College Archives as Windows on American Society

Abstract

The following thoughts reflect encounters with college and university archives over a period of fifteen years. My research on nineteenth-century higher education in America has taken me from Colby College during a Maine winter to Mercer University during a Georgia summer, from the venerable repositories of Harvard University to the modern facilities of Franklin College in Indiana, and to more than a dozen other college and university archives along the way. These efforts have been directed primarily toward understanding the many ways in which collegiate enterprises intersect with the development of American society. College archives have been my windows on the history of this nation from 1800 to 1930. An increasing number of historians have occupied the same vantage point during the last decade or so. Unlike the vast majority of educational historians who preceded them, currently active scholars rarely limit their efforts to carefully chronicling the history of a single institution. They are likely to study groups of institutions and to approach the history of higher education with broader questions concerning particular periods or regions. They place difficult demands upon the resources of archives and upon the resourcefulness of archivists who want to assist serious visiting scholars as well as official institutional historians and curious alumni.