How to Get Inside of History
In the digital age, the concept of a physical archive may seem outdated. Making multiple trips to a library has none of the convenience of searching for information online. But digitizing records isn’t a perfect solution, Alexis C. Madrigal writes, because it may make researchers overconfident that they’ve seen everything, and, as the historian Lara Putnam says, it “decouples data from place.” Still, whether they are scrutinized in person or on a computer, archives have preserved historical moments—via notes, letters, and photographs—for hundreds of years.
The Jack Kerouac archive in 1998, but spending time with his diaries and notebooks in person provides a detailed image of him, including his mindset while he traveled across the country for his second novel, Douglas Brinkley found.Physical documents can help us understand individuals from the past, while capturing the world in which they lived. Stephen Kotkin attempts to tackle botha man and his moment in his biography of , making use of Soviet archives that were not opened until many decades after he was in power. He paints a colorful picture of Stalin himself, but also of his contemporaries, such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.
