Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
STORIES ABOUT ARCHIVES that historians tell each other and their readers concerns their destruction. Missing archives, that is, are not, in Marc Bloch's terms, always either "secreted away" or "misplaced" over the centuries. They "sink into the river" along with the boat transporting them away from oncoming German armies, as one historian of French policing bemoans; they end up in the trash. Even more darkly, some accounts tell of malicious efforts to destroy archives, to burn whole sets of documents. After the 1898 American occupation of the Philippines, as a UNESCO archivist recounts, "the american sic soldier, mostly because of ignorance, but at times with malice and premeditation, destroyed a large portion of the Spanish archival holdings. The documents were used . . . as toilet papers . . . and to kindle fires." Another set of histories concerns the theft of collections that are still intact: the archives from across occupied Europe that Nazi authorities shipped off to Berlin and that, after their victories, Soviet officials hid in Moscow; British efforts to impede access to documentary evidence about their violent campaigns in pre-independence Kenya; or the U.S. government's 2004 seizure of governmental and ruling party archives from occupied Iraq, perhaps today's most pressing such episode. 1 The French-Algerian "Dispute" ("le contentieux") over the archives of Frenchruled Algeria (1830-1962) is usually narrated in terms of such stories, of archives drowned, burned, thrown away, and stolen. According to its actors, the Dispute is about what happened at the time of decolonization to official collections then archived in Algeria and what this means for the writing of history.
Todd Shepard (Mon,) studied this question.