Keeping (and Telling) the Past

This site is a compilation of poems, essays, stories, art and other images of records and recordkeeping. These materials have been, and continue to be, added by archivists, librarians, and others involved in staffing reading rooms, overseeing policies about records, and generally involved in the day-to-day work of trillions of pieces of paper that make up our shared history on earth. So many scholars, writers, and artists have used the archives as a symbol of memory-keeping and we, as archivists, would like to capture some of these materials, and respond to them. Join us by sending a message to susanntucker@hotmail.com.

About me, as compiler:

I am Susan Tucker, Ph.D. Between 1985 and 2015, I oversaw the Newcomb Archives and the Vorhoff Library at Tulane University. There I was able to engage in a wide vareity of projects concerned with the papers of the Newcomb Pottery Enterprise, scrapbooks, oral history projects, and seeking the papers of Newcomb alumnae and other women who influenced the American South. Among my publications are Telling Memories Among Southern Women, The Scrapbook in American Culture (with Katherine Ott and Patricia Buckler) and City of Remembering. I was awarded the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Lifetime Achievement Award in 2017, and I have been, of late, co-editor of the letters of Josephine Louise Newcomb (1816-1901). In retirement, too, I have been able to look around for the images of recordingkeeping in archives, as well as in such diverse places as hospitals, the interior of buses, poems learned by heart, and online streaming services.