Calling All Citizen Archivists
Depending on where you hang out online or what news media you listen to, you may have heard a call from the National Archives Catalog for volunteers with the “superpower” of reading cursive to join their Citizen Archivist program.* Almost thirty thousand new catalogers signed-up in the week after the call went out—100 times their normal weekly sign-ups according to the folks at the National Archives. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more.
Reading handwritten documents from the past can be a challenge.** Signing up to be a Citizen Archivist is simple. No application is required. Just go to the website and follow the instructions to get started.
One of the things I find most appealing about the program are the curated “missions”: sets of documents related to a particular topic that need to be transcribed. The service records of Civil War nurses, for instance.*** Revolutionary War pension files. Or more recently, documents related to the work of the Warren Commission in 1963 and 1964.
It sounds like a wonderful way to dip your toes into the intriguing world of the archives. Future historians will thank you.
*Some of you with sharp memories may feel like you heard this story before. Last year I shared information about a push to transcribe Clara Barton’s papers at the Library of Congress as part of the Library’s By the People public transcription project, By the People. This year, By the People is hosting a transcribe-a-thon dedicated to the writings of Frederick Douglass on February 14, the day on which he chose to celebrate his birth. (Like many enslaved and formerly enslaved people, he did not know the exact date.)
So many ways to help historians of the future work with materials from the past.
**For that matter, reading modern handwritten documents can be a challenge, as anyone who has received a handwritten letter from me can attest. I really try to write legibly, but soon I’m focusing on the idea rather than my handwriting and all is lost. There is a reason I type most of my letters these days.
***It will surprise no one that this particular mission caught my imagination.
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And speaking of the National Archives, I strongly recommend the organization’s blog: The Unwritten Record. A recent post tells the story of Matthew Henson, a Black explorer who accompanied Robert Peary on multiple expeditions to the Arctic. (Who knew? Not me!) Another is a round-up of links to materials in the archives related to the Six Triple Eight Postal Battalion, the subject of a new movie that I have not yet seen.
In Which I enter Black History Month via To Walk About in Freedom
There have been a lot of mixed messages coming from the Federal government about celebrating Black History Month, Women's History Month, and the like since January 20. Even though President Trump has officially proclaimed February Black History Month, many agencies are canceling events related to theses "cultural celebrations." (It's possible this will have all be unwound by the time you read this. Things are moving quickly. )
As far as I'm concerned, February is Black History Month--and it is even more important to recognize than it was before. In honor of Black History Month, I plan to read as many of the books currently in my TBR piles that are related to the topic as I can. As always, I’ll bring you along for the ride.
The Saturday before the Martin Luther King holiday felt like the right time to start. And To Walk About in Freedom turned out to be the perfect first book for the project.
I will admit, I deliberately put off reading To Walk About in Freedom: The Long Emancipation of Priscilla Joyner by Carole Emberton. When it came out in 2022, I was deep into Nazis. I just couldn’t face adding America’s history of slavery and what I learned from Joyner to call the “long emancipation” to the mix in my head. Now I have no excuse. In fact, I feel that it is important at this moment in time to bear witness to a part of our history that we have tried to whitewash from the day of the Emancipation Proclamation onward.
During the Depression, a WPA program called the Federal Writers’ Project sent unemployed journalists, writers and teachers to interview formerly enslaved people as part of a larger program intended to document the lives of ordinary Americans. Priscilla Joyner was the subject of one of those interviews.
Emberton uses Joyner’s story as a structure to explore the collective experience of what she names the “charter generation of freedom,” people who experienced life on both sides of emancipation. She fills out the gaps in Joyner’s interview with information from other oral histories of the charter generation, census data, marriage licenses, and any other relevant document she could find. The result is both a powerful history of the “long emancipation” as it unfolded from the Civil War through the Great Depression and a vivid individual biography. Emberton specifically chose Priscilla Joyner as a subject because much of Joyner’s story was unusual, reminding the reader that Joyner was not simply an exemplar of a generation. In fact, Emberton urges us to remember that the individual stories collected by the Federal Writers’ Project “are not valuable solely because they represent some greater historical truth. Their stories are valuable because they were theirs, and because they chose to tell them, imperfectly, to an unlikely army of public historians thrown together in the midst of a global economic crisis by a government that had shown very little concern for the fate of ex-slaves since Reconstruction."
In her final chapter, titled “The Book,” Emberton traces the use and abuse of the WPA interviews of formerly enslaved people by white historians who were determined to present a positive image of the treatment of enslaved people by their owners. It is a salutary reminder that history is written by people, and some of whom are willing to twist sources to support their own agendas. (And none of us are entirely objective.)
I strongly recommend To Walk About in Freedom. I found it to be an engaging read and a master class in re-examining sources to support a broader story.
My Black History Month reading is off to a good start!
Cecilia Payne Finds Out What Stars are Made Of
One or twice a year, the story of English-born astrophysicist Cecilia Payne (1900-1979) appears on my Facebook feed. I am enthralle-- and enraged--by the story every time. And then I promptly forget her name. A fact that is both frustrating and somewhat embarrassing since this is the kind of story that I firmly believe needs to be known more widely. I hope that by sharing her story with you I can not only spread her story a little further, but anchor it firmly in my brain.
When Cecilia Payne entered Cambridge University in 1919, she knew she wanted to study a science, but did not yet know which one. That changed when she heard a lecture by astronomer Arthur Eddington. Stars were her future.
She quickly realized that she could not have a professional career in astronomy in England. She couldn't even get a doctorate. In 1923, she came to the United States where she became a graduate fellow at the Harvard College Observatory, which was involved in a long study of the patterns of light emitted by stars, technically known as stellar spectra.* One of the goals of this study was to understand what elements the stars were made of by comparing their spectral lines with those of known chemical elements. Astronomers had already identified heavy elements such as calcium and iron and assumed they were major components of the stars.
Payne applied principles from the new science of quantum physics, which she had studied at Cambridge, to the study of stellar spectra. In her doctoral thesis, the first awarded for work at the Harvard Observatory, she demonstrated that the sun and other stars were composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements—a discovery that overturned previous assumptions. She added a butt-covering caveat to her thesis stating that the abundance of of hydrogen and helium were “almost certainly not real.” She was, after all, a 25-year-old woman in a field in which most women doing scientific work were described as “computers” not scientists.
Like many newly minted PhDs, Payne revised her thesis and published it as a book. Stellar Atmospheres was well received. It was soon accepted that her results were in fact quite real, and that they profoundly changed what we know about the universe. In 1960, astronomer Otto Struve, no slouch himself in the study of stellar spectra and a founder of radio astronomy, referred to her work as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”
Payne worked at the Harvard Observatory for many years, doing the work of a faculty member with the lower-paid and less-respected title of “technical assistant” to Harlow Shapley, the Observatory’s director. During this period, she published several important books based on her research. In 1956, she was finally made a full professor—the first woman to hold that title at Harvard—and chair of the Astronomy Department.
In 1976, the American Astronomical Society recognized her work as one of the most creative astronomers of the twentieth century, with the Henry Norris Russel Lectureship, which honors a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research.
*It should be pointed out that a group of 80 women did much of the laboratory work related to this project. Hired as “computers” and often ridiculed as “Pickering’s harem,” they literally mapped the heavens. Among other things, they catalogued which stars could be photographed by attaching a spectroscope to a telescope, which records the range (spectrum) of colors which make up starlight. (This is very simplified and possibly even inaccurate.) Once pictures were taken, they classified the spectra displayed in the photographs. They were paid 25 to 35 cents an hour, less that they would have made at a clerical job, and worked six days a week, seven hours a day.
Dava Sobel’s book about this, The Glass Universe, is now high on my TBR list.

Some of the women of the Harvard Observatory, ca. 1910, with the man who hired them, Edward Pickering.
Annie Jump Cannon, one of the women employed by the observatory, had already created a classification system that sorted the spectra of several hundred thousand stars into seven groups based on differences in the spectral features before Payne arrived.** Her system is still in use today.
**In other words, Payne’s work depended on the scientific work of another unheralded woman. Cannon was finally given the title of Curator of Astronomical Photographs.