Contesting archives

About this book

""Contesting Archives makes vivid and concrete the way historians must proceed when faced with partial or contradictory sources. Historians and anyone interested in how historians work will appreciate the authors' strategies for, and cautions about, unearthing information about women from documents inside and outside the archive." Margaret Strobel, coeditor of Expanding the Borders of Women's History" "The contributors of Contesting Archives challenge the assumption that an archive is a neutral, immutable, and ahistorical repository of information. Instead, these historians view it as a place where decisions are made about whose documents-and therefore whose history-is important.^ Finding that women's voices and their texts were often obscured or lost altogether, they have developed many new methodologies for creating unique archives and uncovering more evidence by reading documents "against the grain," weaving together many layers of information to reveal complexities and working collectively to reconstruct the lives of women in the past." "Global in scope, this volume demonstrates innovative research on diverse women from the sixteenth century to the present in Spain, Mexico, Tunisia, India, Iran, Poland, Mozambique, and the United States.^ Addressing gender, race, class, nationalism, transnationalism, and migration, these essays' subjects include indigenous women of colonial Mexico, Muslim slave women, African American women of the early twentieth century, Bengali women activists of Pre-independence India, wives and daughters of Qajar rulers in Iran, women industrial w…

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