi Society as of February 2006. The digital archives for Tradition & Discovery were recently unavailable for a reason. This year's meeting of the society will be held in Washington, D.C. from November 17-18. The society supports an electronic discussion group that explores implications of the thought of Michael Polanyi.

In 2006, the Special Collections Research Center at The George Washington University launched a project to collect the papers of Washington, D.C. area poets for the Washington Writers' Archive (WWA). The goal of the WWA is to discover and explore the ways individual writers' personal papers and their literary organizations' records intersect to tell the story of the Washington literary community. As the work began, a tension between the inclusive nature of a community history and the exclusive nature of a literary collection became evident. This case study describes and analyzes the tasks associated with collecting the historical record of a literary community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Joseph A. Beirne Memorial in Washington D.C. was built in the memory of Joseph A. Beirne, the founding father of the Communications Workers of America (CWA), who passed away after more than 30 years in the vanguard of the labor movement. The union started a three-part program, including an archives, museum, and written history, as a testament to CWA's many achievements under his administration. The archives was initiated in 1986, when CWA hired an archivist to organize the Joseph A. Beirne Memorial Archives. The original scope of the project encompassed primarily the processing of the Beirne papers and the renovation of an area in the CWA headquarters building into an archival facility. Since then, however, the role of the archives has expanded considerably to include the preservation of the important records of the entire union and the establishment of an oral history project, which will update an earlier project conducted by the University of Iowa's Center for Labor and Management between 1968 and 1972. The Beirne archives consists of six major collections, which include records relating to the administrations of Joseph Beirne and his successor, Glenn Watts, as well as to the National Federation of Telephone Workers and the International Typographical Union.

The article reports on American artists from New England and their documents and records given to the Archives of American Art. The Emmet Family's correspondence and other papers were given to the Archives in 1990. The archives has acquired several of Dwight Blaney's documents including a scrapbook, exhibition catalogues, and photographs of artists, among others. Other collections in the Archives include Boris Mirski's complete gallery, the papers of Elizabeth Gilmore, and letters received by Robert S. Taylor, among others.

The article reports on a tour of the photography collections and art and architecture resources at the National Archives Building in Washington, D.C. on February 17, 1987. Session attendees were led to the various areas of the building and were allowed to view the motion picture "Paper Mountain." It highlights the coverage of the discussion led by archivist Jonathan Heller.

Analyzes the draft Bill of Rights in Roger Sherman's handwriting found among the James Madison papers at the Library of Congress in 1987 and the circumstances of its formulation. Debate among several leading American historians; Framing and ratification of the Constitution; Significance of the draft Bill of Right.

The archival records of the ASIH are administered by the Smithsonian Institution Archives in Washington, D.C. The records occupy 40 cubic feet of space and are maintained under optimal conditions in a remote storage facility in Boyers, PA. This paper describes the transfer of the Society's records to the Smithsonian Institution in 1974, the additional deposits in the following years, and the basic arrangement and importance of the records. The archival collection is available for research, and anyone interested in the history of the Society may access it by prior arrangement with the Smithsonian Institution Archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the haunted relationality of ethnographic archives and anthropology, and the potential for multimodal installations to highlight these tensions while bringing anthropology toward new audiences and new types of collaborations. We argue that experimental ethnographic installations can be used to foreground complex relations among fieldwork, archives, re/dislocation, and aspiration, through nonlinear forms of argumentation and engagement. The particular cases considered are as follows: (1) Vidali's corpus of material collected in Zambia (1986–90) and (2) Phillips and Vidali's remixed and relocated "radio program" based on these materials and installed as a multisensorial, multimodal ethnographic exhibition in Washington, DC, Paris, and London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on printmaker Richard Hood's paper and Sidney Goodman's papers in the Archives of American Art's Philadelphia Project. It states that Hood's papers include two linear feet of material documenting his work on the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Pennsylvania and on collateral projects. It presents an interview of Hood and his answer on the question about the objective of Art week, he said that it is simply a week set aside for the exhibition and the selling of work by American artists and regarding the question how would he knows if people are going to like the paintings, he said that the American public has become much more appreciative of all kinds of Art. It also mentions Sidney, Goodman, a student of Hood's, and his interview with Terry Dintenfass.

This article highlights the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C. They journeyed to participate in the largest gathering of Native peoples in modern history, to celebrate a symbolic moment in the long, long histories of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and to honor their own survivance. After all, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is the museum, the paragon of all that museums have meant to Native peoples and to those people who have collected, named, studied, and displayed Native Americans and their cultures.

The article highlights a co-sponsored session during the meeting of the College Art Association of America that was held in Washington, D.C. on February 23, 1991. It was not initiated by the Art Libraries Society of North America. The session entitled "Seeing Yourself Historically: The Importance of Self-Documentation in the Visual Arts," was conceptualized by Camille Billops, a filmmaker and sculptor who is co-director of the Hatch-Billops Collection: Archives of Black American Cultural History. The session was opened by Billops by stating that the panel would explore the significance of preserving primary research materials as well as their role in the writing and documentation of events in art history. Other speakers during the session were Linda Hamalian, Eric Cameron and James R. Behlke. Billops closed the session with reference to the taped oral histories in the Hatch-Billops Collection, and to the publication "Artist and Influence."