Webinar On-Demand: The Power and Purpose of Historical Archives

Part of the 1619 Impact Showcase, including "1619 Impact on Educators and Instruction," and "1619 Impact Through Community Engagement.” 

In this Opening Keynote from The 1619 Impact Series, Kimberly Annece Henderson presents her work as a curator of archival photographs for both The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, and her debut book, Dear Yesteryear. Genealogy and Black American lineages are the foundation of Kimberly’s professional practices, and she uses photography, historical preservation, and archives as tools. View this webinar to learn more about her perspective on the power and purpose of historical archives and how educators can utilize them meaningfully in their work.

Key Highlights:

• “I've gone so far as to find a plantation local to where my fourth-great grandmother first appeared on the census records, and seeing that she was leasing land and working as a sharecropper on this land for this landowner who potentially was her slave owner when she was enslaved… I was inspired to do more contextual research, and I set out to find photos for my father's family. So I was looking in local North Carolina digitized archives. I was looking specifically at Duke University's archives, and I came across the Hugh Mangum Photograph Collection, and it changed my entire life,” shared Henderson in her presentation of the process of conducting ancestral research when your ancestors were enslaved.
• Henderson demonstrated the importance of historical archives providing a diverse portrayal of Black people across time periods: “I had never seen such a wealth of diversity among images of Black people from the mid to late 1800’s. And it just struck me … And these are all from collecting institutions across America. So there's Library of Congress, Montana Historical Society has photographs of Black pioneers which are rarely seen, University of Virginia has the Rufus Holsinger Archive, and so on and so forth. I just could not stop researching.” 
• In response to a question about creating archives for the future in our current day, Henderson offered, “I think there's a tendency to think that if it's on the internet, it's going to last forever. And I think in 2020, we saw with the Adobe Flash Player ending and the crash of a lot of websites that were supported by the Adobe Flash Player. The internet is not as permanent as we like to think. And so there are so many really great digital humanities projects where people might have created a virtual space for this venue or created this blog about this, you know, whatever happening. Those things are not necessarily permanent just because they're online… [We need to be] saving things, downloading things, taking screenshots, saving files on hard drives, even printing things out.”