How a pioneering manuscript librarian and intellectual uncovered buried records that reshaped America's past As the London-based agent of the US Library of Congress, Ruth Anna Fisher (1886-1975) profoundly shaped the field of US history. Working at the British Museum and Public Record Office between the world wars, she was responsible for a vast program of identifying and copying up to a million documents related to American history, with prescient attention to the transatlantic slave trade. This monumental achievement has provided countless scholars access to source materials that might have remained hidden in repositories throughout Britian without Fisher's brilliant discernment and tireless labor. In Envoy to the Archives, William L. Fox offers the first full-length biography of this remarkable American intellectual. Born to a prominent African American family in northern Ohio, Fisher was keenly aware of racial issues throughout her life. She was associated with key thinkers in the Harlem Renaissance and the twentieth century transatlantic world, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harold Laski, and J. Franklin Jameson. A trailblazer in historical research, Fisher was among a small group of Black women who first joined the ranks of professional library work, and her efforts in London coincided with the creation and consolidation of the US National Archives in the 1930s. She also mastered technologies that were new at the time, including photostat reproduction and microfilm-precursors to the many historical digitization projects of our own era. This engrossing biography adds to the growing body of work centered on Black women archivists, librarians, and curators. Fox draws on a wide range of archival sources, including the personal papers of prominent Black thinkers (Fisher's were destroyed in the bombing of London in 1940), and various institutional records at the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Fox also knew Fisher personally, adding warmth and insight into this captivating portrait.
William L. Fox is president emeritus of St. Lawrence University. His previous books include Lodge of the Double-Headed Eagle: Two Centuries of Scottish Rite Freemasonry and Valley of the Craftsmen. He is the biographer of the twentieth century Harvard theologian and longest-serving dean of the Harvard Divinity School, Willard L. Sperry.
List of Illustrations Preface Introduction 1. Appalachian Antecedents (1850-1865) 2. Northern Beginnings (1866-1880) 3. Home Ground (1881-1906) 4. Vocational Trials (1907-1918) 5. African Otherness (1919-1923) 6. New Directions (1924-1929) 7. Primary Sources (1930-1932) 8. Du Bois Returns (1933-1939) 9. Magnificent Distances (1940-1945) 10. Quiet Eyes (1946-1949) 11. London Restoration (1949-1952) 12. Constructing Waymarks (1953-1975) Epilogue Acknowledgments Index
"Envoy to the Archives will make a major contribution and will open new avenues of research focused on behind-the-scenes history. It will interest public historians, scholars and students in library and information science, and those scholars in history and political science whose work is made possible by the collections that Fisher created."-Cheryl Knott, author of Not Free, Not for All: Public Libraries in the Age of Jim Crow
