Download our Logo
Vol. 30:3 ISSN 0160-8460 September 2002
The Executive Director's Column:
Camp Edit and Historical Editing after Thirty Years
by Roger A. Bruns, Acting Executive Director
I recently returned from the Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents. Sponsored by the Wisconsin Historical Society, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the NHPRC, the annual Institute is known fondly by participants as "Camp Edit." Directed by Wisconsin State Historian Michael Stevens and coordinated by the NHPRC's Timothy Connelly, the Institute is a 1-week immersion in the philosophy and techniques of historical editing. Over the years, it has been remarkably productive.
The Institute is now 30 years old. Since its inception in 1972, the Institute has graduated over 500 individuals, many of whom have gone on to successful editing careers. In fact, Institute grads have served on the staffs of over 50 editorial projects. They also include college and university faculty, editors of historical journals, archivists, manuscript librarians, and government historians.
As I returned from Madison, I thought of how the field of editing has been transformed in the last three decades. Unlike their 19th-century predecessors, modern editors must meet very high expectations regarding textual accuracy and sound scholarship. Working under rigorous editorial standards, they are unearthing new information and providing authenticity and context. In many cases, they are changing the way we look at our history.
There's a passion for uncovering new material and a constant search for new ways to present it, to make it available not only to other scholars but to the public. Computer listservs permit editors to share information and opinions. There are websites constructed by editorial projects that present authentic texts.
And there is evidence that the editing field is expanding its influence in many associated areas.
For example, it is enhancing genealogical research. For years, genealogists have made use of the documentary editions. But now, increasing numbers are discovering them. At a recent genealogical society meeting, a genealogy specialist named Claire Bettag pointed out the value of the editions, which she considers "finding aids," in the highest meaning that that term can take. She explained that the work of editors presents the most sophisticated analysis available and a wealth of indexed and footnoted information for the researcher. These volumes, she said, are a great untapped source in the field of genealogy.
The editing field is also expanding in the field of education. At last year's national meeting of the National Council for the Social Studies, the principal professional organization for high school history teachers, several sessions focused on the value of using documents in the classroom.
Allida Black, the editor of the Papers of Eleanor Roosevelt at George Washington University, has been working with the National Council for History Education in training 600 teachers from New York, New Jersey, and Virginia to use Roosevelt documents in their classroom. Already, a number of school districts have asked the project to help shape their history programs. And other editorial projects have also produced curricular guides that are being introduced in the school systems.
New information and insights from editing projects have even found their way into the performing arts. On March 18 of this year, the Boston Globe published a review entitled, "Voices of Slavery Stir the Soul." A writer for the Globe staff called the performance "One of the great moments in the collective life of our musical community." It was the premiere of an oratorio called "Slavery Documents: A Cantata." Loren Schweninger, the editor of the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, served as librettist. It was performed in Boston's Symphony Hall with an orchestra, about 70 cantata singers, and a number of African American soloists. Most of the words sung at the event were directly from the documents uncovered by Schweninger and his team of editors, words of freedom captured in legislative petitions and county court documents discovered across the country and now brought to life through the medium of theater. Twenty-three hundred people heard the performance. It received a 5-minute standing ovation.
This Boston event was the culmination of an 8-year run of theater performances based on these materials. A few years earlier, Schweninger had created a theater documentary titled "Let My People Go: The Trials of Bondage in the Words of Master and Slave." That theatre piece has been performed 70 times before about 15,300 people in 30 North Carolina counties and outside the state as far away as Nebraska.
Recent editorial work is providing the basis for public programming in a variety of media. Numerous television documentaries in the past few years have featured documentary editors: Barbara Fields on the Civil War, John Simon on U.S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln, Bobby Hill and Barbara Bair on Marcus Garvey, Ann Gordon on Stanton-Anthony, Allida Black on Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others.
The field of editing is also expanding its influence into areas of the judiciary. John Kaminski and Richard Leffler, editors of the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, have conducted a series of seminars for Federal judges around the country to help fortify understanding of the relationship between the Constitution and contemporary legal issues. For example, Kaminski addressed about 60 appellate judges in a seminar sponsored by the American Bar Association, discussing how public opinion has affected American jury trials. The seminars help judges relate their own work to the nation's historical heritage and philosophical underpinnings. Through the seminars many judges also find or renew an interest in history. What better service could the editors of the Ratification project provide than to connect the writings and thoughts of the founders to sitting judges over two centuries later!
A number of Supreme Court decisions have referenced the Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution as well as other documentary editions. Just this past session, Justice Stevens and Justice Souter, in two separate opinons, used documents and information from the Documentary History of the Supreme Court, edited by Maeva Marcus.
And so the impact of the editors and of their editions has reached far beyond the academic setting.
This is a growing field, one in which the first wave of professionally edited works is reaching its culmination. Several major projects have completed work in the last few years and numerous others will finish in the near future. But new and exciting projects are already taking their place- documentary editions that will uncover fresh materials on ethnic history, the arts, the history of science; new editions in new formats that will reach larger numbers of users, especially electronically.
Modern documentary editors are helping to undermine misinformation, distortion, tall tales and secondhand storytelling. They have, for example, dramatically changed the way we look at African American society under slavery. Editors are revealing new information about the role of women in society, about conditions on the American frontier, and about the evolving social and cultural patterns of various immigrant groups. They are challenging our assumptions, making valuable discoveries, opening new areas of study, and forcing re-evaluation. They are giving us answers, raising new questions, and providing a wealth of information that is offering us a better understanding of the country's past.
This is, all of it, a noble endeavor.
