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- I came to Schlesinger first for my junior paper,
and the junior paper I wrote was about the history
of rape trauma research in the 1970s through the 1990s.
And so I came Schlesinger, and that's where I started.
And I ended up loving the materials I found here
and loving that research so much that I'm now writing my thesis
on that subject matter.
- So first of all, I think Schlesinger Library
is a fantastic place to do research.
The collections are really well organized.
A lot of it is digitized.
The whole staff here is incredibly helpful.
- So finding the sort of hidden things
that you wouldn't be able to get just
by scrolling through an online database, for example,
was something really exciting for me
about the physical research process.
- I think by coming here physically
you get the opportunity to find other archives that
are somewhat maybe tangentially related or directly
related to the person or topic you're dealing with.
-The original paper-- and you can smell and feel
how old it is.
Someone held this in 1912 when it was first printed.
- You can see really on scale.
How small is it?
How big is it?
What does their handwriting look like?
You can see the condition of the paper.
Was this letter folded and refolded,
or was it just kept really flat?
Did someone treasure it in a way,
or was it something that was used?
- You can read a lot of secondary sources
and hear about the history of what was happening at the time.
But it's another thing listening to the voices of the people who
were on the ground and seeing what they were going through
at the time.
-I wanted students to encounter this initially, to just make
sense of what's there, to sit with it,
to reflect, to not have any expectations set on what they
would discover-- and allow them to have time to do that
and then figure out, through that first encounter, what
they wanted to come back to.
-The research done here at Schlesinger
completely changed exactly what I want
to do with history of science.
So I do plan to go to graduate school for history of science.
Schlesinger helped me I guess find the specifics
that I was excited about, that made me want to do that.
-I'm in social work school now, and I still
have a huge passion for archival research
that totally started here.
So I think actually one of the biggest takeaways for me
from the Schlesinger is an understanding of how
to do archival research, how to know what to ask for,
how to know how to find things-- all of the really basic skills
that I felt like I was able to gain, develop,
ask a lot of questions about, thanks to the support
from librarians here.
- I think a lot of times in college, people
talk about papers like it's just kind of a glorified book
report.
I would sum up about 10 ideas that I
read in various journals.
And I'd try to put my own spin on it,
but it wasn't like I was doing my own data collection.
I wasn't reading actual archives or looking at pictures
and making my own thoughts.
So doing my own research, connecting the dots by myself,
was something that I haven't done before.
And it was just really interesting to be
able to do that on my own and to feel
like I produced my own work with the things that are available
here.
- If we tried to have a conversation about what
happened yesterday, many of us would not agree.
So the mistake that students often bring to the classroom
is they flatten out the complexity of the past.
They miss the texture.
They miss the contestation.
And therefore they miss the ability
to interpret multiple phenomena.
- Students in history classes have a reflex
where they describe what has happened
in the past in a sort of impersonal third person.
"It says what happened in 1968." "It
says that there was violence at the Democratic convention."
Well, who says?
And how do they know?
What do we know, and how do we know it?
These are crucial questions in any range of disciplines,
and we have the materials to support
students' original answers to those questions.
- What I've learned has completely
changed my approach to the way I do a project or I do an essay.
I always first look for some facts,
and then I always want to make sure
that I understand how people were feeling at this time
period.
You learn a lot from different secondary sources.
You hear a lot from different historians.
They all have differing opinions.
But in order to have a closer connection
to these characters in history, it's best
to see history through their eyes-- and these images,
diaries, correspondences helped me do that.
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