When historians refer to ‘training,’ we often refer to being able to read an archive and understand how the source itself fits into the grander scheme of the archive. But part of the problem, at least in Middle East and North African studies, is having archives to read into at all. The last two decades have witnessed multiple archive crises in the region. Archives have been rendered inaccessible, often by conflict, in the case of Syria and Iraq, or sources have been deliberately removed from archives by security states, such as the Israeli State Archives; Lebanon’s national archives, meanwhile, are under ‘renovations’ and there’s little word on when they might be accessible to the general public. But perhaps the problem is that we’re not thinking archive-first: we dive into topics without thinking of the availability of sources. Another layer of training we might receive is to construct projects while thinking source-first and readily reading available sources against the grain.
Jafet Library at the American University of Beirut (AUB) is one such repository of primary sources that might inspire researchers to think critically when building their own collections of sources. The Library has an impressive microfilm collection of Arabic-language periodicals. Furthermore, its Archive and Special Collections have accumulated some noteworthy unique documents, including private papers of the region’s elites.
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