The Questioning Librarian

Klansmen during the Reconstruction era While catching up on Game of Thrones a few weeks ago, I was particularly struck by the appearance of the terrorist organization known as the Sons of the Harpy. After the outlawing of slavery, this group, sporting golden masks to hide their identities, wages a campaign of terror against former slaves, the occupying army, and those who support the new government. Their parallel in the real world is obvious, an echo of the horror unleashed by the Klan and other white supremacist groups during the Reconstruction period of U.S. history and continuing for well over a century beyond that. This unprecedented campaign of violence against newly freed slaves and those who supported them crushed the hope that emancipation and the early stages of Reconstruction promised, disenfranchising African-Americans who had only just begun to exercise their right to vote and hold office.  In the face of this backlash, the Federal government finally backe...

Old reels of microfilmed newspapers (image from the Manchester Library of New Hampshire) Last year, as the terrorist group Daesh expanded the territory under their control, they made a great show of destroying artifacts and sites of historic value in their wake. They were only the latest in a long line of similarly fundamentalist groups that took pride in working to erase our history--the Taliban notoriously demolished ancient statues of the Buddha in Afghanistan, and Malian rebels torched hundreds of manuscripts before they abandoned Timbuktu, to name just two examples. But you don't have to burn books or pick up a hammer to destroy history. While it is not spectacular enough to attract headlines, benign neglect has destroyed enough of the historical record to warrant notice as well, thanks in part to the underfunding of libraries and historical societies. It doesn't generate the same outpouring of outrage and emotion that the deliberate destruction of our past doe...

Last week, I finished the newest work by David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation, considered the final volume in his trilogy about the history of slavery. While the entire work was interesting, from his discussion about the complicated process of abolishing slavery, to the colonization movement in the United States, and the status of free blacks as a window into how slaves were viewed, his thoughts on the larger question of moral progress and human history in the conclusion were most interesting to me. While it is hard, he writes, to look at the blood-soaked history of the 20th Century and imagine that we are making moral progress, the abolition of chattel slavery in the West stands as a shining example of this very idea, that within roughly two hundred years we ended a practice that had been accepted for thousands of years. The question of race in the United States is, however, another matter entirely. Davis begins with a discussion about the an...

Last week I attended a meeting of the local historical society. There was a wonderful meal followed by a talk by a local historian about a park in the area. When he stood up to talk, and I saw his topic was a park I'd never heard of much less been to, I immediately began to think of how bored I would be. I was delighted to be proven wrong on that account; I hardly noticed that an hour had passed before he finished, and everyone else in attendance seemed to have enjoyed it as well. For many, the history of the park, which started out as a trolley park, must have brought back memories of their youth. At least one person talked about how their class always went to the park at the end of the school year, and how they looked forward to the rides and the experience. Some of the readers may remember that my first professional job was working as a genealogy reference librarian, overseeing a collection of local history and genealogy resources at the Uniontown (PA) Public Library. While...