Manuscripts for Recent History: A Proposal for a New Approach

Abstract

Historians are continually searching for ways to delve into the mass of documentary materials available for research. Forays into the recent history of public affairs, however, give the archival problem a new twist. Unless special measures are taken to acquire evidence being produced, it will be destroyed and hence unavailable for later historians. Moreover, historians of the contemporary United States, who are in touch with the wide-ranging documents about public affairs and with their sources, can play a unique role in assembling contemporary records as well as preserving them. Here I wish to stress both aspects of this problem: the need to take special steps to preserve contemporary documentary material that often becomes irrelevant to policy actors very quickly and is both neglected and allowed to disappear, and the important role that historians working in contemporary history can play for future historians in assembling and preserving that material. In undertaking research on public affairs involving environmental issues since World War II, I found it necessary to ferret out documentary materials myself.1 Few of the records I sought were available in archives. Hence I had to search them out from those who created them. Some of those records would undoubtedly have been preserved in due course, as citizen environmental organizations developed an interest in preservation and sought out archives to hold records, or as archives reached out to citizen groups. Other documents, such as those created in the course of public decisions, would probably be preserved in some public archive, but they would be quite scattered and difficult to bring together. So I found myself not only acquiring records to preserve them for future, as well as current, research but also looking on the task as one of assembling and organizing records for use by later historians, as well as myself. Here I wish to describe the kinds of evidence assembled for that one area of research in public affairs and to argue that special efforts to apply similar strategies in other areas are needed if future historians are to tackle many policy questions. Several preliminary observations are in order.