Researching the Recent Past Online

By Prof. Hacker. [This is a guest post by Dan Royles, a lecturer at the University of Angers in western France, where he teaches American Studies and English as a foreign language. He's previously written on "Digital Workflows for the Archives" for ProfHacker. You can find him online at danroyles.com, or follow him on Twitter at @danroyles.--@JBJ]
When I was writing my dissertation on African American AIDS activism, I ran into the problem that plagues many historians of the recent past: lack of archival sources. I had identified a handful of interesting stories to anchor my five chapters, but several of them involved organizations from the 1990s and 2000s that had left little in way of a paper trail. I solved some of my problem with an oral history project, which filled in some major gaps while creating a set of resources that will be useful for the future. However, I didn’t want to rely on oral histories alone. Memory is faulty, and although the narrative choices that people make in telling their stories are often instructive, without a set of corroborating sources it can be hard to piece together even a rough chronology of what “actually” happened. More...