Welcome to Archive Rats

Why I started a newsletter

In 1931, Joseph Stalin insulted my profession.

More specifically, in an article for Proletarskii Revolutsia, Stalin called historians ‘archive rats’. Ever since encountering the phrase, I have thought of myself as an archive rat.

On one level, I enjoy the reclamation of past put-downs. But the term also reflects my process.

I’m tend not to create neatly itemised lists of documents before entering archives. I prefer to scurry about among the catalogues and files, gnawing on the information morsels that more focused and better organised researchers might overlook.

To extend the rat historian nibbling metaphor, I’ve spent much of my career regurgitating my favourite archival titbits into the digital sewers of Twitter. Although Twitter provided me with important opportunities, I personally detest spending time on it and deeply regret my profession’s reliance on the platform as a public sphere.

However, I really enjoy research as a shared endeavour. Since starting my gradual withdrawal from Twitter, I have mourned the disappearance of a community amid the site’s descent into chaos and cringe. Twitter is dead. Blogs are not coming back. Maybe newsletters are a path forward?

Archive Rats is my attempt to recover what was lost. It’s a newsletter about what I’m finding in the archives, just as my Twitter account was how I once shared the obscure things I found. Hopefully we can also have some conversations here about the research process and how we share our stories.

Part of my reason for being active on Twitter as a historian was always about a sense of obligation. Public money funds what I do, so I believe everybody should have a chance to learn about the research at every stage in a an accessible. A free newsletter seems like a good way of share my work while sticking to that idea.

The logo of my newsletter reflects the stories that interest me most. It’s a picture from the 1921 Second Comintern Congress. Lenin is visible in the upper left, Bukharin leans forward in a seat behind him.

But I’m not so interested in the Lenins or Bukharins of history.

I focus on the people beneath the headline, the table of women busily making shorthand notes of the speeches, the kinds of people who kept the revolution going but who went unacknowledged in the contemporary moment. The eccentrics, the mis-remembered and the marginalised who rarely feature in conventional histories of the modern world.

The kinds of people who are left to the archive rats.

P.s. If you could recommend this newsletter to friends, that would be class.