A Good Week at the Archive
At the archive. © Erin Faith Allen
This is what a good week looks like.
Thousands of scans of primary source material that has not been looked at in three decades, waiting quietly in a dark warehouse. Three days at the archive, with the third day being cut short by the archive closing down and the imminent, eerie sound of tornado warning sirens. This was the kind of spring sky that means business.
I packed up, relocated to the Airbnb, and sat in my room while the sirens ran their course, still pulling the threads together about what I had been reading, quickly, as I scanned as fast as I could.
That is a side effect of archival work that nobody talks about. You do not leave your work in the reading room. It follows you into the rental car and into wherever you eat and sleep, and in the morning you go back and do it all over again until it’s time to come home.
Even then, it doesn’t end when you arrive home. That’s where the real fun begins.
This is just the latest round of thousands of scans, with thousands more to follow.
Erin Faith Allen is an investigative war historian and the founder of Fortitude Research, specializing in WWII archival research, wartime reconstruction, Holocaust documentation, and the recovery of women's wartime histories. She is a leading authority on the 42nd "Rainbow" Infantry Division and the liberation of Dachau concentration camp. Her forthcoming book, One Day Over the Rhine, is in active development.
All original photographs and written work published on this site are copyright Erin Faith Allen. Historical and archival images are used where they exist in the public domain.
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