Francis Xavier Blouin, Jr., And William G. Rosenberg, Eds., Archives, Documentation, And Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar (Book Review‪)‬

Francis Xavier Blouin, Jr., and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Archives, Documentation, and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar. 502 pp. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007. ISBN-13 978-0472114931. $60.00. From ancient Rome's damnatio memoriae to George Orwell's memory holes, from the ancient Library of Alexandria to Google's proposed digital repository "of all books in aU languages," people have ever been concerned about the written products of history, what they signify, how to preserve them, and how to make them accessible (or not, as the case may be). (1) Archives, in Randolph Starn's words, are "surrogates of God, and of the devil too"; and although materials have been archived since history has been recorded, only since the 19th century have they been "primary sites of the labor and legitimacy of professional historians." (2) Indeed, both the Enlightenment and Romanticism, the two great human movements of the modern age, are embodied in the archive. I suspect that most researchers have experienced that existential frisson of excitement and dread on gaining access to a private or public archive: existential because our early careers can depend on it; exciting because we have gained entry to a defined body of primary sources on our research topic; dread because we may not find what we think is there after all. Starn's characterization may seem a little hyperbolic, but romanticism still accompanies our rational inquiry in the archive.