Contesting archives

Nupur Chaudhuri, Mary Elizabeth Perry

""Contesting Archives makes vivid and concrete the way historians must proceed when faced with partial or contradictory sources. Historians and anyone interested in how historians work will appreciate the authors' strategies for, and cautions about, unearthing information about women from documents inside and outside the archive." Margaret Strobel, coeditor of Expanding the Borders of Women's History" "The contributors of Contesting Archives challenge the assumption that an archive is a neutral, immutable, and ahistorical repository of information. Instead, these historians view it as a place where decisions are made about whose documents-and therefore whose history-is important.^ Finding that women's voices and their texts were often obscured or lost altogether, they have developed many new methodologies for creating unique archives and uncovering more evidence by reading documents...