By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist
I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce our Beehive readers to an exciting project at the MHS. In an effort to draw attention to collections that contain material documenting historically underrepresented populations, library staff have added four new subject guides to our website. They describe items and collections related to African American history; Native American history; the history of sexuality, including LGBTQ+ populations; and the history of the economically disenfranchised.
This is a relatively new endeavor for the MHS. Of course, we have hundreds of guides available at our website, but they describe the contents of individual collections. We use these guides to explain a collection’s organizational scheme and assist researchers to locate specific material. The four new guides serve a different purpose. They bring together material from across MHS collections, and with them we hope to highlight the lives and experiences of individuals traditionally overlooked or undervalued in the historical record.
The subject guides are similar but not uniform. The guide to African American resources, first written over fifteen years ago, was substantially revised just a few months ago. It contains a fairly comprehensive overview of material related to enslavement, freedom seekers, the antislavery movement, and emancipation; the colonization movement; African Americans in the American Revolution and the Civil War; African American organizations and education; civil rights; and other subjects. Its contents are grouped chronologically by era.
Collections listed in the guide to Native American resources are arranged within general subject areas, such as “The Land,” “Missions to Native Americans,” “Diplomacy and Warfare,” etc. The guide covers many aspects of Indigenous life, society, governance, and history. Staff members made significant efforts to identify specific individuals and nations where possible, and we particularly wanted to highlight manuscripts, artwork, and artifacts created by Indigenous people.
The guide to the history of sexuality takes the form of an alphabetical list. Included is material related to sexual desire and behavior, sexual and gender nonconformity, courtship, pre- and extra-marital sex, gay rights, sex work, birth control and abortion, pregnancy and childbirth, and other subjects. This guide is necessarily less comprehensive than the others, as the MHS holds thousands of collections of family papers, and most of them cover, to some degree, topics like courtship, marriage, childbirth, etc.
This guide also proved challenging for another reason. It can be difficult to determine the exact nature of relationships between people who leave an incomplete historical record or who had to be circumspect because of stigma or prejudicial laws. The parameters of relationships have also changed over the years, as has the language used to describe them.
The last of the new subject guides covers the history of the economically disenfranchised. Like the guide to Native American resources, it’s organized into broad subject areas so that similar collections appear together. Most MHS material on this subject documents the work of charitable organizations and reflects the class prejudices of the time, but you’ll still find some fascinating details about the lived experiences of impoverished communities. The guide also identifies some first-hand accounts of poverty and hardship.
These four new subject guides—along with our list of presidential letters at the MHS—include links to available collection guides and/or catalog records, so researchers can easily begin requesting material.
Researchers have always been able to use our online catalog ABIGAIL, of course, to search for collections by subject, but a catalog requires controlled vocabulary—that is, subject terms defined by an authority, such as the Library of Congress. The choice of words and the format of these access points must be consistent to be useful. Our new subject guides, however, allow us to include more detailed contextual information, use our own terminology, explain how collections relate to each other, and draw attention to material that may not otherwise get the attention it deserves.
The MHS will continue to collect in all of these subject areas, and additional relevant material will undoubtedly be uncovered in collections we already hold, so the subject guides will be revised as needed. We also hope to create more of these kinds of resources to assist and encourage research into other underrepresented populations.
My heartfelt thanks to everyone who helped with this project!