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Review
| The Public Vaults Unlocked, by Thora Colot, et al. Washington, DC: The Foundation for the National Archives, in association with D Giles Limited, London, 2005. 176 pages. $ 40.00, cloth.
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| The National Archives was established in 1934 by an act of Congress to serve as a depository for official documents of the federal government. Today, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) serves as home for billions of documents representing more than two centuries of records of the three branches of the United States government. Included in this vast collection is a wealth of documents from America's political, military, and social history (including family history). Among the most famous documents in the National Archives, also known as the "national attic," are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights, and the Emancipation Proclamation. |
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The National Archives, though, is home to more than simply many millions of documents in the history of the United States. The NARA also preserves, protects, and makes accessible to the public billions of other documents (e.g., letters, memos, photographs, maps, drawings, posters, and film and audios clips). Included in the National Archives' vast collection are: billions of paper records; 300,000 reels of film, and 41 million photographs, to name but a few of the resources. The public, however, is largely unaware of the contents or magnitude of the National Archives' holdings. Other NARA holdings, for example, include firsthand reports of the Battle of Lexington, records of the Continental Congress, a telegram from John Wilkes Booth to an accomplice, passenger manifests from Ellis Island, film clips of Theodore Roosevelt, the Zimmermann Telegram, a recording of one of FDR's "fireside chats," photographs of the D-Day landing, the arrest report of Rosa Parks, photographs of the 1969 moon landing, an electronic database of Vietnam War POWs, and Cold War-era satellite photographs of Moscow. |
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Besides improving public knowledge of its holdings, NARA set out to create a dramatic experience for visitors, a "Public Vaults" exhibition, officially installed in November 2004, It was created to provide visitors with "the feeling of going beyond the walls of the Rotunda into the stacks and vaults of the National Archives." As part of the exhibit, over 1,000 originals and facsimiles of documents (including written documents, photographs, drawings, maps, and audio and video clips) are displayed with interactive tools that allow users to examine and analyze them in detail. The Public Vaults Unlocked is designed to provide readers with a similar experience of delving into the vaults of the National Archives and of examining the rich and varied records that are housed within. The publisher's intent, which is similar to that of the Public Vaults exhibit and Web site (available at <http://www.archives.gov/national-archivexperience/visit/public_vaults.html>), is to afford readers an opportunity to appreciate the depth, diversity, and magnitude of records available in the National Archives. The Public Vaults Unlocked is designed to mirror the organization of the Public Vaults exhibition. As a result, the book's authors attempt to replicate the various thematic "vaults" included in the exhibit. Following an introductory chapter on the types of records contained in the National Archives (a primary documents primer, of sorts), the five remaining chapters address the themes found in the five vaults included in the exhibit. Each of the chapters is drawn from phrases in the Preamble to the Constitution: "We the People," which focuses on family and citizenship; "To Form a More Perfect Union," which highlights records of liberty and law; "Provide for the Common Defense," which includes records of war and diplomacy; "Promote the General Welfare," which celebrates Americans' ingenuity, imagination, and enterprise; and "To Ourselves and Our Posterity" which examines the care and preservation of National Archives' holdings for future generations. |
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The Public Vaults Unlocked includes illustrations of over 200 documents and photographs of artifacts, which together serve to demonstrate the breadth and depth of holdings under the stewardship of the National Archives. Examples of some of the milestone documents in American history contained in this public archives are the Declaration of Independence; the Emancipation Proclamation, House Joint Resolution 1 proposing the 19th Amendment, a 1962 aerial photograph of a missile launch site in Cuba, and President Nixon's letter of resignation. The Public Vaults Unlocked also includes dozens of illustrations that document the story of America not through the actions of important and famous people, but through the lives of ordinary Americans. Some of the records in the book illustrating America's social fabric are: a page from the 1850 census records for Concord, Massachusetts; excerpts from the 1865 "Register of Marriages among Freedmen" in Arkadelphia; an 1869 Teacher's Monthly School Report for Williams School, Virginia; a 1921 passenger arrival list in the Port of New York for the SS Acropolis; the 1931 Oath of Allegiance of Mikael Amerikian; and an eyewitness account of the actions of Medal of Honor recipient Clifford Chester Sims during the Vietnam War. |
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A narrative included in each chapter of The Public Vaults Unlocked provides the historical context for the document sets , and the informative captions that accompany each illustration makes this book accessible to a wide audience of students, from junior high and high school through college. It appears, however, given the inclusion of such end-of-chapter features as "Patent Puzzlers," "Make Your Own Great Seal of the United States," and "Can You Guess Who's Who" (a presidential childhood photo matching game), that the publisher's intended audience is grades 7-12. However, the reading level of the book appears to be much higher than the junior high school level, and The Public Vaults Unlocked seems better suited for use for high school American history courses. It is useful, as intended, to call attention to NARA's holdings, not as significant source of documentary evidence. The digital history classroom has access to the enormous on-line via the NARA's Archival Research Catalog (ARC) electronic database. Nevertheless, The Public Vaults Unlocked remains useful for the more limited purpose of introducing students to the richness of our heritage stored in the National Archives and Records Office. |
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| Ball State University |
D. Antonio Cantu |
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