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The Elizabethan archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker is best known for his efforts to collect medieval manuscripts, which had changed hands or been repurposed after the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and to construct from these sources a new history of the church in England. This essay looks at the complete process by which Parker and his circle collected, used, and printed books for their historical project. It argues that Parker’s work was not as pointedly confessional as it has typically been seen, in part because of the shifting sands of early modern religious discourse and in part because of how Parker engaged with the medieval sources he encountered. He learned from what he read—perhaps especially from late medieval historians. His practices in constructing church history reveal the extent to which he viewed himself in a continuous historiographical tradition, even as he sought to reform an ecclesiastical one.

This chapter discusses the Inclusive Archive of Learning Disability History. It points to a collaborative relationship between the political ideas derived from public political logics — public service, public sphere, ‘on behalf of the public’ and for posterity — and those that derive from relational and personal-centred politics. Rather than favouring one or the other, the chapter argues that for an archive to be an archive, and for it to be an inclusive one, an approach to archival practice that held both the public and the relational political traditions in dialogue needed to be developed. Both political traditions have a history of being very effectively expressed in the learning disability self-advocacy movement as speaking up and being heard, and of arguing for services to start with the individual by being more ‘person-centered’. As such, the chapter reveals that the task of this archive is to explore fruitful combinations and collaborations between the two political traditions.

This chapter follows the history of the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, founded in 1939 and opened in 1947, which in 1969 changed its name to the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People. This archive sought to bring Jewish archives from all over the world to Jerusalem under the banner of what they termed the “ingathering of the exiles of the past.” Its leaders, including Alex Bein and Daniel Cohen, who spearheaded the effort to gather materials from Europe, hoped to draw upon the legacy of European Jewry and thereby place Jews around the world within a sphere of Israeli cultural hegemony. In this archive, one finds an extension and intensification of the Gesamtarchiv’s dream of a total archive of Jewish life—and a powerful instance showing both its possibilities and the problems of fundamentally reframing the Jewish past.

This chapter explores the multitude of ways householders used collecting recipes and creating recipe collections to construct and write their own family histories. It argues that gathering recipes and creating recipe collections constituted one aspect of what we might call the “paperwork of kinship.” Early modern householders, it shows, wrote down, collated, and preserved all kinds of paperwork concerning the social and economic holdings of the household, from land deeds to rent accounts to lists of births and deaths. Working together, these documents not only sketch out a social and economic history of a family but also construct its very identity. Recipes and recipe books, it contends, were a crucial part of this paperwork, and it is in no small part due to this role that so many examples survive in the archives.

With much of Welty’s correspondence now available, we can use Welty’s remarkable letters in our classrooms as introductions to Welty’s fiction and as literary gems in their own right. Drawing from several recent collections and other publications that quote Welty’s correspondence, instructors may provide letters for students to explore alongside Welty’s fiction. Welty’s letters document her daily life and artistic development, often in language matching the playfulness, lyricism, and wit of Welty’s other published work. Students glimpse Welty’s mind at work, growing more accustomed to poetic qualities of her fiction. This activity suits survey courses with a short time to study Welty as well as upper-level courses. Letters also offer a wide range of research opportunities for students and scholars, from tracking down historical references in letters to reading and transcribing the many still-unpublished letters by Welty in the Eudora Welty Collection of the Mississippi Department of Archives & History.

This chapter describes Winter’s appointment as state tax collector in 1956; his appointment to the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in April 1957; Winter’s work with white leaders to check the extremism of the White Citizens’ Council crowd; his participation in the Kennedy-Johnson campaign; the decision of moderate economic, community, and political leaders to speak out for a more reasonable approach to solving the race issue.