Foundations of Historical Knowledge: How Libraries Make History

How do we know what we know about the past? History rarely if ever reveals itself to us easily or transparently. Instead, it yields to the close study of a wide range of materials and a thorough understanding of existing relevant scholarship. The materials that make the era of revolutions legible are varied and frequently occluded by their patchwork survival, the narrow scope of authors and perspectives, by expectations about what counts as reliable sources of information, by the time necessary to reconstruct complex historical realities, and by their location across globally disparate collecting institutions. Perhaps most urgently, traditional, comfortable or expected historical narratives can be difficult to dislodge with fresh, evidence-based history.

The JCB will develop programming for 2026 and Beyond to encourage new approaches to exploring, teaching, and understanding how historical thinking develops from the primary source materials that have long shaped our histories. These efforts will shed light on how sources were produced, how they came to reside in libraries, and how they became available to scholars and community members.