Documenting History - Inclusion, Memory, Community

Who built Portland? What cultural moments do our neighborhoods reflect? What is the history of the city and where is it recorded? Is it complete? Starting from these questions, this panel begins from the understanding that the history recorded by most archives reflects the people in power. Working backwards, we ask how this can be corrected, to make sure that libraries and archives across Oregon instead record a history that reflects the diverse makeup of the state. We examine case studies from libraries who have worked to build community collections and consider their successes, challenges, and failures. We explore what has been left undocumented and which eras, groups, and individuals have been overlooked by historians until now. Finally, we examine the work left to do, and consider how we can begin to expand and correct the record.

Dr. Hannah Leah Crummé is Head of Special Collections and Archives at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She completed her doctoral research at King’s College, London. While much of her research focuses on the impact of the Spanish language on the development of poetic and political ideas of the Renaissance, she is also the lead researcher on the LSTA and CIC funded project "Vietnamese Portland: Memory, History, Community". This seven year project, undertaken in 2017, is designed to increase the diversity of Lewis & Clark's archive and create more inclusive documentation of the city of Portland. She has recently edited several collections, including Re-examining the Literary Coterie, 1580-1780 (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) and Shakespeare on Record: Researching an Early Modern Life (Arden, 2018). Her work has appeared in Notes and Queries (2009), the Journal for the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (2011), The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Europe (Brill, 2013), and Studies in Philology (2017). Hannah’s reviews appear regularly in the Times Literary Supplement. Her edition of The Life and Papers of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (1538-1612) is under advanced contract with the University of Toronto Press.

Dr. E.J. Carter is Special Collections and Archives Librarian at Lewis & Clark, where he has worked since 2014. He completed his doctoral study in history and an MLIS from the University of Illinois. He has published articles in Central European History (2006), RBMS: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage (2010), and The Northwest Review of Books (2016). For the past two years he has helped coordinate and conduct interviews for Lewis & Clark's Vietnamese Portland: History, Memory, Community project. In a prior position, he built an oral history project at Chicago State University that focused on campus race relations in the 1960s.