Finding the Voices of Marginalized People in Archives

The New York Review of Books interviewed Scott W. Stern, an environmental lawyer and the author of The Trials of Nina McCall, “about a mid-twentieth century government initiative to police and institutionalize women on the grounds that they were spreading sexually transmitted infections.” The book reflects his interest in archival research on the criminalization of marginalized people. This is how he describes his method for unearthing their stories:

Finding the voices of marginalized folks (or, more generally, nonrich, nonfamous people) in the archive is always a challenge, because the kinds of records that survive are usually produced by those with money and power, to say nothing of literacy. To address this challenge, I’ve embraced the techniques of historians of policing, enslavement, and queerness (among other subjects), which involve locating the voices of marginalized subjects in records that were never really intended to be historians’ primary sources. So one might read a police record to try to encounter the story—or voice—of the person under arrest. This will often entail looking past, or reinterpreting, the bigoted gloss of the recorder. In my own research, court records—trial transcripts, briefs, complaints, etc.—have been vital, but I always need to remind myself that the transcriber may not have been neutral or accurate, that such records often reflect duress, and that the subjects had valid reasons to lie or omit information.