On Friday, I made my way to the Healey Library archival reading room. Having been there with the class, there was a feeling of familiarity and confidence that came with the visit. I knew to leave my things by the front desk and that my water bottle could certainly not come with me. I know if it would have been my first visit, much stumbling around and awkward confusion would have been involved, much like the amateurs of some of Farge’s vignettes.

I chose to look at the Lexington Oral History Projects. I knew from the finding aid that contained in the collection were oral histories from Vietnam veterans, but not many details beyond that. The one box that encompassed the collection was brought to me. The contents were as follows: 1 binder, 2 VHS, 2 folders, and 66 CDs. I started with the binder, wherein I discovered a much more intriguing story behind the collection than I had anticipated. In 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, led by John Kerry, organized a march from Boston to Concord, stopping at a few locations to perform “guerrilla” theatre. When they reached Lexington, the veterans, along with many supporters from the community, filled the Lexington Battlegreen with plans to both perform and spend the night there. The city denied access, but veterans and protesters refused to leave, resulting in the arrest of 458 people. The collection of oral histories, gathered in the nineties, details the events leading up to and occurring that night.

A snap of the “guerrilla” theatre

John Kerry surrounded by fellow vets

Upon receiving the box from the archivist, and viewing the fresh DVDs and newly printed labels, I immediately began thinking about the physicality of this archive. Clearly, I wasn’t viewing the original collection of these oral histories, as this compilation had to have been put together within the last few years. This brought to mind questions of the relationship between the physical and the digital. With this collection, the accessibility of the digital archive (the recorded stories themselves) was placed above the physical archive of the stories’ original form—most likely VHS. In addition, not only were the contents of this collection physical copies of the originals, but there was no reference to where the originals were located. As the VHS will someday be a foreign item of the past, should they not be part of the archive as well, even if a new version has been made? It seemed to me that while the stories had been preserved in their digital format—preserving, to some extent, the story of the 1971 event—the event of the gathering of oral histories had been compromised. The ability to fully “breathe in” the dust of the collection in the full historical moment in which it was compiled was gone. A giant piece of the physical collection agent was missing from this collection without any trace as to where it could be found.

While something was lost in the prizing of the digital files of this collection over the physical, a page in the binder noted that an identical collection could be found at the Joiner Center. Although this still presents the loss of the original mechanism, it does reflect the flexibility of the digital archive to escape the “one-of-a-kind-at-one-place” quality that most of the other collections carry.

Moving on to the actual oral histories, knowing that I would barely be able to scratch the surface of the 66 stories in a few hours, I chose three very different interviewees: a Vietnam vet, a journalist, and the judge that presided over the 458 cases of arrest that night. The most striking thing about these stories, besides their varying and powerful perspectives, was the way in which the interviewers controlled the story. While the interviewees wore willingness to tell their stories on their faces, only details were given where details were asked. In this way—and in terms of most oral histories as well—it is the interviewers more than the “magistrate,” as Derrida claims, and the historian, as Steedman seems to believe, who truly hold the power over what is in the archive and what is not.

In addition to the swaying of the interviewers’ questions in the directing and limiting of the story of this archive, time passed and the extent of the digital file also limit the narrative of the event being discussed. In terms of the influences of time passed, all interviewees, at some point espoused that they “can’t remember why” something happened that day, or who was there, etc. Furthermore, many of those present that day have since passed away, continuing the inability of this collection to tell the entire story. Farge writes, “Words carry their present with them, and they tell us of the way things were recognized and differentiated” (82). Considering this, we can also see the limitation of time in the event of the spoken words of the interviewees, who produce from twenty or more years after the event being spoken of. The limitation of the digital file (what has been captured) itself can also be found in these oral histories. Upon starting the interview with the journalist, Emily Frankovich, one finds herself in the midst of a story she’s sharing with the interviewers before the formal collection of the story begins. This demonstrates not only the limitation of the archive to tell the story of the event being discussed, but also the limits of the archive to tell the story of the project itself.

As both Steedman and Farge impress, this archive is an instance of clear incompleteness of a collection, showing that the archive, and thus the history made from it, can never fully encompass the event.

I’m not sure whether it was nostalgia or convenience that led me to the BPL Rare Books Room – I’d hoped to branch out, but the transportation shutdown made that trickier to manage with my schedule – but it felt like falling into an old routine from last spring when I was in the Books, Manuscripts, Libraries seminar (and seeing my portion of the exhibit on the way in is always cool.)

I wonder a little whether I cheated myself, and a bit more whether I’m cheating on this assignment: there are finding aids and a private stack system like any archive, sure, but in the rare books reading room the collection is detailed at the item level and stacked in two long card catalogs: sorted by name on one side and by region and date on the other: so that I always feel tempted to — and this time I did — spend some time sorting through Ireland, Galway, 19th c. or Philadelphia, mid-18th c. and trying to look for genealogical hints. The latter proved more successful, since my mother’s great-great-etc.-grandfather was a Revolutionary War era painter: it’s not the first time there I’ve pulled Rembrandt Peale’s letter or two out of the archive and ran my hand (gently!) over the signature.

And what I thought was going to be a tangent brings me to one of the points I’d like to bring up in passing: I feel really interested in the margins of an archive, which makes me, perhaps, more a dilettante than a proper researcher. It’s obviously more useful to find a complete set of papers or union records or letters, but I’ve always been interested in the odd pieces out — the one or two letters that a Philadelphia artist, say, wrote to a Boston historian, or that a great British writer wrote in passing to an acquaintance in America — the edge cases, let’s call them, of an archive that is otherwise slanted toward certain types of literature and documents.

The discovery process happens so often, then, at the card catalog level (rather than on the individual item level or higher up in a finding aid), and sometimes I think the effect of this organization is not so much one of discovery – the bag of seeds moment Farge describes, say, or the surprising letter sandwiched between two more generic documents, or the experience of rifling through boxes for surprises – but instead one of depth.

You know you’re asking for a letter written by Robert Browning, for example; you know the recipient; you may even get a brief one-sentence summary on the weathered index card, and know that he was responding to condolences on the death of his wife. All this you already know before filling out the small paper request slip and waiting for the material to be (slowly) found and pulled – a brief summary of your experience is already laid out for you —

What you experience instead then is the physicality of the object: in this case, the thick black of the ink, the flourish of the handwriting (an experience that always makes me want more paleographic training), and, most strikingly, the black border on the paper, part of the elaborate system of Victorian mourning custom for a widower.

(Farge was writing before the advent of smartphones and pocket cameras, and the preface does a good job preemptively defending the physical archives by talking about the errors of technological reproduction, but here I think for a second about recopying. If “the hand, by reproducing the written syllables, archaic words, and syntax of a century long past, could insert itself into that time more boldly than thoughtful notes ever could” (17), what about what the hand misses in direct transcription that the eye can catch?)

The experience of working with the details of an object which often escape transcription is one I’m interested in while doing archive work (or maybe this is better classed as “rare book work” or even “special collections work.”) Even more so than the unpredictability of sifting through a box, I like knowing exactly what I’m going to get — and then, it will always turn out, not knowing at all.

Despite yesterday’s heavy morning snow, I still managed the visit to Massachusetts Archive which is rightly located next to UMass Boston. This is the first time for me to enter an archives building, not an archive room in a library. I find myself enjoying staying there and researching into the documents in the past.

Instead of simply depicting only on the documents and history of any archive, Farge shared what she saw and experienced in an archive, in my point of view, in a quite romantic way in The Allure of the Archives: “Large painted murals, vaguely bucolic and markedly academic, darken the walls of the adjoining ball-ways…” (19). “If, by chance, he emerges from the same train, you must never greet or even smile at him. Any complicity would inevitably entail troublesome compromises of principle” (21). Unlike Steedman’s statement: “…as English-language readers, we are forced to have the fever, and, if we are historian’s, forced to exasperated expostulation that archives are nothing like this at all” (Steedman, 1163), Farge’s views sound like a sort of commitment to the affection of archives that I’m able to identify with.

With the of the archivist’s guidance, I spent most of the time on reading the administration and files on the development vocational projects high education. The main body of the collection “PLANNING AREAS FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION” is the explanation of the enacted legislation, approved by the Governor in 1969, on the issue of planning vocational technical education. It listed numerous clear objectives and detailed plans of how to establish the vocational education in the aspects of academic study, health and care, employment program, etc.

Another document that attracts me is the pyramid graph of “CAREER EDUCATION” for a specific project named career education program, which articulates the continuous curriculum at every level. Career awareness lies in the bottom of this pyramid, while occupational specialization is of the top this graph. This document reveals itself in the way of the arrangement and values that people’s consideration and judgement on vocational education, which is as well enlightening to some extent nowadays. In this sense, this is the reason why we need to go through the documents in the past.

“The archival document is a tear in thefabric of time, an umplanned glimpse offered into an unexpected event” (Farge, 6). It is still worthy of considering the value of the combination of the past and present in archive, which not only concerns about the academic research, but the memories of past as well. It also drives me to think about except for the past, how to make this documents more effectively influence the development of education in the future?

To make up the blog post I missed, I spend a while to think about what kind of archive or collection I’d like to present and it turns out that the archives for music fascinate me most.

Rather than just an online music site for the age of the internet technology, the Free Music Archive (FMA) is an interactive music library that involves blog post, latest single reviews, downloads of the archived music, etc. FMA provides legal audio downloads, which is directed by WFMU, a non-commercial community radio station renowned for the freeform and high-quality of its music collection. Thousands of featured mix are available via FMA legally. On this basic level, the music resources on FMA, which exist in a way of reviewing the accessibility of the pieces of music tracks in the past and present online, completely embody the concept of “extension of the period of time” (Mbembe 21).

On top of the FMA home page, visitors can easily choose what they want and browse this site via “by curator” and “by genre”. Curators from throughout the world select and upload the latest music onto their pages. Featured blogs as well unfold the upcoming music festivals, the introduction of artist collectives and the stories behind a certain piece of music which are all connected to the archive. Most of the music resources can be found via genre, through which the music resources on FMA are catalogued into 15 different styles, including blues, jazz, hip hop, country and the like. In each genre tracks, a specific item can be found by the artist, track title, and album. In this sense, the items of FMA is“in a system that facilitates identification and interpretation” (Mbembe 20).

In addition to enjoying the latest music and searching for archived resource, the FMA visitors are allowed to build up music archive of their own by registering their own accounts. As a result, individuals’ participation in the entire process of archive on FMA entails a certain degree of creation: they are able to make comments on what they are interested in; they post blogs to express their ideas, thoughts and stories in relation to music; they even make friends by sharing the great music on FMA. Unlike those traditional archive or online archive networks which are tightly concentrated on professional archiving, FMA looks more like a conflation of archive and social network.

In my understanding, “…the archive affirms the past, present, and future; it preserves the records of the past and it embodies the promise of the present to the future” (Manoff 11) indicates the fact that such archive websites like FMA combine the past and present through music, sometimes even predict or analyze the latent music trend in the future by connecting the people and sharing their different ideas, which sounds rather inspiring and stimulatory to lots of music maniacs and researchers. On this level, the fact that FMA evolves from the diversity and creation of the new has challenged Derrida’s statement: “there is no archive fever without the threat of this death drive, this aggression and destruction drive” (Derrida, 19). However, I’m still considering that whether it is appropriate for an archive to be entertaining. It’s worthy of thinking about should the nature of online archive website cater to public popularity or authority on a relatively limited researchers.

By the time I left the Massachusetts Archives I’d accomplished the vague goal I’d set for myself of looking at photographs taken by some sort of public works department (in this case it was photographs from what is now the Port and Harbor Planning agency) that documented areas of land near the coastal boundaries of the state. While on one hand this goal was an extension of my post from last week that cited Public Works as agents in the archiving (banking) of snow dropped by the recent winter storms, the other reason, the potentially more primary reason, is my own subjective interest in coastal landscape. My hope was that archival documentation of this landscape, as the subject of potential development for public works and construction projects would illuminate further the inherent liminal qualities of such space. Harbors, canals, beaches, bays, bulkheads, low-lying or elevated industrial zones, inlets, vacant dunes—I had hopes of pristine aerial photographs clearly capturing the waste (of a sort) between the developed/urban lands and the ocean.

Of course there was nowhere near enough time to actually see if these imagined photographs actually existed on this first, single visit. This knowledge that the work one does in an archive is never complete is a dilemma and anxiety that both Farge and Steedman allude to. The photographs I did view were not aerials, rather small prints taken by an anonymous employee of the Harbor Planning agency. And, I realized that the distance I was looking for, the flattening of the ground and inherent wide angle of the aerial image, simply wasn’t present in these unremarkable, though surprising for their clarity (take for example the photo below, look at the texture on the water), prints, which resembled more the vacant yet charged documentation of an early Smithson “Non-site,” or backdrop for an Acconci performance.

It wasn’t until I sat down in the central glass-walled reading room that I began to note my surroundings, and I recorded these observation in my journal:

Registered / Concrete / Carpet / vault-like /

The micro-film reader named—“Library Researcher”

card catalog stacks / marriage records

A family history

Birth / Marriage / Death / indexes

I wait for my boxes from the vault

Hurricane of 1938 / was this that “sudden storm?”

that wiped out the east coast

fishing industry

What will be in the report?

When I was browsing the archive’s holdings it wasn’t a box of photographs that peaked my interest immediately. Rather it was the Flood and Hurricane Report from 1938 sponsored by the Department of Public Works that leap from the list. It was the only report of its kind in the holdings and at least the only document within the department of public works the dealt expressly with the massive category five hurricane that struck the Northeast in September 1938. The volume includes high-water data from the flood of 1936, as well as graphs and charts of the “storm-tide” resulting from the 1938 hurricane.

During this chance encounter with this report in the context of the state archive—which as the kind and extremely helpful archivist Jennifer Fauxsmith explained, was organized according to the structure of the state government bureaucracy, cementing (pun intended) the theoretical link between the archive and state power—I began to grasp the idea that I was reading something never meant for me (graduate student/poet) to read. Similar to how Farge characterizes the contents of judicial archives: “rough traces of lives that never asked to be told in the way that they were…” (6). And, precisely echoed by Steedman when she states, “[as] an archival historian, you nearly always read something that was not intended for your eyes (1177). The report enacts a surprising paradox, unique perhaps to the archive. As a volume it is its own collection of data, tables listing the high-water marks, graphs of the hurricane’s track, graphs and data on the “storm tide.” It displays order—the management of information, of an event (a destructive, sudden, and overwhelming event), and yet what the lists can and cannot contain in plain scientific language and empirical data is the rising of the water. The record which was commissioned by Public Works suggests a sense of control like a well-managed account, but it’s also the record of where and how the storm and the flood overwhelmed state infrastructures.

“…these reports indicate the flood peak progressed about 19 miles in 14 hours, unless during the night the water may have been at points above 26A.”

“While the waters along the southerly mainland shore of the state are almost completely guarded from direct exposure to the Atlantic ocean by the offshore islands of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and the Elizabeths, yet the general south westerly to north easterly direction of Narragansett Bay, Buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound coincided with the wind direction on the easterly perimeter of the hurricane. This coincidence resulted in a storm wave of unusual proportions at points far removed from the ocean.”

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Thinking about the destruction that this 1938 report does and does not record–the death toll from the 1938 hurricane was around 800 people in the North East–seems to me to be part of that larger idea which Steedman clarifies in the context of Derrida and Michelet, that the contents of an archive are the physical debris of life (death), and that the impossible search for an origin is in fact a movement towards death.  As I was reading Steedman I asked myself: what would an archive be like in a non-western culture? In a culture where death is not something which is generally entombed–maybe in a culture that believes in reincarnation? How would the archive change?

Surveying my options of which archives to visit, I found myself intrigued by both the Saturday Evening Girls club and City of Boston photography collections at The Healey Library archives. I emailed a day ahead to let the staff know my intentions to visit on Wednesday morning and received a courteous email within 24-hours from the librarian, stating that the collections would be ready for my viewing promptly at 10am. Of course, thanks to the recent transportation issues in the city, I was running late.

Exasperated by my own tardiness, I reached the library a half-hour past due, feeling a little like the scholar Arlette Farge describes in “She Has Arrived”—fumbling, inconspicuous, and hypervigilant in the dense silence of the reading room. Thankfully, having navigated The Healey Library archives a few times before (and informed the staff of my delay), I could fake the rest of my confidence as the kind man at the front desk directed me to a table. A gray metal cart bestowed one box of file folders from the Saturday Evening Girls collection and two smaller flat boxes from the City of Boston collection. The staff member informed me that the librarian had chosen the boxes as representatives of the full collections. “That’s our largest photo collection,” he said, referring to the City of Boston boxes. Dread knotted in the pit of my stomach. My short time at the archives—a brief sifting through the three perfectly labeled boxes—would not be enough. I would be trying to “conjure a social system from a nutmeg grater,” not only because the boxes’ contents are a fraction of the full archives (which are a fraction of the “infinite heaps of things they recorded”), but because I would not finish—“there will be something left unread, unnoted, untranscribed” before I left for my midday meeting (Steedman 1165). Resigning myself to the inevitable incompleteness of my proposed task, I started with the Saturday Evening Girls club box.

After gingerly pulling off the lid, I surveyed a row of folders, each numbered and arranged in ascending order. I pulled out the first folder. Right away I was sucked into a narrative: Fanny Goldstein, self-described as the first Jewish woman in charge of a public library in Massachusetts, had written a short autobiography, detailing her experiences in the city. The piece was published in the Saturday Evening Girls (SEG) club newsletter in 1954. Goldstein worked at The West End library branch since 1922. She never married. In the accompanying photo, she sits on a beach next to another woman, who is marked “unknown.”

Already, I am making things up: Fanny was there when the West End was nearly leveled, the public and private sectors transforming the area from a “slummy” immigrant community into a more gentrified downtown neighborhood. She never married because of her fierce independence, or her gender, or her sexuality (that could be her secret partner in the photo!). Clearly she only ends her autobiography with a patriotic love confession to America on behalf of her Russian family so she could temper her notable statement that “in the course of the years I have had the extraordinary, rarely experienced by other women,” in which she lists off citations, rewards, lectures, and travels with which she received or partook. Not only am I looking at the photo and written account for “a history of relationships of power,” attempting to “narrate a conflict” that may or may not exist, but I’m also abusively using Fanny Goldstein’s story “as the motor of [my] reflection, the source of [my] own narrative” (45). At the end of the day, the scholar’s point of reference can only be his or her own origin.

In fact, I knew that I would look for any whiffs of female oppression before I arrived at The Healey Library. Farge’s assertion that “it is not easy to separate the history of men and women from that of social relations and antagonisms” somewhat validated my subjective approach to my visit, but I felt guilty as I greedily poured over photo after photo of these women berry picking, folk dancing, glazing, embracing near some rocks at Wingaersheek Beach (44). I chose which narrative to see in these photos before I arrived, before skimming the folders labeled “pottery” (which include stunning photos of the primary-colored bowls, pitchers, and plates the SEG made and sold at Paul Revere Pottery) to peer more closely into the one’s labeled “women.” Filled with pictures of the group’s craft-driven joy and intimacy, I perhaps too presumptuously assumed this community of women existed tenuously in the male-dominated society that originally produced such a politically acceptable, economic-based training program. I chose this narrative over others.

And really, knowing that these photos and their accompanying letters from family members were gathered beginning in 1975, a time of emerging feminism when gender equality may have been a sexy political agenda in good ol’ liberal Massachusetts, a “revisionist history” may actually exist here in a way opposite of what one might expect. While I forgive myself for my imagination—I am in fact a poet more than a scholar—there’s an anxiety I have about “truth” each time I visit an archive. While Farge describes the records themselves as occupying “an ambiguous position,” an intensity and potential intangibility, it’s not the unreliability of the documents I’m worried about—it’s mine.

Unfortunately I was unable to make my planned visit the Massachusetts Historical Society (I rely on the red line to get into town, and that has not been working out so much this week…). So I decided to visit an easily accessible local collection in the Thomas Crane Public Library in Quincy, MA. The “Quincy Room” houses the special local history collections, including maps and atlases, manuscripts, Vital Records to 1850, Quincy Annual Reports from 1889 to present, as well as copies of the Patriot Ledger newspaper from 1837 to date. I grew up in this city, but I’m more familiar with the history concerning John Adams and his homestead because this part of the city’s history attracts the most attention, especially from out-of-town tourists. I decided that these collections in the Quincy Room would provide an intriguing opportunity to research other aspects of my hometown’s history. I was most interested in seeing the photographs and the collections about Quincy’s industrial history, namely the granite quarries and shipbuilding.

A view of the Thomas Crane Public Library, sans snow (with all of the snow banks, I was not able to stand somewhere safely to take a current shot like this!) Photo credit: National Register of Historic Places

Part of me was hoping that the special collections would be housed in the oldest part of the library, the original castle-like structure designed by Henry Hobson Richardson in 1881. I learned from the circulation desk staff that the Quincy Room is located on the second floor of the new addition to the library (decidedly not in the impressive Richardsonian wing.) I made my way upstairs to find and speak with the reference librarian. She was very interested in my research purposes and appeared to be most excited that someone wished to view the local history materials. She confessed to me that these collections are not frequently requested by visitors to the library. Knowing this made accessing these materials myself somewhat more special. Only a few people have physically handled these materials, and I would be one of them.

The librarian went over the restrictions and rules of use with me. The materials in the Quincy Room may only be viewed under the direct supervision of the reference librarian, and the researcher is required to sit at one of the desks adjacent to the reference desk, not at one of the “regular” desks for the general public to use. My photo ID remained in the librarian’s possession until the end of my visit, when I returned my items and they were thoroughly inspected for any damage. I was not permitted to make any reproductions of any materials without the express authorization of the librarian, and I did not dare make any for fear of bothering her repeatedly.

The first collection I wanted to view was the Warren S. Parker Photograph Collection, which includes prints, glass slides, and negatives of local sites from 1890-1930. Some of the prints are available digitally through the library’s website, but I wanted to hold the original prints and glass slides. I requested a smaller sub-collection, containing photographs of Quincy’s granite quarries taken in the 1800s. This area today has been redeveloped, and is home to a golf course, restaurant, walking paths, and condominium and apartment complexes. This is not the Quincy quarries that I saw depicted in the old photographs. These photographs revealed the quarries as they existed well before my lifetime. There are images of enormous cuts of granite, workers blasting into the quarry walls, and pictures of old machinery and equipment. There are also several photos of a “Titanic memorial statue,” presumably made from a slab of Quincy granite. There are many images of nameless men, covered in dirt at work in the quarries. My favorite of these is titled “Quarrymen coming up in boat out of Granite Railway Quarry for dinner.” The image shows a group of men piled into a “boat” that is hanging precariously from a crane above a deep quarry, slowly being pulled up to the top. I have a terrible fear of heights and even viewing this image made me uneasy; I could never by a quarryman. My family lived in the neighborhood of the Quincy quarries, and my older brothers used to jump the quarries (before the redevelopment when the deep pits were still filled with water.) After viewing these pictures, I think I have a better understanding of just how dangerous and stupid that was.

“Quarrymen coming up in boat out of Granite Railway Quarry for dinner”    I did not make my own reproduction of the original print, but managed to locate a digitized version of the photograph on the Thomas Crane Public Library’s website. Photo credit: Warren S. Parker Photograph Collection

I do not know the names of the quarrymen in the prints, and they are not listed in the finding aid or in any captions of the photographs. All I have are these brief moments of their lives, captured and frozen in these photographs. These feel, to me, like Farge’s Parisians in the city’s judicial archives. These quarry workers remain frozen in the state when their photographs were taken, just as Farge’s subjects “remain stuck pleading” in the court records (Farge, 26). The photos of the quarrymen at work, in a sense, catch the quarries “red-handed” and in action, just as Farge’s judicial archives caught Paris red-handed for her.

After taking a trip back in time at the quarries, I decided to explore another area of Quincy’s industrial history: shipbuilding. I knew that the Fore River shipyard was a hub of activity during World War II, and I asked the librarian if she could recommend any good materials on that time period. She told me that I “absolutely” needed to consult the “Winnie the Welder Oral History Project.” She disappeared into the Quincy Room and returned moments later with a thick binder. Inside were dozens of dvds containing recorded interviews with some of the women who worked at the Fore River and neighboring Hingham shipyards from 1941 to 1945. Most of these interviews were conducted in the late eighties and early nineties, and I learned later that many of the interviewees have since passed away. It seems fortunate that someone had the good sense to record their stories and experiences before they were lost forever.

As the dvds are not exactly sensitive materials, the librarian set me up at another nearby desk with a computer so that I could watch the interviews. As I settled in, I could not help but feel like Arlette Farge must have when she discovered the voices of Paris’ long forgotten women in the judicial archives. I spent much longer than I realized, inserting disc after disc, going through the women’s interviews. It was fascinating to hear their stories and about the challenges they faced being women workers in a traditionally male industry. On top of work challenges, these women were living in a society at war and dealing with daily problems like rationing and child care. The propagandist image of “Rosie the Riveter” and general narrative of women’s role in World War II is not an accurate representation of the sheer diversity of these interviewees’ experiences. The women who worked at Fore River and Hingham shipyards came from different backgrounds, entered wartime work for their own reasons, and each had different experiences working at the shipyards. This collection of interviews revealed to me “existences or stories that are irreducible to any typology or attempt at synthesis, and do not fit neatly into any easily described historical context” (Farge, 86).

Carolyn Steedman said that “no one historian’s archive is ever like another’s” (Steedman, 1163) and I feel that given my pre-existing connection to these locations, my experience viewing these local history collections was unique for me. The quarries and the shipyards closed for business long before my childhood, and I was not familiar with these sites when they were bustling centers of industrial activity. I was familiar only the newly redeveloped quarries and Hingham shipyard, and the largely abandoned eye sore that is the Fore River shipyard today. The photographs and the oral history collection brought Quincy’s industrial past back to life for me. Going through these materials, I was “struck by an impression of reality that no printed text” can give (Farge, 5). These photographs peeled back the layers of modern Quincy and showed me the city as it was long before my lifetime, and the oral history interviews brought the shipyard and its workers to life. My visit to view the Quincy Room collections did indeed bring me on “a roaming voyage through the words of others” (Farge, 123) through the city I thought I knew well. I was not entirely familiar with these aspects of Quincy’s history before, but after this visit I have a much greater understanding and appreciation for the granite quarries and shipyards.