Who Will Use Your History? How Will It Be Interpreted in Future Years?
Researcher/activist Winifred Armstrong, archivist Lauren Stark, and historian Lydia Walker in conversation with each other and seminar participants
Please write to [email protected] to RSVP
Rarely do archivists meet the people who provide their archives, or historians the individuals who created the documents they study, and too infrequently do the archivists who provide order to the files discuss their contents directly with the scholars who make use of them. This meeting will be a conversation between all three—and with the audience, many of whom are researching subjects that will provide future perspectives on current history. This conversation will feature elements of the life, work, and archives of Winifred Armstrong, an early member of the African Studies Association and a long-term participant in the Columbia University Seminar, Studies in Contemporary Africa from the perspective of an archivist who catalogued some of her collections, a historian who worked in them, and the woman in question herself. Participants are invited to read this chapter by Lydia Walker about Winifred Armstrong, which will be circulated ahead of the seminar: Lydia Walker, “The Unexpected Anticolonialist: Winifred Armstrong, American Empire, and African Decolonization” in Manela and Streets-Salter, eds., The Anticolonial Transnational: Networks, Connections, and Movements in the Making of the Postcolonial World (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 199–218.
Winifred Armstrong spent two years in Africa in the late 1950's talking with leaders of African independence movements in East, West, and Southern Africa, and with the then African, British and French colonial administrators about their political, economic and educational situations. The US government up to then had had no African affairs department, and little contact on the continent. When she returned, she worked with then Senator John F. Kennedy, who had just taken on the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Africa sub-Committee, arranging meetings for him to meet with the African leaders often on their first visit to the US, drafting speeches on Africa and Future Policy, and finally helping organize the Peace Corps. Her archives from the trip and subsequently the Kennedy work are at the Kennedy Library and Schomburg Center of the New York Public Library. The "back story" and the finding aid to the Schomburg file is at https://archives.nypl.org/scm/20959 -- take a look before the seminar if you can.
Lauren Stark has been working as an archivist for the past 10 years. She has worked in institutions including the Museum of Chinese in America, Hunter College, and the New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Currently, she is the Senior Processing Archivist at New York University Libraries. In 2018, Lauren completed the processing of Winifred Armstrong's collection at the Schomburg Center and created the finding aid. She has a personal relationship to North Africa, having served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco from 2005-2007.
Lydia Walker is Provost Scholar Assistant Professor and the Seth Andre Myers Chair in Global Military History at The Ohio State University. She is the author of the prize-winning book, States-in-Waiting as well as the chapter on Winifred Armstrong pre-circulated to the seminar, “The Unexpected Anticolonialist,” which both draw upon Armstrong’s collections.