If you have seen any of the “It Began with Bartholomew” videos celebrating the county’s bicentennial, then you have had a look into the collections of the Columbus Indiana Architectural Archives and the Bartholomew County Historical Society. (If you have not seen them, search for the title on YouTube.) Without these collections, how would we explore our county’s history? What would we know about the past, whether 200 years ago or last week?
I have spent hours studying historic photos in books about Bartholomew County, books such as “Illustrated Columbus, Indiana, 1915,” “Columbus, 125 Years,” “The Faces Among Us” and “Columbus, Indiana: An American Landmark.” These books use primary sources. That is, they rely on the records and objects closest to what is being studied. That fall 1878 photo of the courthouse with mounds of firewood alongside it is a primary source. It provides us with first-hand evidence of what the courthouse looked like in 1878 as well as a glimpse of the human and natural resources needed to heat the building at that time.
As an archivist I often think about the fragility of the past, how some materials survive and others do not. Materials are lost in fires and floods, through neglect and disinterest. Increasingly, collecting institutions like museums, archives, and libraries have been acknowledging that they are not neutral. Decisions about what is collected, how materials are displayed and interpreted and how people access those materials have social and political meaning.
I am reading several books right now that could not have been written without access to archival materials. Two, in particular, show both the fragility and import of primary sources.
Indiana historian James H. Madison’s “The Ku Klux Klan in the Heartland” from 2020 examines how, in the 1920s, the Klan flourished in the Midwest by fashioning itself as a patriotic organization comprised of respectable, white Protestants. Blacks, immigrants, Jews, and Catholics were the target of KKK terror at that time. Two essential primary sources for Madison’s research were the “Indianapolis Fiery Cross,” a KKK newspaper and the anti-Klan “Muncie Post-Democrat.”
In the bibliography, he acknowledges that his access to the newspapers and other primary sources is the “work of several generations of librarians and archivists.” Their decisions to collect, digitize and put online the “Fiery Cross” have profound implications for understanding our past and present. For those interested in learning more about the KKK and its activities in 1920s Indiana, Madison’s book is an excellent place to begin. Both the “Fiery Cross” and the “Muncie Post-Democrat” may be accessed online at the Hoosier State Chronicles.
The other book is Joe Sacco’s graphic nonfiction “Footnotes in Gaza” (2009). Sacco wanted to learn how, according to a United Nations report, 275 Palestinians died in the town of Khan Younis in 1956. For his research, Sacco consulted materials in the Israeli Defense Forces Archives, the Israel State Archives, the United Nations Archives, among others. He also turned to people who witnessed the massacre. With archival research and witness interviews, Sacco renders this tragic “footnote” into a story about people, about individuals and their families. Sacco reflects throughout the book on the nature of evidence and the challenges of writing history. .
I am anxious to explore his many other books not only for the history he writes but for his meditation on documenting human experience.
Tricia Gilson, archivist of the Columbus Indiana Architectural Archives at the Bartholomew County Public Library, can be reached at [email protected]
