Lost and Finding Aids

I did not major in history as an undergrad, and did not write a thesis on a historical topic, so the first time I ever set foot in an archive was in my second semester of graduate school. This condition--being a graduate student in history that didn't know how to use an archive--had me breathing into a brown paper bag. The first year of graduate school is a nine-month grinding down of your confidence (see: impostor syndrome), and the specter of being berated by an archivist for knowing absolutely nothing  was like twisting the knife into the heart of my fragile emotional being. It worked out well for me, though, because I decided that the best way to cope with my anxiety was to first go to a little archive with a nice archivist, get my feet wet there, and then face the big scary Manuscript Room of the New York Public Library the following day. In that little archive with that nice archivist, I found a wonderful collection of documents that inspired my whole dissertation! So, no regrets.

Now, three years later,  when I go to visit an archive I feel excitement rather than anxiety. By the time I show up, I already know what I'm looking for--and more importantly, where to look for it. That's because I use archival finding aids to figure out what libraries have collections of documents related to the history I am researching. 

What exactly is a finding aid? Well, let's say that a Very Important Woman (maybe a socialite? maybe a radical labor activist?) decided to donate all of her letters, diaries, business records, scrapbooks, and files so that future scholars can learn about her interesting life. She contacts a library she really likes--maybe her alma mater, or maybe a library to which her friends or fellow activists donated their papers--and they agree to preserve her documents for the use of researchers. When the library gets the Very Important Woman's stuff, it's probably in some cardboard boxes. Perhaps they're neatly placed in the same order they were in when they lived in the Very Important Woman's filing cabinet. Or, more likely, they arrive disorganized. An archivist then has to process this collection of documents. Processing means to put the records in an order that makes sense, whether it was the way that the Very Important Woman arranged them, or by placing them in order chronologically by year or thematically by topic (debutante balls and charity dinners, or union rallies and Communist Party meetings). As this order is created, the documents are placed into file folders and then into boxes (like this or this). Some collections fill only one box, but most take up several. Once everything is filed away, archivists create a finding aid; it's a map that tells you, the researcher, what documents are in those boxes and folders. 

Before breaking down the collection into this level of detail, a finding aid begins with a description of the collection. If the collection is of an individual's personal papers, the archivists will also include an autobiographical note.

“These records of a Very Important Woman provide valuable insight into 1920s society. Very Important Woman was involved in major events of the 1920s like Big Parties/Rallies with other Very Important People who are historically relevant if you study 1920s society or social movements.

The Very Important Woman was born in 1898 in a big city, to aristocratic parents with no money who worked hard to instill in the Very Important Woman the values of polite society and solidarity. She died after establishing a magazine and foundation dedicated to Charitable Causes and the Social Good.”

The beginning of a good finding aid will also list the subjects (topics or individuals or locations) that are especially prevalent in the collection.

After all of this, the archivists describes the contents of each box and folder. Finding aids are rendered in various degrees of detail, which can be challenging. If an archivist was given a substantial amount of time to process a collection, they usually include more detail about what's in each individual folder. Usually, though, a finding aid only tells you the label of the folder. It might say something like "Very Important Woman's Correspondence with Labor Activist," or "Debutante Balls, 1918-1919." As a researcher, you don't know if there's one letter or one hundred letters in that folder, or if "Debutante Balls" refers to parties thrown by the Very Important Woman or parties she attended. When you open that folder, you have no idea if you're in for some fun or some frustration. 

So, how do you find a finding aid? Sometimes it's as simple as Googling "Very Important Woman." More often I use a database called Worldcat to search through many library catalogs at once. It can be unreliable because each library has to sync their catalogs up with Worldcat; if they do not, you might miss something. To be thorough, I also search the catalogs of libraries and archives that would be a logical place for my historical subject (either an individual or institution) to deposit their records. I look at all the public and university libraries in their city, or I look at special archives dedicated to a defining characteristic of my historical subject (like at an archive that specializes in American Jewish history or one that collects materials from social welfare institutions). It's time consuming to go to each library's website and type your search terms into their catalogs, but sometimes you find complementary collections to the one your were looking for. That's always a nice surprise! 

Once I find my finding aids, I then decide if a collection seems valuable enough to justify a visit to that archive. Sometimes it's an easy decision, like when a library has the complete papers of the Very Important Woman who is the subject of your dissertation. Other times, you know you want to write a chapter about the Very Important Woman's favorite charity, and you look at the finding aid for their records--which with your luck are at an archive on the other side of the country--and you realize that the charity only donated one box of documents and all of the folders are labeled "Tax Forms" and dated from the 1970s, well after the Very Important Woman died. It's not worth buying a plane ticket to look at that! That's when you decide to cut the chapter, or to base it on research that has already been done (secondary sources). 

Finding Aids are an invaluable tool to a researcher, but like all tools they vary wildly in quality and helpfulness.* Sometimes you end up with a top-of-the-line power circular saw with laser precision guide and built-in level, and sometimes you end up with this. The more you use finding aids, the more adept you become at working with what you're given!

If you're interested in looking at a few examples, here are a few finding aids from my own research that represent the spectrum of detailedness:

Solender Family Papers (American Jewish Historical Society/Center for Jewish History)

Fort Washington Branch Records (New York Public Library Archives)

Henrietta Scherer Papers (Tamiment Library, New York University)

*Let me make it clear that this is not always the archivists' fault. They are often underfunded and overworked. Most archives have more collections than their existing staff is able to process, but grants to hire more helping hands are really competitive and hard to come by. I love archivists and librarians, and could not do my job without them.

Preview: Archive Week

This week, I will explain what exactly historians are up to when they say they are off "doing research." Each day, I will post about one step of the process of visiting an archive, from figuring out which archive to visit, what they have there, what documents you want to look at, how you even get to look at them, and what you do once you're allowed to look at the documents. By the end of the week, my hope is that an accountant or a plumber or an artisanal chocolate maker can understand what exactly fills a scholar's day when they are conducting historical research. 

Orienteering

Archival research resembles a hiking trip. You start out the hike with a path you decided to follow based on some known information: distance, incline, degree of difficulty. The first few miles you manage to keep yourself oriented to the path as rendered on your map. There are clear cairns, or trail markers, that keep you from wandering astray. At some point, though, you come to the intersection of two trails, or the trail markers become obscured, and you can no longer tell if you're going north or south, east or west. Experienced hikers can figure it out quickly and get back on the trail, but if you're not so good at reading a map you end up standing there, looking left and right, unsure of whether you should forge on or backtrack. You wonder--what will happen if I leave this path? Will I wander off so far that I can't find my way back to this point, or will this be a productive detour that leads me past some beautiful nature stuff that I didn't even know was there?

If the dissertation prospectus is my map, and the historical narrative (the history of JCCs) is my trail, I feel like I'm standing in the middle of the woods completely disoriented. Up until now, this path was all about children--more specifically, how Jewish social workers in JCCs tried to prevent delinquency and promote conformity and "adjustment" to an American-Jewish identity. Moreover, I presumed these kids were secular or Reform Jews. As I've read through historical records from urban JCCs in the 1960s-70s, though, that path has become less clear. Somehow, I've found myself on an intersecting trail, one that runs somewhat parallel to the first but has its own distinct features--Jewish Senior Citizens and Orthodox Jews! 

I'm not sure why I didn't foresee this change of direction. Youth culture and Conservative Judaism moved out to the suburbs after WWII, leaving behind an older and more observant Jewish community. JCCs were increasingly called upon to deliver services to senior citizens, despite their long history of being a youth-centric institution. Most young Jews in the city, however, were Orthodox. The JCCs, which espoused pluralism, had often come into conflict with the Orthodox community. Most of their children went to Yeshivas, and parents found alternative leisure spaces for them rather than have them exposed to non-observant Jews, or God forbid to non Jews! By the '70s, though, the JCC felt pressured to cater to Orthodox families. Demographic changes thus had a big influence on the evolution of the JCC. 

The other big influence that I did not foresee when plotting out the prospectus was how economic recession in the 1970s would influence the JCCs' embrace of programming for Senior citizens. 

In New York, for example, the municipal government provided funding to JCCs for service programs dedicated to improving the quality of life of older​ adults. These ranged from subsidized lunches to tenant advocacy to housekeeping assistance to transportation. Urban JCCs became multi-generational or family centers during these years because this funding filled budget shortfalls, and because serving older Jews provided a new justification for their existence after the departure of young families and children from the city. 

To return to my tired hiking analogy, I'm currently sitting on a log eating a PB and J while I try to decide the direction in which  I should trek. ​It's scary to wander away from the narrative I outlined in my prospectus, but I also get the feeling that the view will be better if I follow the money... And the old people.

PIT-EWR-LGA-PIT

There are many elements of dissertation writing that gut your self confidence and leave you flailing, but there are also moments when you witness progress and feel really pumped and good about yourself. I literally brush my shoulder off when this happens. Even when I'm alone, at home, disheveled, and there is absolutely nothing swag about me. It's my academic humble brag. Oh, I just finished taking notes on thousands of pages of documents? Aint no thang. 

Amidst the swirling uncertainty of the first weeks of working on the dissertation, the one reliable confidence fix I regularly got was the realization (and re-realization, and re-re-realization) that I already knew A LOT about my project. If I made one good decision in graduate school, it was to continue working on the same topic I researched for my mandatory, year-long research seminar. The semester after the end of that course, I continued exploring the topic with my advisor in an independent reading course. I based the dissertation on the two years of work I had already done. 

So, even when I had no clue what I was ABDoing, I could open up my laptop and celebrate. I already had SO MANY DOCUMENTS! Better yet, I had a really good idea of where I could find the rest of the documents I needed! The catch was that they were all in New York, and my home, my friends, and my partner were all in Pittsburgh. I had to figure out whether I wanted to pick up and move to New York for the academic year--I have fellowships for both semesters this year and do not have to be in Pittsburgh to teach--or whether I would rather travel back and forth between the two cities.

Ultimately, travel won out--in addition to really liking my partner, it was going to be a huge burden on our finances to maintain two separate homes. So, in the last five months I have been to New York for a week in June, two weeks in August, and a week in September. On Sunday, I head back for another week! While I am quite sick of airports at this point, each of these trips have been incredibly productive. Next week I will break down the process of archival research into more detail, but for now I will discuss just a few of the great historical documents I found during these trips.

In June, the Executive Director of the YM-YWHA very graciously allowed to make copies of the minutes from the Board of Directors meetings between 1960 and 1980. These valuable sources have provided an excellent overview of the major issues that the Y's leadership considered over these decades. In August I conducted an extensive survey of the Jewish Welfare Board records. This organization served as the leader or guide of the JCC movement for most of the twentieth century. I found materials ranging from conference presentations about JCC's relationship with synagogues to surveys of local communities trying to evaluate the number of Jews living in the area. I was especially excited to find many documents relating to the JWB's concerns about the Urban Crisis. In September, I returned to look at these materials more thoroughly. 

In the interim, I've organized all of these documents into a giant database and I'm slowly making my way through it. I've taken thorough notes on the growth of New York City's senior citizen population and it's Orthodox Jewish community over the 1950s and 1960s. I've also read a lot of materials that discuss tension between JCCs and synagogues. And luckily, I've also found a lot of what I'm looking for: discussions between leaders about how the JCCs should react to the changing demographics--both by race and class--during the urban crisis. 

Reading these documents has shown me that, while many of the arguments that I laid out in the prospectus were spot-on, the history was much more complicated than I initially thought. No surprise, there, but it's certainly a challenge to reconcile my preconceptions with the reality, and I feel disoriented. More on that tomorrow.

Ground Zero

This post begins a three-part series describing my dissertation project. Today I will lay out the study as originally proposed. Tomorrow I will discuss the research I have accomplished so far. On Friday, I will post some reflections on how the project has evolved and changed since its inception. Change over time being, of course, an historian's primary interest, both in the distant past and the immediate, personal present.

I recently re-read the abstract I wrote before I defended my dissertation prospectus. My department requires that the abstract be circulated to faculty and graduate students in the email announcing the defense. I distinctly recall finishing one of the last drafts of the prospectus and absolutely dreading the task of writing the abstract. I also remember that, once I sucked it up and forced myself to sit back down at the computer, writing it was a loathsome, tedious experience that yielded an unsatisfactory product. 

The best part about the whole "ordeal" was that it did not matter; no one cares about the abstract for a document that by its very nature is prospective. Five months later, however, when I read this overstuffed paragraph I do find it instructive. It's a testament to the ambition of the project. I really wanted--hell, I still want--to tell a thoughtful story with contemporary relevance, national scope, and valuable implications for urban leadership. It's also evidence of my determination; I stubbornly jammed in every element and angle that I determined was important. The abstract talks about Jewish identity, professionalization theory, spatial politics, demographic transition, intra-religious tension, and ethnic conflict over three decades in three cities, and maps all of this onto the history of one institution!

Here's the basic premise: Jewish communities in large urban neighborhoods began to change after WWII, for a variety of structural reasons. Demographic changes pushed Jewish Community Centers (JCCs) in these neighborhoods to reevaluate their membership policies. Executives, Boards of Directors, and Federations of Jewish Philanthropy debated the options for membership intake policy. Would they accept non-Jews, eschewing their sectarian mission? Or should they double down on their sectarian commitment, and work to strengthen their membership's Jewish identity?

I argue that the gradual shift towards more inclusive membership policies in postwar urban Jewish Community Centers derived from the universalistic social work training of movement leadership and local Center executives; that this universalistic commitment was guided by the imperative to maintain professional prestige and legitimize their expertise among fellow (non-sectarian) social work colleagues and to distinguish their expertise from religious leadership; that this distinct professional identity required constant validation because the unique expertise of Jewish social workers justified the existence of separate sectarian institutions like JCCs; and finally, that universalism won out over particularism during the urban crisis, as local demographic changes affected Center memberships and forced a reevaluation of these institutions’ sectarian missions.

I proposed to do case studies of three urban JCCs in order to support this argument: the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood in northern Manhattan, the Soto-Michigan Community Center in Los Angeles' Boyle Heights neighborhood, and the Miami Y.  Throughout the chapters, I would move from telling the history of the JCC movement more broadly to an specific, emblematic episode in the history of one of these Centers. This close study would demonstrate how broader national or regional trends played out at the local level. For example, after describing how autonomous JCCs often came into conflict with their Federations--metropolitan fundraising bodies--over agency priorities, I would zoom in to describe a fundraising campaign undertaken by the YM-YWHA of Washington Heights-Inwood in the early 1950s. The Y was struggling to pay for the construction of a new building, and they wanted help from Federation to meet their fundraising total. The episode not only illuminates the complex financial relationship between the New York Federation and individual Centers, but also how these entities disagreed on the degree of responsibility Board members, Center staff, and local members had to subsidize and contribute to their own services and spaces.

To boil it down even further, here are the assumptions and questions that are central to my project. 

Assumptions

Beginning in the 1940s, American cities rapidly deindustrialized. Economic prosperity and changing social values prompted white Americans to decamp for the suburbs. Many formerly- Jewish neighborhoods transitioned to predominantly black or Latino. JCCs that were built in these neighborhoods to serve Jewish members had to decide whether or not to move, close, or start serving what they referred to as the "total community."

Questions

How did American urban Jewish Community Centers evolve between 1945 and 1980 in response to changing American society and values? How did community building occur in increasingly multicultural urban neighborhoods? How did JCCs define the extent of the Centers’ community? Would it include non-Jews? If so, would the Center relinquish its sectarian commitment and become a secular agency? How would this stance likewise facilitate cooperation with non-Jewish membership, particularly Latino Catholics, or underscore differences? Finally, did these changes affect the social service and communal welfare infrastructure of urban areas?

Any questions? Yeah, I bet you do! I'm not sure that I've done a better job explaining it here than I did in the abstract.