Engaging with war records: archival histories and historical practice

Abstract

The First World War (1914–1918) produced an explosion of record making and record keeping, from state agencies conducting a war of unparalleled scale, to individuals and families producing testaments of experience which also often became objects of remembrance and memorialisation. The effort to document has a history; so too does the determination – or otherwise – to retain those records, organise and describe them, and provide for or otherwise deny access to them. In turn, the ways in which contemporaries recorded and then archived the First World War have powerfully shaped the kinds of histories produced over the last century. The war was being recorded and archived as it happened – and for decades after – for particular reasons and particular purposes. The processes of recording and archiving have bequeathed in different times and places alternately a very rich, very partial, and very prejudiced record of conflict and its legacies. This special issue of Archives and Manuscripts grew out of a gathering of scholars in Melbourne in 2018. The conference, hosted by the International Society for First World War Studies, took as its theme ‘Recording, narrating and archiving the First World War’. Our selection of papers from that conference revisits the creation, recreation and transmission of knowledge about the war. Together, a series of archivists and historians investigate the ways in which a war that has been so critical not only to defining the modern world, but also individual and cultural identities, has been shaped and reshaped by those who produced and archived its record for a century since 1914. Studying the experience and demands of war – perhaps especially the First World War – has been enormously consequential for archivists and historians both. In an immediate sense, Hilary Jenkinson’s 1922 A Manual of Archive Administration emerged in the wake of that experience (subtitled Including the Problems of War Archives and Archive Making and published as part of a series on the Economic and Social History of the World War), with abiding impact on how archivists thought about their practice. More recently, studies of records-making and management during and after the First World War have been important in giving historical weight to emergent themes in archival thinking. For historians, of course, the war has other attractions. So well described as the ‘matrix event’ of the twentieth century, for the way it set the pattern for the century’s politics and culture, and indeed for its terrible example of humanity’s capacity for mass killing, the war has proven endlessly fascinating. As a wellspring, too, for narratives of national maturity in places like Australia and New Zealand, the war remains politically charged as a subject of historical debate. We should not be surprised that the recent centenary – even before it commenced – provoked expressions of unease at a perceived over-commemoration of 1914–1918. The continued historical and popular significance of the experience exposes the diverse and changing contexts for ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS 2020, VOL. 48, NO. 2, 97–108 https://doi.org/10.1080/01576895.2020.1769363