Tag: history

Spring 2024 Behind-the-Scenes Reading

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I swear I have had multiple posts eaten by websites in the past month. I had a whole bunch of Tweets scheduled and they disappeared and I had this post queued and it disappeared. I’m already so busy and scattered, websites losing my queued posts is literally the last thing I need. Anyway, a few weeks belatedly, here’s the quarterly Spring post. *shakes fist at the rapidly enshitifying internet*

Anyway, I survived my first semester teaching and I have a summer of reading ahead of me. This spring was defined by half finished books and reading fewer articles than I would have liked as I tried to find a balance of grading and class prep and my own homework. For the summer, I’m on a ticking clock to read a lot of books and begin assembling my thesis reading list, meaning that the Summer 2024 post is going to be unhinged in its own special way.

Image ID: Three books laid out in a row. On the left is "Dust: The Archive and Cultural History" by Carolyn Steedman, in the middle is "Madhouse at the End of the Earth" by Julian Sancton, and on the right "The Allure of the Archives" by Arlette Farge. End ID.

Finished:

Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton – This was actually a reread, but I’d forgotten most of the audiobook and I was reading it with new intent. I picked it up as a possible thesis book because of how Sancton explores the public rhetorics that surrounded the Belgian Antarctic Expedition—from de Gerlache’s obsession with how the Belgian press and public at large would perceive his decisions/failures/successes, to Cook and Amundsen’s intentional construction and manipulation of their personal and public narratives as explorers in the public eye: see Cook’s falsehoods regarding the successes of his later expeditions and Amundsen’s self fashioning as a polar hero.

“Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention” by Barbara A. Biesecker – This short article presents archives as sites of historical invention. No discovery, recover, etc. invention. Pointing to there being no “fixed” historical record, only what we create from what remains. She explores this through the controversy surrounding two museum exhibits about the Enola Gay and what they claimed as history through what they did and didn’t include. It’s a fascinating read, and only about 7 pages.

“The History of European Archives and the Development of the Archival Profession in Europe” by Michel Duchein – This is one of those articles that I could see a lot of the people outside of the field calling boring, but I loved it. It’s a quick, effective breakdown of how modern archival science isn’t the product of a single “European model,” since the archival “models” in Europe are actually extremely varied in their developments and practices. It also ends before the digital archive boom, being an article from 1992.

“Rethinking Access to the Past: History and Archives in the Digital Age” by Thomas Peace and Gillian Allen – This article asks us to consider how we can recover and make accessible scattered archival collections of marginalized communities through digital collections. Peace and Allen here are specifically speaking to Mi’kmaq people in Acadia, and how archival materials, and making them accessibility through digitization, can help not only recover, but showcase community history.

In Progress:

Dust: The Archive and Cultural History by Carolyn Steedman – I’m about halfway through this book and I adore it, it’s technically a collection of essay, but they flow together in a way that you wouldn’t know if they weren’t included like that. Steedman takes apart and complicates the theory that Derrida presents in Archive Fever, so if you struggle to read Derrida (like just about anyone), I would highly recommend Dust to supplement that.

The Allure of the Archive by Arlette Farge – Like Dust, this books presents a theory of working in the archives that goes beyond the basics of examining the items in the archive and speaks to the experience of working in an archive. Unlike Dust, Allure does it through the narrative experiences of the author as she does her work in the archive. It’s a more story-centered approach, as opposed to Dust’s heavy theory approach. They’re both excellent, and I’ve loved reading them in tandem.

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The Radium Girls: The Dark History of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore

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Note: Because I read this as an ebook, I sadly do not have any snaps.

It’s not often that I’ll ruin my sleep schedule just in order to finish a book in one sitting, and it’s even rarer for me to tear through an ebook in a single go given how much I struggle with reading on a screen, but that’s exactly what I did with “The Radium Girls.” I tore through this book in a matter of hours, and was helped along by the fact that the book is exceedingly well written in a way that makes it highly accessible to the lay reader. It focuses on telling the stories of the individual girls, not just providing an overview of what happened, which is my favorite way of looking at history.

But what did happen?

The Radium Girls were factory workers who worked painting glow in the dark clock faces. Labor conditions at the turn of the century weren’t great across the board, but it was particularly bad for these young women because the paint they were using got its glow from radium, a radioactive material discovered by Marie Skłodowska-Curie. They were instructed to bring their paintbrushes to a fine point using their mouths, which led to the ingestion of radium. In the body, radium acts like calcium and is taken into the bones, where it stays and slowly destroys everything around it.

Despite it being recognized early on that radium was dangerous to work with, the companies, who just wanted to make money, told the girls, repeatedly that the paint was safe to use. They even hired doctors to lie to the girls and tell them they were perfectly healthy. “The Radium Girls” takes us from start to finish of the stories of the women who fought the companies who poisoned them and permanently changed the landscape of occupational health and safety through their efforts.

I’d been aware of the Radium Girls for some time before this, a combination of a childhood interest in labor rights and medical history, but I’d never explored it in detail until now. And, honestly, the level of detail provided by Moore does a tremendous job of showing all the moving parts of what was happening—from why the earliest girls who came forward were misdiagnosed to just how far the companies went to avoid being held accountable to the fact that, at the time these girls were fighting to have radium recognized as an industrial poison, there were medical professionals touting it as a health cure.

All told, it was incredibly difficult for these young women to get any sort of justice and it would take 13 years and two court battles against two different companies for change to happen, and even that wasn’t the end. While I said before that “The Radium Girls” takes us from start to finish, that ‘finish’ is ongoing. As of 2015, there were still women alive who had worked in those radium factories and clean up of the factory sites, particularly the ones in Ottawa, Nebraska, was still ongoing.

A word of warning: This is a heavy story, with industrial negligence and a blatant disregard for human life at its center. The descriptions of medical conditions brought on by radiation poisoning are not sugarcoated, but nor are the needlessly graphic. Please take care of yourself while reading, and if you need to put the book down there’s no same in that.

You can pick up a copy of the book, or its young readers’ edition, through the book website, and if you want to test the waters first I strongly recommend the Sawbones episodes on radiation therapy and the Radium Girls.

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