From the Archives: A 19th-Century San Francisco Chinese Woman's Autobiography

We are pleased to include below the first post in an ongoing occasional series titled "From the Archives." Our first contribution comes from Joshua Paddison.

Autobiography of an Unnamed Chinese Woman

Introduced and Transcribed by Joshua Paddison

The following unnamed Chinese woman’s life story, written “in her own words,” was published in San Francisco’s Presbyterian newspaper, The Occident, on August 5, 1885. At the time, she was an interpreter and resident at the local Presbyterian Mission Home for Girls. Presbyterian missionaries had been working with Chinese immigrants in San Francisco since the 1850s.

In the 1870s, California’s politicians had seized on the figure of the “sinful” and “diseased” Chinese prostitute to urge the necessity of halting immigration from China. This resulted in the Page Act of 1875, the federal government’s first restriction of immigration, which forbade Chinese “coolies” and prostitutes from entering the United States. Protestant missionaries in California generally supported the Page Act but argued that Chinese women could and should be cared for, “uplifted,” and transformed into “useful Christian women.” “What maketh us to differ from them?” asked Presbyterian missionary Samantha Condit in 1874. “God’s grace alone.”

Chinese women’s autobiographical stories such as this one appeared occasionally in California’s Protestant publications, offered as evidence of the progress missionaries were making as well as the redeemability of all of the world’s “races.” These narratives are a largely untapped resource for historians of Asian American history, offering evidence of both the benefits and costs accrued when Chinese Americans joined Protestant churches in the nineteenth century.

Better Know an Archive: UCSB’s American Religions Collection

by Dusty Hoesly

This summer marks the 50^th anniversary of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). It is one of the oldest such departments at a secular university in the United States, established one year after the Supreme Court’s Abington v. Schempp decision allowed teaching about religion (but not proselytizing) in public schools, and it has been a leader in the field ever since. Well-known faculty specializing in American religions have included Robert Michaelsen, Thomas O’Dea, Phillip Hammond, Ines Talamantez, Catherine Albanese, Wade Clark Roof, Charles Long, Rudy Busto, Ann Taves, and Kathleen M. Moore.

UCSB also maintains one of the finest collections in the world of archival and documentary materials on new religious movements and “alternative” religions. The cornerstone of the library’s Department of Special Collections is the American Religions Collection (ARC), mainly comprised of materials assembled by J. Gordon Melton for his Encyclopedia of American Religions, first published in 1978 and now in its 8^th edition. The ARC contains thousands of books and serials, and almost 1,000 linear feet of manuscripts relating to 20^th century sects and newer religions, such as Hare Krishnas, the Unification Church, Scientology, the Church of God, New Age groups, Asian religions in the U.S., and mail-order religions. Melton’s manuscript files, containing correspondence, newsletters, flyers, articles, clippings, and ephemera relating to hundreds of such groups, make up the bulk of the collection. Like his Encyclopedia, materials are organized by “families” of religious traditions.

In addition to the ARC manuscript files, some of the other holdings within the ARC include:

·         Bromley Papers: legal case files compiled by scholar David Bromley relating to est, ISKCON, Unification Church, and The Way International, among others.

·         Burnell Collection: materials by Los Angeles-area New Thought leaders George and Mary Burnell.

·         Chicagoland Psychic Archives (1964-1985): materials relating to practitioners of paranormal phenomena in the Chicago area, such as psychics, astrologers, mediums, ghosthunters, and devotees of the occult, UFOs, and parapsychology.

·         Clifton Collection: files about pagan, witchcraft, and occult subjects.

·         Cult Awareness Network (CAN) Collection: files on hundreds of religious groups, as well as internal administrative files of the former cult watchdog group.

·         Hadden Papers: files collected by scholar Jeffrey K. Hadden about evangelical groups and leaders such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Jim Bakker.

·         Russell Chandler Collection: files from the 1960s-1980s collected when Chandler was a religion writer for the Los Angeles Times.

·         Santa Barbara Parapsychology Collection: materials related to parapsychology groups in central coastal and southern California.

Other sub-collections include materials about Ramtha, Estreletta, Worldwide Church of God, World Prophetic Ministry, Children of God, Old Catholics, Krishnamurti, ISKCON, Unification Church, Soka Gakkai International, Goddians, Christian Science, Unity School of Christianity, Swedenborgianism, Foundation for Christian Living, Brotherhood of the White Temple, Process Church of the Final Judgment, and Christian anti-Communism.

If you are looking for a complete run of FATE magazine or a complete set of Jack Chick books, the ARC has them both. Metaphysical serials include Hypnosis Quarterly, Health Alternatives Newsletter, Parapsychology Bulletin, Pagan Dawn, Eck News, and Astrologers’ Almanac, to name just a few. Aside from non-traditional religions and spiritualities, there are periodicals and other materials on a range of Christian sectarian groups, including Pentecostalism, Adventism, and various stripes of Evangelicalism, as well as Asian, African, and Native American religions, plus many more.

Beyond the ARC, the Special Collections department contains other resources useful for studying religion in the American West. For example, the Humanistic Psychology Archives encompasses manuscripts about “spiritual psychology” and related topics, and the J. F. Rowny Press Records collection contains materials from the Santa Barbara-based J. F. Rowny Press, which published metaphysical works. The Ricardo Cruz Catolicos por la Raza Papers (1967-1993) includes correspondence, legal documents, transcripts, and ephemera of Cruz, a Chicano rights attorney and founder of the controversial Católicos por la Raza, which demonstrated against the Catholic Church for its neglect of the Latino community.

Best of all, the library staff is always helpful and courteous, making research in the Special Collections a joy. Curator and archivist David Gartrell, in particular, can locate anything you are looking for quickly, typically offering relevant suggestions about other files which may aid in your research. In my experience, he will even sit with you and comb through manuscripts or serials looking for that one piece you are searching for. One time, he spent twenty minutes with me flipping through the classified ads in the back pages of FATE magazine for a particular advertisement.

In this brief and rather arbitrary look at the ARC and the UCSB Special Collections department’s holdings, I have focused more on the “alternative” and “new” religious movements which gained steam in the 1960s rather than “traditional” or “establishment” religions. I do this primarily because it reflects much of J. Gordon Melton’s collection as well as his scholarship, both of which are the core of the ARC. However, California should not only be seen as a place for “weird” religions, immigrant religions, and religious innovation. It is also a place of mainstream religions, nativism, and religious conservatism. Happily, the ARC contains materials on all of the above and more besides. Next time you’re visiting the American Riviera, stop by, introduce yourself, and surf through UCSB’s Special Collections and especially the American Religions Collection. Scholarly—or other—enlightenment awaits.

James W. Scott Regional Research Fellowship Awards for 2013-2014

Western Washington University’s Center for Pacific Northwest Studies welcomes applications for the James W. Scott Regional Research Fellowships, established to promote awareness and use of archival collections at WWU and to forward scholarly understandings of the Pacific Northwest. The fellowships are awarded in honor of the late Dr. James W. (Jim) Scott, a founder and first Director of the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, and a noted scholar of the Pacific Northwest region. The Center for Pacific Northwest Studies is a program of Western Libraries' Heritage Resources, located in the Goltz-Murray Archives Building.

For more information, see this announcement at H-net: http://www.h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=204537

or here: http://library.wwu.edu/internships_cpnws#fellowships

Redd Center grants due March 15

The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies offers a number of awards, fellowships, and grant opportunities for folks doing research on topics related to the American West. There are awards for graduate students, faculty, independent researchers, visiting scholars, etc, and for specialized topics, such as women's history, local histories, creative projects, and the use of special collections at BYU. Grant applications are due next Friday, March 15. For details, click here.

Researching Judaism in the West

by Shari Rabin

Over the last few years the Bancroft Library at the University of California at Berkeley has acquired the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life from the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley. Included in this collection is the Western Jewish Americana Collection, which I spent a month with last summer as part of my dissertation research on the importance of geographic mobility in nineteenth century American Judaism. In addition to being a beautiful research facility in a moderate climate with easy access to great food and really strong single origin coffee, working at the Bancroft was an exciting opportunity to research in a major archive with broad holdings in western history.

Jewish materials tend to be held in separate archives, most notably the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. Such archival divisions beget historiographical ones, however, and I hope that the presence of Jewish materials in the Bancroft, where those with interests outside of Jewish history can easily access them, will help bring Judaism into more studies of religion in the American West.

While there are sources in German, French, Yiddish, and Hebrew, some come with translations and there are plenty of fascinating materials in English. A few highlights from the collection:

The most compelling and robust congregational collection is that of Congregation Sherith Israel, one of the two oldest Jewish congregations in San Francisco. In addition to the congregation’s constitution, minutes, and marriage records, particularly fascinating is its documentation of the contentious relationship between the congregation and its clergy. For instance the collection includes a paper war over animosities with Rabbi Aron J. Messing in 1872 – he was accused of financial misdeeds, misrepresenting his English abilities, and “using during his address from the pulpit profane and indecorous language…to attack the Board of Trustees personally” – followed by a stack of applications from the ensuing search for a new rabbi.

Clerical-congregational acrimony flowed both ways. In 1855 San Francisco’s cantankerous Rabbi Julius Eckman wrote a letter to Solomon Nunes Carvalho, who had been the daguerrotypist on John C. Fremont’s Fifth Expedition. Exasperated with the indifference and bad behavior of his congregants, he noted as an example the “strange mode gaining countenance here of celebrating Wedding banquets.” Receptions were being held – and announced in the synagogue – at the non-kosher Shepherds Brewery Saloon “without grace, without a blessing.” Furthermore, “the room was crowded, people got in spirit[, and] four ladies fell headlong to the ground in the room.”

Of the Collection’s various personal memoirs, of particular interest to American religious historians is Florence Prag Kahn’s 1904 account of living in Utah as a young bride in the late 1860s. In “My Life Among the Mormons” she describes life in Salt Lake City and socializing with Brigham Young, recounting: “Did they ever try to convert us? No. One day Brigham asked us, 'Are you Jews by birth and race, or converts to Judaism?' By birth, race, faith, conviction, was the reply. 'Then you can never become Mormons; no true Jew can be converted to Mormonism.'"

Cantankerous congregants, badly behaved clergy, non-normative religious practice, interreligious encounter: these are not just Jewish stories, but are classic themes of western religious history. If you are conducting research at the Bancroft, consider taking a look, and including some Jewish stories as you document the excitement, challenges, and eclectic forms of Western religious life.

Casual Friday: Redd Center Grants

For those of you doing field research or archival research on (American) Western topic that requires travel and find yourself in needs of some funds (which means all of us!), the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, centered at Brigham Young University, offers a number of grants for students, faculty, and independent researchers. Here is a list of the awards they offer. Applications for awards will be available beginning Monday January 14. Here is the link: https://reddcenter.byu.edu/Pages/GrantsAwards.aspx

Casual Friday: Chican@ history

This is exciting news!

The Department of Archives and Special Collections, William H. Hannon Library, Loyola Marymount University, has opened to researchers an extensive collection documenting Mexican immigrant and Mexican-American history in Los Angeles. This is the Venegas Family Papers, which consist of correspondence, photographs, immigration records, Roman Catholic realia and devotional literature, and business records, principally related to Miguel (1897-1994) and Dolores (1900-1991) Venegas. The collection guide is on-line at the Online Archive of California.

Themselves Cristeros, the Venegases came to Los Angeles from the Mexican state of Jalisco in 1927 as refugees from the troubles of the Cristero Rebellion (1926-1929). A remarkable run of correspondence from Miguel and Dolores Venegas to relatives in Jalisco from the first five years of their life in Los Angeles (1927-1932) extensively details the challenges and opportunities of their lives as immigrants. The letters offer valuable insights into their work and economic opportunities, family life, recreation, religious practices, diet, health, continued ties with Mexico, and education. Examples of the kind of detail found in the letters include the effects of the Great Depression on the Mexican-American community in Los Angeles and the United States immigration law of 1929.

A letter from Miguel Venegas to his brother, containing (on p. 2) one of the earliest known uses of the word "chicano." From the William H. Hannon Library tumblr.

Almost all the correspondence is in Spanish, often colloquial, with irregular orthography, which in itself is evidence for Spanish linguistics and levels of literacy in Mexico and Los Angeles in Spanish. Striking in the correspondence is the uses of the word "chicano" by Miguel Venegas to describe his United States-born children (the couple had ten). His uses of the word here may constitute some of the earlier written instances of the word.

The collection also treats the history of Mexico. The Venegases' correspondence with relatives in Jalisco contains extensive information on commerce, agriculture, health and medicine, family life, and religious practices from the 1920s through the 1940s in Jalisco. Comments by relatives in Guadalajara on the political situation in Jalisco, both before and after the Cristero Rebellion, are especially valuable for understanding the course of the Cristero Rebellion and its aftermath. Cristero "corridos" (ballads) provide a valuable source for understanding the culture of the Cristero movement.

Photographs in the collection record the social activities and work of this LA family. Noteworthy are those of Venegas family outings to Lincoln Park and the beach in the late 1920s, which provide photographic documentation of the social life of Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles at that time. In addition, there is a strong run of photographs of Guadalajara and Zapotlanejo, in Jalisco, which document work, family life and religious culture, e.g. vacations, masses, and work on a hacienda.

Online Resources Roundup

By Stan Thayne

There are a number of online resources available to students and researchers interested in the study of the American West. Though most of these are dedicated to Western history more generally, several are relevant to the topic of religion—which, after all, intersects with every other facet of culture and is only relevant when placed in a broader context. What follows is a brief summary, with links, of several sites that may be helpful to researchers. Our hope is that this roundup (and its deficiencies) might open up a conversation about online resources. So please, jump on in and tell us what resources you have found helpful to your own studies!

The Library of Congress’s American Memory site has a digitized collection of photographs from the Denver Public Library available. The collection is titled History of the American West 1860-1920. Here is how the collection is described at the website:

The images in History of the American West are drawn from the more than 600,000 photographs in the holdings of the Western History and Genealogy Department at Denver Public Library. ...approximately 4,000 images document the place of mining in the history of Colorado and the West and 3,500 that show the lives and culture of Native Americans from more than forty tribes living west of the Mississippi River. To these, the Denver Public Library has added approximately 23,000 additional photographs digitized as part of its large-scale Photodigitization Project.

The National Archives has a digitized collection of Photographs of the AmericanWest: 1861-1912.

In 1986 Patty Limerick and Charles Wilkinson founded the Center of the American West. In addition to selling T-shirts, the site announces upcoming events, provides information on internships and student awards, and also offers a number of forums, podcasts, and links to papers, books, and websites on a number of topics relevant to the study of the American West. The center’s projects include subjects such as Energy, Mining, Water, Land Use, Interior, and more.

The Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University, co-founded by Richard White and David Kennedy, offers a number of resources, forums, and fellowships, as well as a blog. Projects include Water in the West, The Rural West Initiative, and Comparative Wests.

The American West Center at the University of Utah offers a number of resources. Of particular interest is their oral history collections, on topics such as Utah Outdoor Recreation, Polio, Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans, and more. Also very useful for those in Indigenous Studies is their digital archive on Utah American Indians and Utah Indian Curriculum Project.

PBS’s New Perspectives on the West site, based on the Ken Burns documentary, is actually quite helpful in a number of ways, providing links to archives, biographical information on a lot of key figures, and even lesson plans on a number of topics, as well as, of course, clips from the film.

The Howard R. Lamar Center at Yale University offers a number of resources and fellowships.

The Charles Redd Center for Western Studies offers a number of fellowships and publications and has a really good oral history project (though interviews are not available online), as well as other resources.

Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library offers a number of digitized collections relevant to those interested in Mormonism and much more, including the Western Waters Digital Library.

TheMountain West Digital Library, a project of the Utah Academic Library Consortium, offers “free access to over 670,000 resources from universities, colleges, public libraries, museums, historical societies, and government agencies, counties, and municipalities in Utah, Nevada, and other parts of the U.S. West.”

Resources for the American West in general are of course much more numerous than those dedicated to Religion in the American West specifically. Though much at the above sites is very relevant, a focus on religion is still greatly lacking at many of the centers for the study of the American West. But there are a number of useful resources here.

For those teaching courses on Religion in the American West, particularly helpful is the Seminar on Religion in the American West (the host of this blog). The Seminar organizes a session at the American Academy of Religion and the site offers a timeline, sample syllabi, primary source documents, a bibliography, and, perhaps best of all, a link to this blog (which is, after all, an extension of said seminar)!

These are just a few of the resources available to scholars interested in the West as a region—or whatever else you may characterize it as. I have surely overlooked several others. What have I missed? What databases, websites, or online collections do you find particularly helpful to your own research interests? Your input just may help someone out with a research paper or conference paper or dissertation or book chapter they’ve been working on. So, please, comment and share…

p.s. See also our Online Resources tab in the sidebar for more links to online collections and databases.

Reflections from the California (Bay Area) Archives

By Tisa Wenger

This academic year I’ve been enjoying the enormous privilege of a sabbatical, and I’ve been hard at work on the research for a book that I’m describing as a cultural history of religious freedom discourse in the twentieth-century United States. In other words I am interested in anybody, anywhere in the country, who was invoking the ideal of religious freedom. The goal is to explore the changing meanings of "religious freedom" across the century, and the cultural and political work that this ideal has performed.

This is anything but a small topic, and at various times I’ve felt overwhelmed at the scope of the research involved. When I spent a week at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, and described my project to an archivist there, he looked at me like I was quite possibly insane, and said, “Just about everything in our collections would be relevant to you.” Well, yes. One of my methods for locating relevant primary sources was to do keyword searches in Archive Grid and Archive Finder for phrases like “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” and just see what turned up. After almost a week of this I had around forty piles of printed-out finding aids organized by state, and I planned research trips based on which piles were a) the biggest, and b) would provide me with materials representing a wide diversity of religious groups, political perspectives, and geographic regions. To the dismay of my family, who had the crazy idea that they might see more of me than usual during my sabbatical, I’ve ended up doing research this year at archives in Indiana, Maryland, New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, California, Illinois, Tennessee, and of course (since I live here) Connecticut.

Now I admit that this is not exactly a “religion in the American west” topic. But since I’m the person writing this book, westerners and the west will be well represented in it. And since my trip to California was just at the end of May, I thought I’d share with you just a few of my reflections on the sources I managed to gather in a day at the Hoover Institution (Stanford), four mornings at the Graduate Theological Union library (Berkeley), three afternoons at the Bancroft (Berkeley), and one afternoon at the California Historical Society (San Francisco).

One important thread involved new religious movements and the “cult” scare of the 1970s, especially as it played out in California. The GTU has an excellent “vertical files” collection on new religious movements, which includes extensive materials from and about the Church of Scientology and the Unification Church (Moonies). Not surprisingly, given the animus directed against them, both of these groups developed very sophisticated public relations campaigns that appealed, among other things, to the constitutional principle of religious freedom. As their opponents sought in various ways to define their activities outside the bounds of what could be protected under the First Amendment, they worked to place themselves squarely within the protected category of “religion.”

While none of that was a surprise, I did find some unexpected (at least to me) intersections between the NRMs and the other sorts of groups I was pursuing. For example, at the GTU I was also exploring the papers of Richard Boeke, a Unitarian minister in Berkeley during the 1970s and 1980s who was instrumental in reviving the North American chapter of the International Association of Religious Freedom (IARF). This is an organization of Unitarians and other religious liberals, originally founded in Boston in the early twentieth century, which has given me rich insights into how religious freedom appears from the very liberal end of the religious spectrum, Christian and otherwise.

Boeke also ended up being active, along with religious studies scholar J. Gordon Melton and many others, in a group called the Alliance for the Preservation of Religious Liberties (APRL), which was based in Los Angeles but had a very active Northern California chapter. APRL’s primary goal was to combat the persecution of new religious movements, and dedicated much of its energies to public relations against “deprogrammers” hired by some families to get their young adult children away from the “cults.” They also fought legislation that was proposed in California and many other states to specifically legalize deprogramming—some deprogrammers were being convicted under kidnapping laws—when the person targeted was involved in a group that allegedly used “brainwashing” and other coercive tactics. The national APRL president, Dr. Ross Bartlett, was a Baptist minister from Los Angeles whose contributions to APRL newsletters quite clearly reflected the Cold War context of these events. America must allow religious liberty for all, he wrote, and not just for the popular or well-established religions, because to do otherwise would make the United States like the totalitarian and anti-religious Soviet Union. (On the other side of the debate, anti-cult activists represented the Scientologists, etc., as “totalitarians” who forced a conformity of belief—thus violating the religious freedom of their members—and threatened the foundations of a free society.)

The Jonestown tragedy of 1978 inspired a rash of anti-cult publicity (as well as legislation), and occasioned much soul-searching on the part of many of those who had been defending the rights of new religious movements. Even within APRL, the limits of religious freedom were always complex and very much contested. The organization included some Scientologists and Moonies as members—after all they had a stake in the cause—and so regularly faced accusations that it was simply a “front group” for these movements. In the early 1980s, Bartlett visited chapters across the country to ensure this was not the case. After investigating the affiliations of all local APRL leaders, he ultimately forced a “purge” of several regional chapters in order to ensure the national credibility of the organization. Around the same time the IARF sponsored a symposium on “The Limits of Tolerance,” asking under what conditions “tolerance” and inclusivity might become counterproductive and actually undermine the liberal values they wanted to advance. Some of the correspondence around that symposium revealed that part of the impetus for the event was a petition from the Church of Scientology to become a member group of IARF—a request that was promptly denied. Scientology, tainted as it was with a reputation for fraud and coercion, clearly did not fit the IARF’s parameters for an ally in the cause of religious freedom. Even the ACLU (I spent my time at the California Historical Society with the Northern California ACLU papers) went through some soul-searching after Jonestown, as several chapter leaders questioned the wisdom of their support for the People’s Temple during its San Francisco years. And they extended these doubts to the broader question of religious freedom, asking whether and when they should be more selective in advocating for “freedom” for groups that may prove undesirable in various ways.

At the Bancroft I spent much of my time with the “People for the American Way Collection of Conservative Political Ephemera, 1980-2004.” You would be amazed (or maybe you wouldn’t) how many right-wing organizations over the past three decades have employed the words “religious freedom” or “religious liberty” in their names and statements of purpose. This focus on religious liberty sometimes made for strange bedfellows: in the early 1980s, when a number of luminaries from the emerging Christian right went to Washington, D.C. for a march for religious liberty, some were surprised to discover that the march had been mostly organized by the Unification Church—part of a campaign to have its leader, the Reverend Moon, released from prison (he had been convicted of various financial improprieties). While some who had come for the march disavowed any connection with the Moonies, others heartily embraced the cause of Rev. Moon as a legitimate religious freedom issue.

More broadly, the People for the American Way collection helped me understand how the religious right managed to seize ownership of “religious freedom” in American public discourse in the 1980s and into the present. At mid-century a majority of religious freedom talk had come from the coalition of civil libertarians, Jewish organizations, and mainline/liberal Protestants who advocated for the separation of church and state as the primary guarantor of this liberty—an agenda reflected in the Supreme Court’s adjudication of First Amendment cases in that period. (Not at all concealed in much of this advocacy, especially around public-parochial school questions, was a deep and abiding suspicion of Roman Catholicism as a major threat to American liberties.) But in the conservative upswing that began in the 1970s, evangelical leaders asserted a fundamental conflict between religious freedom and the separation of church and state, pushing for things like prayer in the public schools as an issue of religious freedom.

Although there were many factors that played a part in that shift—the cultural and political dynamics of the ongoing Cold War prominent among them—I have started to see the “cult” scare of those decades as one contributing factor. On one hand, the events of Jonestown and the cult controversies contributed to doubts among liberal groups like the ACLU and the IARF about the limits and the utility of religious freedom talk. And on the other, despite the doubts of some evangelical leaders, the Washington march organized by the Moonies contributed to the surge of the new right-wing discourse of religious freedom.

So that sums up some of my more interesting finds in the Bay Area archives. Again, not entirely about the west, but the distinctive religious dynamics of California are essential to these insights. And I’d love to hear thoughts on this work from any readers of this blog.

Archive Envy

by James Bennett

My summer consists mostly of being a stay-at-home dad this year. It is unquestionably time well spent, but that doesn’t mean that occasional sibling squabbling doesn’t send me dreaming of archives! Alas, my forays into archives of religion in the American West will have to wait until the dog days of August, or even September (which is, here on the West Coast, the best weather of the year!). Fortunately, the quarter system (an academic phenomena largely of the West?), facilitates late season archiving when my children are already back in school.

But back to archives: what are some of your memorable archive experiences researching religion in the American West? I’m thinking here not of the biggies (the Huntington, the Bancroft, the Beinecke, etc.), but the little, out of the way treasure troves—not just of documents, but of knowledgeable and friendly archivists. The previously unknown sources (at least to me) that such places might contain is exciting, but there is something stimulating about just working in such an environment.

I’m still in the process of shifting my scholarly energy from the South to the West, so have yet to experience this while working on the West. I did, however, have several such experiences working on my first project. Perhaps the most memorable was the archives of the Josephite Fathers in Baltimore, MD. Father Pete Hogan, who served as the Josephite archivist for over forty years, had collected the largest repository of black Catholic materials in the country, all stored and organized according to a classification system he invented. It was controlled chaos. Fr. Hogan was gracious to a fault, generous in sharing whatever he knew and whatever he had. But for someone used to working in the strictly regulated environment of traditional archives and reading rooms, the Josephite archives were quite a shock: before proceeding down to the basement archive, you could grab and cup of coffee and a doughnut and bring them with you! A visit always included lunch. Once you received the dot-matrix tractor feed sheets of paper showing the classification numbers of the documents you wanted, you just got up, wandered through the basement and pulled the archive boxes you needed off the shelves yourself. If you needed a copy, you copied it yourself. If you needed to work late, you could stay in the basement and turn off the lights yourself when you were done. But most enjoyable, was being part of the banter with Fr. Hogan and his assistants and the recipients of their knowledge and insights. Gentle teasing and insight reminiscing replaced the sacred silence that dominates most reading rooms.

For me, one of the most exciting parts of embarking on a new project is anticipating the new places I’ll do my research. What treasure troves of religion in the American West have you come across?