Attempts to register and control the populations of the east left a documentary record that was often extremely local. Provincial subjects proved astute readers and compilers of local documentation, which they rearranged in order to make claims of right. These claims can be mined for their underlying legal ideologies. Provincial subjects imagined law not as an abstract system, but as a running list of privileges and disabilities. Rights emerged from having the most correct or most persuasive hermeneutic for making sense of collections of documents in dialogue with officials, through the process of generating legal paperwork. Archives were not merely repositories of external facts about the world: they were collections of arguments that could be made. Law emerged from the collaborative process of claiming such rights.

In 2009, numerous manuscripts, previously thought to be lost, were rediscovered in what was once Florence Price’s summer home. The rediscovery narrative that followed, especially in white mainstream media discourse in the United States, focused more on the rediscovery of Price herself, rather than on the rediscovery of her manuscripts. Not only did this distort Price’s meaning to a modern-day, mainstream audience; it also erased the scholarly and archival efforts of practitioners, which can be dated back to the era of Price’s activity. Black classical communities in the United States kept Price’s musical legacy alive through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This chapter therefore asks: How do we listen to Price today? The Price archives, the narratives of community embedded in her musical manuscripts, and the ensuing recovery work emerge as important factors in this new era of Price scholarship.

The late Rae Linda Brown was instrumental in taking Florence Price scholarship to new heights. She worked as part of a dedicated cohort of Price scholars and performers (such as Mildred Denby Green, Barbara Garvey Jackson, and Althea Waites) to bring the life and music of Price to wider audiences, in and outside of academia. This chapter positions Brown as an important link between the earlier efforts of New Negro era musicologists who documented Price’s outputs during the composer’s lifetime, the post–civil rights era musicologists who contextualized Price and her contemporaries in a deeper social history of Black American music, and the twenty-first-century interventions as represented in this companion. This chapter delves into Brown’s journey to tell Price’s story, encompassing her first encounters with Price’s music as a student at Yale and her monumental efforts to subsequently archive, publish, and publicize the details of Price’s groundbreaking story. In this chapter, the centrality of several library collections, including those at the University of Arkansas, come to the fore.

This chapter examines the engagement of women next of kin of forcibly disappeared individuals in Sri Lanka with the Consultation Task Force on Reconciliation Mechanisms (CTF). The CTF was tasked with consulting on the design of four transitional justice mechanisms in 2016, including an Office on Missing Persons. Even though the government refused to respect the findings of this process, the chapter shows that the CTF generated a significant archive that can be probed as an ‘archive of desire’. This archive can help us to understand not only the demands of victim-survivors in relation to what form of justice or what kind of mechanisms they believe can deliver justice, but also the depth of affective feelings and investments underlying these demands. In post-war Sri Lanka, this archive continues to challenge and resist dominant narratives of denial and efforts to entrench impunity for forced disappearances. However, such archives equally serve as a resource to build solidarity across differences, to cultivate practices of listening to the ‘Other’, and to refigure the state towards recognising and redressing its sovereign violence.

This introductory chapter presents the main topics and orientations of the book. Its subject matter is the invention of technology, that is, the study of techniques in the twentieth-century human and social sciences – as grasped through the fundamental contributions made by André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986). Biographical background on his life and career highlights Leroi-Gourhan’s wide-ranging scientific productions in such fields as ethnology, museology, orientalism, art history, palaeontology, behavioural psychology and prehistoric archaeology, and indeed the archaeology and anthropology of techniques. The breadth of these contributions reflects a diversity of interests, but also a form of eclecticism or ‘in-discipline’. Alongside long-standing investments in documentary and experimental practices, his writings were structured around several conceptual keywords (‘techniques’, ‘milieu’, élan vital, Homo faber, ‘liberation’, ‘exteriorization’, chaîne opératoire) which varied over time and in function of their uses. In addition, Leroi-Gourhan’s extensive archives make it possible to address the literary ambitions and intellectual practices of the scientist in action.

In this chapter, I explore three female folk song collectors: Lucy Broadwood, Annes Geddes Gilchrist and Dorothy Marshall, and three women from whom they collected songs – to provide wider commentary on the contributions of women to the first English folk song revival and their marginalization. In doing so, I examine the role of women in the first folk song revival, feminist practices in the archive, and a growing resurgence of interest in women and folk music. By exploring three examples of collecting in the first folk song revival, I illuminate the women who operated in the margins of the folk music movement and have since been marginalized by its history. I contend that by paying closer attention to what is found in the margins of manuscripts and other archival material, it is possible to glean information on the singing tradition, and collection practices, of women in the first folk song revival.

The introduction lays out the importance of critical race theory as a compelling analytical framework for historians of twentieth-century British history. It works first from an examination of everyday racism in Britain and the lack of attention to this in existing historiography, and then moves into the longer history of ‘not knowing’ racism that has characterized denials of racism in domestic twentieth-century Britain. The chapter notes critical race theory’s particular relevance for understanding Britain’s claims to racial tolerance in the twentieth century and the production of racialised screen content.

This study of theatre censorship has laid bare the boundaries of the permissible; the messages that people – from bureaucrats to artists, playwrights, and spectators – promoted to advance their view of the world; and the limits of these worldviews. Whilst wanting to recognize the continuities and ruptures across regimes, the book repeatedly shows how the bureaucratic and lateral censorship processes worked together as well as against each other during the period 1788–1818. Taken as a whole, this book rejects the argument advanced by many scholars that censorship was purely repressive and negative; the positive, even propagandistic potential of censorship for plays and their effects on the public sphere must also be taken into account. In doing so, this study also emphasizes the importance of the individual, and how archival material has helped bring these forgotten histories back to life.

This introduction provides an overview of the theories and methodologies necessary to reveal the social, economic, and political lives of Afro-descended Mexicans after the abolition of slavery and caste. Beginning with the cofradía del Rosario in what is now Morelia, it sets the stage for the collection by showing how references to Afro-descended communities continued after independence in 1821. The introduction argues that the limited sources about Afro-descended Mexican citizens do not preclude the study of these communities after emancipation. Instead, it requires careful, often against the grain, readings of racial identities as well as of individual and collective agency, historical themes related to slavery and freedom that are better known in the colonial period. Ultimately, the introduction attempts to provide a roadmap for future studies into the history of Afro-Mexicans in the nineteenth century.

This chapter provides practical guidance for using four types of digital resources: finding aids, digitized analog records, databases, and born-digital records. It points out a variety of potential pitfalls to consider, including searching finding aids in ways limited to the immediate and most obvious object of interest, compared to the benefits of wider searches based on a fuller understanding of bureaucratic structures and personnel. Effective use of the National Archives Catalog requires a full awareness of its limitations and how it can obfuscate relationships among various organizations and records. The discussion of digitized analog records describes various approaches, using as examples the online resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA, as well as the digitized microfilm of Department of State records by the National Archives. The World Military Expenditures and Arms Transfers Data Files and the Disaster History Files are examples of traditional databases discussed. The Department of State Central Foreign Policy File for the years 1973–1979 is discussed in depth, including what is and is not online, how to effectively search the records, the use of P-Reels, and how to interpret the TAGS system. The chapter closes with suggestions on steps to take before visiting research institutions.

Adopting a microhistorical approach and narrowing the scale of observation offers Cold War historians invaluable heuristic and narrative opportunities, uncovering little-known, seemingly “small” stories that nonetheless hold significant illustrative and historiographical power. This approach repositions human agency at the center of historical narratives and examines its interplay with broader political, geopolitical, and ideological structures. Drawing on Edoardo Grendi’s famous “exceptional/normal” antinomy, the book reconstructs the story of the evangelical Church of Christ’s mission in Italy – a story that is, at first glance, highly exceptional, but on closer examination proves to be remarkably normal within its broader historical context. The analysis seeks to connect global history with microhistory, bridging the dynamics of world integration, such as the Cold War, with the bottom-up perspectives of long neglected actors. This methodological challenge is compounded by the abundance of primary sources available to historians of post-1945 international relations. By exploring the Church of Christ’s Italian mission, the book highlights the potential of microhistory to enrich global historical frameworks, weaving together large-scale structural forces with the intricate, human-scale dynamics that often drive historical change.

The chapter offers a critical social-historical and theoretical framework to analyze transitional justice politics in Eastern Europe, particularly Polish lustration, in the global post-Cold War moment marked by the proclamations of the “end of history” and ideology, the “moral turn,” the memory boom, the rise of human rights and rule-of-law imaginaries, neoliberal globalization, and their crises and alleged ends today. The chapter unpacks the concept of moral autopsy, which underpins transitional justice efforts such as lustration and reconstructs communism as a dead and ruinous past and criminality, the truth of which it seeks to trace and dissect in the persons associated with communism, especially communist secret service. The chapter focuses on the themes of truth-telling, deception, and treason articulated by moral autopsy and Polish lustration, and places them in the context of postsocialist contradictions of liberal legal and capitalist transformations. The chapter discusses the key methodological orientations of the book, particularly the conditions of ethnographic research on lustration, marked by pervasive suspicion of betrayal and moralization of politics and history.

Seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a city of innovations. Explosive economic growth and the expansion of overseas trade went hand in hand with a high level of religious tolerance. In this world of increasing complexity, legal and governmental innovations were essential in order to adapt the urban institutional landscape to the challenges posed by these great social, economic, and cultural changes. The topic of insolvency legislation, as a crucial junction of the fundamental contextuality of commercial law, is most suitable to shed new light on the precise circumstances under which the most striking and seminal developments in the rise of a modern commercial order took place. This introductory chapter explains how new empirical evidence from Amsterdam's legal archives can help understand how innovative governance and legal practices interacted with moral thought in order to produce a liberal, open-access insolvency regime.

This chapter explores a form of anticolonial resistance that has gone relatively unnoticed by social theorists – insurrections aboard slaving ships. How might social theorists effectively represent, theorize, and contextualize these moments of anticolonial action? Drawing on the materials from the newly opened Lloyd’s archives, we discuss the importance of the insurance archive to histories of slavery and how these materials – despite their colonial ontologies – can offer novel understandings of anticolonial action. The materials permit scholars to uncover a complex set of financial logics that convey multiple different meanings about the category of the human and allow social theorists to ask different questions. Even the smallest details in the most highly localized spaces can provide insight into the nature of resistance and revolution.