When I think about an archive, I often think about really old texts that have been saved in dusty rooms. Archives feel like something that only historians and librarians ever interact with. Maybe also some graduate students writing their dissertations. But to the ordinary person? We don’t really give it a second thought. Probably because of the way that we teach history in America, it’s easy to think that it’s separate from our lives today, and not living beside us. But history is living beside us.
And that moment we’re in today, where we’re watching a giant empire fall right before our eyes, has been building through generations of actions leading us here. Everything that has ever happened has brought us to where we are today. That is true for the whole of history, and that is true for the moment we’re living in today. That timeline doesn’t stop because we’re alive today.
One day, we’ll tell our grand kids about what it was like living through this moment. One day, they’ll be reading about it in history textbooks. We’re living through history every single day, and I think you should keep an archive of your own.
What is archiving?
People go through life creating things and accumulating information about their personal lives, interests, businesses, and more. “Archivists identify and preserve these documents of lasting value,” according to the National Museum of American History. That means that archiving is simply the act of accumulating historical records or materials. It can be tracking what is collected or just collecting things all together. The place where related historical records and materials are collected together is called an archive.
Archives are simply collections of records, documents, or other materials that hold historical interest. They’re often full of primary sources from people in history: letters, ledgers, home videos, recordings of interest, or anything else. Not always, but usually, they’re all connected in some (possibly loose way). The National Archives hold records from the government, American Archive of Public Broadcasting preserves and makes accessible to the public historically significant public broadcasts, the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies houses a collection of LGBTQ+ historical materials.
Even museums can act as archives! Technically, they’re different because a museum’s main purpose is to display items and an archive’s main purpose is to collect and preserve. But the British Museum does collect and preserve all the artifacts they’ve stolen from countries they’ve colonized, after all.
Why should YOU keep an archive?
Archives usually hold some sort of theme. They’re collections of records that relate, or are connected, to each other in some way. I think this is where the beauty is. When you start collecting and creating things to keep, the thing that connects all the items in your collection is you. It becomes an archive of your life and how you lived through it. You start to become intentional and keep and create things that hold importance to you. And most importantly, you start to get to know yourself even more and, hopefully, ground yourself in your praxis.
Even beyond creating something simply to look back on as “historical importance,” when you start building an archive of yourself, you start to turn your life into something creative. You start collecting and curating pieces that reflect who you are within the context of the time and place that you live. You gain the agency to start taking back ownership of things that they’ve started renting to you. And you gain the agency to start documenting and preserving your dissent against this fascist, crumbling empire.
Is archiving really important right now?
I used to think that I needed to spend all my energy doing the flashy, loud fighting back. I thought that, since the world is so awful, there would be a quick fix, and if I just locked in long enough, we’d fix it in the end. But you can only really do that for so long before you slowly start to realize how long this fight is going to be. We live in a country founded on settler colonialism and built on chattel slavery. But just as white supremacy, capitalism, and colonialism have outlasted many generations, it will outlast ours as well.
There’s never really going to be a time where the world doesn’t feel like it’s collapsing. We’re living our lives inside an empire in free fall. I don’t say that in a doomerism “why even try” way, I say that to mean that our job isn’t to fix everything in our generation. Our job is to carry on the fight of those who came before us so that those who come after us can stand on our shoulders and push us even further. Understanding that, I’ve come to learn that the way to keep going for the long haul isn’t to lock in until it’s over, it’s to align how you live your life with your values.
Because the way that we change the world for good is to change ourselves, and the best way to change ourselves is to reflect and to create.
You are a primary source for this time in history
An archivists entire work is identifying and preserving information, and that information is largely in the form of primary sources. Because historians want to look back on primary sources to understand history.
People who’s work ends up in archives didn’t know their work was archive material when they made it. I was recently at a museum looking at a 150 year old crop ledger that helped researchers have a more intimate understanding of the crops and the lives of farmers during that time. But the farmer who was keeping a ledger was not thinking about the lasting value of his ledger, he was just thinking about tracking his finances. The things that you create are important too.
I remember when I was growing up, when we learned about American slavery and Jim Crow, it never really made sense today. There would always be questions like, “but didn’t they know that was wrong?” and the answer was always something along the lines of, “maybe, but that’s just how it was back then.” And then I got older and continued to read and realized that wasn’t “just how it was.” People were fighting back, people did know it was wrong. There’s no “maybe” about it. But we know this from people archiving their dissent.
But what if we decided to understand that our lived experiences are a part of history?What if we decided to document our dissent too? What if we make sure that activists 100 years from now know that we didn’t just allow our neighbors to get kidnapped off the street? What if we can make sure they know that we’re in the street protecting each other? Would we start to value our own praxis more? Would we start to get out in the street more? Would we value our writing and our art more? Would we create more?
The internet is not forever
I remember when I was growing up, when the internet was still new to being widely accessible, there used to be this myth that things on the internet were forever. Adults would tell us to be careful what we post on the internet because it could come back to bite us in the ass when we’re applying to colleges or looking for jobs. And while what happens on the internet can definitely affect your life, the internet has turned out to be surprisingly ephemeral. Webpages get deleted, accounts get banned, and we lose beautiful gems like StumbleUpon.
And it isn’t just that people stop paying for hosting or lose interest in their websites, we’re losing things on purpose too. Within the first week of Trump’s second presidency, the white house made quick work to remove significant portions of the constitution from the white house website. More recently, they changed the government website where people used to be able to get COVID tests mailed to them for free by the government into a website entirely dedicated to blaming China for manufacturing COVID. On the white house official government website, too.
While they ended up adding the missing parts of the constitution back onto the white house website, it sure does make you start wondering how easy it is to tweak things to your benefit when you’re in power. And that COVID propaganda webpage? That seems here to stay, despite COVID continuing to kill people and research showing more and more long term effects of COVID on us, like rising higher dementia rates.
The threat of having our story erased and rewritten is not just some dystopian future that is just starting to come true, it’s a reality that the United States has made true since it’s founding. When we learned about the history of the USA, we vaguely start with 1492 (even though Columbus never landed in the USA), then start the story in 1776. Well I guess they start just before 1776, so the context of the American Revolution makes sense. But school completely ignores the history of those who came before us on this land, as if they didn’t exist, because those in power are the ones who control the narrative.
How to start archiving in your life
With the government taking things away and everything switching to a monthly subscription service, we’re being forced to own less and less. Capitalism is defined by private ownership of the means of production, but it’s getting to a point where we, the people, don’t even own the products that we buy. But if we shift our mindset to archiving and owning, we can start to change that, a little at a time. Here are some ways you can start archiving (and owning) on your own:
- Buy physical books and DVDs that you love: When you love a story, make sure that you have access to it for the longer term. Streaming services and digital rentals sometimes even change the movie or the copy of the book. Buy physical to preserve the history. Start collecting your own little curated library of art that you love.
- Start journaling: Pick up a notebook and start writing down your experiences, the news, quotes that you like, learn how to draw. Journaling can be about anything! Value your own writing enough to archive it for the long term. Remember, you are a primary source for this time in history.
- Start scrap booking or junk journaling: Yes, this is very similar to the last. But consider saving things you come across and saving that. Pick up the local newspaper, buy last month’s magazines, keep some receipts (prices are always going up, keep proof), keep the logo of some small business you went to (businesses are always closing, but you can remember them).
- Print out articles or essays that resonate: Digital articles get edited, they disappear, their URLs change or you lose the URL. Start saving the articles that resonate with you so that you can revisit them. Save them in a cute binder or bind them yourself!
- Use the library: It may seem counterintuitive to borrow more, but we own the library. The library is ours to use collectively. The more that we borrow from the library, the more funding they’re able to get. Borrowing from the library actively puts more resources into your community, which is, after all, the whole point of all of this.
- Start simply: There’s many different things you could archive, but don’t let that overwhelm you. Start small, start simply. Listen to the advice of professional archivists. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or lost in your collection, but be realistic and remember that nothing is perfect.
While the ruling class may be sucking us dry and preventing our ability to own, there are still things we can do to fight back on a micro level. Stop accepting their robbery and start valuing owning things more. Yes, even small things. We can preserve our own history. And I know that sounds like a massive task, and it is, but don’t forget: we’re so much stronger as a collective. Together, our knowledge and history is far greater than the Library of Alexandria.
By the way, I hope you noticed that the most obvious ways to start archiving are creative in some way. That’s not a coincidence. Art is how we win this; never stop doing your art.
