| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Antoinette Burton, editor. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. x, 396. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.
Antoinette Burton gathered seventeen scholars to reflect on archives as physical and political entities, archival research, and the nature of historical evidence. Their regions of study include Egypt, Australia, North America, South Africa, Central Asia, Russia, India, Britain, France, and Germany. Postmodernism, postcolonialism, and an emphasis on contingency dominate their approaches. The result is a stimulating tour of archives and research experiences that makes this volume appropriate for inclusion in all history graduate training programs. Burton enhanced its appeal for teaching with a rich introductory essay and selected bibliography. Experienced historians will also find much here to inspire reflection on their own "archive stories."	1
The essays highlight the intentions behind the construction and subsequent management of archival collections, reveal the universally contingent nature of the researcher's interaction with the archive, and challenge scholars to expand their definitions of evidence to include oral testimonies from persons typically omitted from archival collections as "dominant regions of truth" (p. 2). The volume thus attacks "head-on the lingering presumptions about, and attachments to, the claims of objectivity with which archives have historically been synonymous" (p. 7). In Burton's apt phrasing, the scholars' experiences bring to light "fugitive traces of subjectivity" in all historical scholarship (p. 14). That subjectivity renders the notion "that history is or can be a delivery system for absolute truth" a "fantasy" (p. 19).	. . .

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