Visiting Archives: The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, Georgia

A recent project took me to the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, Georgia, and I thought this might be a good time to launch a second series on the IHP blog: archive visit notes. Hopefully the information in the posts will help researchers to get better acclimated with various archives before they go, or even help them to discover new archives!



I contacted the Jimmy Carter Library in advance of my visit by the form available on their website. The research room director responded with some information about their holdings which became clearer on-site, as well as with a list of local housing options.

From Geneva I checked the National Archives and Records Administration Archival Research Catalog (ARC), limiting all results (possible under “Search Options”) to the Jimmy Carter Library, for relevant records – the order in which they were returned did not make much sense to me at the time. Upon arriving the research room director ran a search for me, one which was classified by series and thus gave a better idea of the hierarchy of files – to those heading to a NARA archive I would recommend sorting your catalog search results by “Hierarchy” – knowing the record group certainly helps in a first sorting of which sources might be useful and which will likely not be so useful.

A source which is not noted on the Jimmy Carter Library website, but which was extremely valuable, was their CREST database (housed on an in-room computer, not accessible remotely). The CREST database mostly houses once-sensitive documents which have been reviewed and either declassified or sanitized (redacted). The advantage – and disadvantage – of all things digitized is that it is key-word searchable. This works well if you are looking for person names or agency names. However, if you have a less concrete subject, you will likely want to run the search several times, with varying key words, in order to best cover all your bases. As in real life, official titles or names were not always used in cabled correspondence, meaning a thorough search of the CREST database takes some good detective work. The CREST database documents each have unique identifying numbers which can be deconstructed, leading you back to potential files of interest – it can serve as another search tool.

Once on site, you also have the possibility to consult extensive finding aids for their series mentioned online, such as the White House Central Files, or the files of the First Lady’s Office. While the row of binders certainly looks daunting, they are actually a bit wanting in information – often the descriptions are vague, the type with official department titles but little indication of the content – that it serves the researcher best to order any box which might look interesting for their research.

In order to access the archive, I had to fill out a contact form and provide identification (a passport suffices). This in turn permitted me to receive a researcher card, valid at the Carter library for one year.

Prior to entering the archive, researchers are given keys to lockers just outside the reading room for all bags, coats, and nonessentials. Upon entering, researchers have to sign in and present any paper they wish to bring in (or when exiting, what they wish to bring out) to the research room supervisor in order to ensure documents are not being added or pilfered. There are no set pull times for files – one fills out a short request form, and usually in less than five minutes they are available for consultation.

The reading room itself is well stocked with reference works for the period of the Carter presidency, as well as the latest volumes concentrating on the Carter presidency. In addition to the document finding aids, there are extensive finding aids for audio and visual material (generally these results are available on the ARC catalog as well).

Researchers are permitted to photograph all documents (without flash, of course), as well as make copies (or print copies if they are in the CREST database). Copies, however, are fee-bearing.

In terms of accessing documents, as the Carter presidency was less than 30 years ago, there are still lots of documents which are classified. Even some that have passed the 30 year limit are still classified, due to too few staff to review such material. Therefore, I would recommend if the Carter archives were to be consulted for a major work (like a dissertation) in the next few years, that a minimum of two visits be planned - a first one to survey and examine what is already available, and a second one at least three or four months later, in case any access reviews or FOIAs need to be ordered.

The Jimmy Carter Presidential Library is part of the Carter Center complex, which in turn was formerly the Augustus Hurt Plantation.



In addition to the offices of the Carter Center and the archives, the property houses an actual library, a public museum, and a gift shop. There is a cafeteria (adorned with photos of Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter feasting all around the world) where researchers are entitled to a complete lunch for $4 (open 11am to 3pm). Between the archives and the museum/gift shop/cafeteria entrance is a small rose garden which is nice on a clear day.





Overall, the Carter archive was very welcoming to researchers, from the receptionist to the multitude of research room staff. A plus for those planning to spend multiple days there is that their chairs are superbly ergonomic! I look forward to returning sometime in the near future.

IHP Fondue

At the Bains de Paquis, Wednseday, 25 November

Photos courtesy of Lisa Komar

Getting to know the IHP Faculty: Davide Rodogno

New school year, more interviews! We begin with Davide Rodogno, Professeur boursier, who is a co-director of the Doctoral and Faculty Seminar in International History and Politics this year (and who will team-teach a course on the League of Nations and the United Nations: A Parallel History in the spring).



Jaci Eisenberg: I’m curious about how you became interested in your specific areas of research. Could you tell us about what you did your graduate studies on, and how that’s evolved into what you’re working on today.

Davide Rodogno: I was a Ph.D. student here at the Graduate Institute. Our director, Philippe Burrin, was my supervisor and I also was a teaching assistant for Professor Bruno Arcidiacono and Matthew Leitner. I consider the three of them as my mentors. The topic of my dissertation was on Fascist Italy military occupations in Europe during the Second World War.

The topic of my Ph.D. actually began as a seminar paper in late 1994. Bruno Arcidiacono asked me whether I was interested in working on Fascist policy towards the Jews of the occupied territories in Europe. The topic appealed to me a lot, since it contributed to the understanding of the persistence of a myth alive still today in Italy: Italiani brava gente, the Italians were good people and benevolent occupiers. In 1995, I came to the conclusion that if one really wanted to understand Fascist policies towards the Jews in Europe it was necessary to understand the broader context of the military occupation or annexations. The seminar paper became a mémoire and, eventually, a PhD dissertation.

In 2000, while finishing my thesis, I became interested in the topic of my second book, (a history of humanitarian interventions during the nineteenth century, which should be published by the end of 2010). I should mention that the 1990s was a time when at the old HEI there was a lively debate on humanitarian interventions. As a student I had the privilege to attend seminars of international law professors such as George Abi-Saab, Theodor Meron, and Luigi Condorelli. While preparing my thesis defense, I dealt with questions concerning the history of genocide and I came across Vahakn Dadrian’s book on the Armenian genocide. Dadrian mentioned humanitarian interventions during the 19th century, without giving any definition of this international practice. So, I started doing some historiographical research and realized that, with the exception of some international law articles, nothing had been written on the history of humanitarian interventions.

Shortly after my doctoral thesis defense I applied for a bourse chercheur avancé of the Fonds National Suisse. My research project was about armed intervention against massacre in the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. In the meantime, I was already working for the World Bank in Lithuania and try to keep as many professional doors open for my future because I wasn’t so sure that I would get the Post-Doc fellowship.

So, this is how things developed in my case. Curious maybe, but that’s the way it is.

Jaci Eisenberg: What were you doing at the World Bank exactly?

Davide Rodogno: The World Bank had to prepare a Country Economic Memorandum, a photograph of Lithuania, one of the post-communist transition countries, as they were called back in the 1990s. I was one of the members of a team of 10 experts, and the only non-economist of the group. I had to prepare a report on the business environment. It was a very formative experience because I could interview the ex-President of Lithuania, the representatives of the patronat, of the workers, of small-and-medium size enterprises, as well as NGOs monitoring corruption in the country.

At the very same time I was applying for the YPP (the Young Professional Programme of the World Bank) the FNS awarded me the post-doctoral fellowship. I decided that I would keep working in academia. I moved to London and to Paris. From there I moved to St. Andrews, where I was appointed Academic Fellow in 2005.

Now, to go back to your first question, while I was working on the history of humanitarian interventions throughout the 19th century, I realized that a number of public opinion movements, such as the Pro-Armenian, Pro-Macedonian, the Congo Reform Association had a truly transnational dimension. I started developing an interest in transnational history, and wanted to combine this new research interest with my previous interest in the history of humanitarianism and humanitarian interventions. In 2007, I submitted a new proposal to the Fonds national, this time for a position of Professeur boursier, on the history of international humanitarian associations.

I started this 4 years’ project when I came in Geneva, in 2008. It is an entirely new experience for me. For the first time a lead a small research group and collaborate with two IHP Ph.D. students: Shaloma Gauthier and Francesca Piana. The first thing that we did was to narrow down the topic. We have decided to focus on humanitarian relief operations in the aftermath of conflicts, whether internal or international during the 1920s and 1930s. Our units of analysis are European and Northern-American non-state humanitarian actors, such as the ICRC, the League of Red Cross Societies, Save The Children, l’Union Internationale de Secours aux Enfants or the American Relief Administration. The project is about a given number of situations, post-war situations, and a given number of configurations. Geographically, the project covers an area that goes from Poland, down to Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans, and then Turkey and Caucasus, including the relief for Armenians, from Anatolia to Asia Minor. We try to understand who were the actors doing what, and how humanitarian cooperation took place.

As you see, my interest in the history of Ottoman Armenians is still alive today. The reason why today I keep working on the international relief on behalf of Armenian populations, especially women and children in the 1920s, is because for me this is in a way the third chapter of a story that begins with the Armenian massacres of the 1890s, when no humanitarian intervention ever took place, and tragically continued during the War with genocide.

Jaci Eisenberg: Have you started any other projects? In previous conversations you’ve mentioned the League of Nations Century Project.

Davide Rodogno: This is a very long-term project that involves the colleagues of this academic unit, and possibly of other academic units, who have an interest in the history of international organizations. On the one hand, we wish to cooperate with the United Nations in the process of digitization of the documents. Currently, we are exploring the possibility of focusing on the Fonds Nansen, which is a corpus of documents that stands alone. Moreover, some of these documents have already been microfilmed, so the digitization process should be smooth and easy. On the other hand, we are developing a scientific project that will go along with the digitization. The history of Nansen is inextricably linked to the history of refugees, and, as you know, HEID hosts a refugee center, directed by Jussi Hanhimäki.

Jaci Eisenberg: You’ve already mentioned quite a lot of future projects, but do you have any others that you’d like to talk about?

Davide Rodogno: I would like to teach a seminar on the history of NGOs (maybe co-teaching it with Professor Pierre-Yves Saunier of Lyon). Pierre-Yves and I have already been discussing a number of things that we’d like to deal with in our seminar. We would like to encourage students to work in the archives of NGOs, to study the history and politics of NGOs as well as the history of NGOs governance a very topical question. As you know, a number of NGOs have their headquarters in Geneva or in Switzerland, and I wish our students to exploit this gold mine of unexplored archives in the future.

Bernhard Struck (University of St Andrews), Jakob Vogel (University of Cologne) and myself organized a two-round conference on the history of transnational networks of experts and organizations during the long nineteenth century. We are currently preparing a synopsis, and hoping to find an editor willing to publish this volume.

Finally, let me mention the Groupe d’Histoire des Organisations Internationales (History of International Organization Network). Last year, together with Sandrine Kott, from the University of Geneva, and Daniel Palmieri, from the ICRC, we funded this group. Our initial aim was to provide advanced students, independent scholars, university professors, as well as archivists with a forum and a locus where they could meet and exchange their views on the history of international organizations. We began by organizing a number of meetings with the archivists of the ICRC, the United Nations, the ILO. This year we’ve got an award from UNO Academia to organize a seminar on the history of international organizations. On October 27, we had a brilliant Oxford historian, Patricia Clavin, come to Geneva and present a fascinating paper on the League of Nations during the Second World War. By the beginning of 2010, we plan “to go virtual” and to have a website allowing scholars and students from all over the world to join the network. So, students and scholars coming to Geneva – where many archives of international organizations are located – will get to know the community of students and scholars sharing their same interests.

Jaci Eisenberg: Do you have any advice for the students of the History and Politics section?

Davide Rodogno: Just follow your passion. Especially for Ph.D. students, this is extremely important, because they have to live with their topic for 4 years. They should not follow any ephemeral fashions or short-term interests and take all the time necessary to understand what really their passionate about.

Professor Davide Rodogno, Office Hours on Wednesdays from 16h to 18h, Voie Creuse 334.

How accurate are your sources?

The Columbia Journalism Review recently profiled the "Tilburg Checkers", a group of Dutch Journalism students whose fact-checking skills are being honed through an intensive course of re-fact checking mainstream press articles - an astonishing amount of which are incorrect in some way or another.

This article certainly applies to history as well. In researching my Master's thesis, I found mistakes which ran the gamut from:

CONFUSION - for example, Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels' ("Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of its Economic and Financial Organisation." Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 490) indictment of sloppy research on behalf of economic historians:

They often write of ‘Geneva-based ILO-LON economists’, although many of the League reports originated from committees comprising government representatives, such as the Delegation on Economic Depressions. League officials, League economists, members of the International Labour Organisation, League committees and delegations comprising national representatives are frequently, and confusingly, lumped together See Andres M. Endres and Grant A. Fleming, International Organisations and the Analysis of Economic Policy, 1919–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

To MISAPPROPRIATED ERRORS - such as assuming the title of a person, as seemingly presented in official sources, was indeed their title - without further checking.

In my professional experience i've even copyedited works who employed primary sources in their own way, mixing and re-ordering the quotation until it bore little resemblance to the original!

How frequently do you find mistakes in your sources? How do you address them in your research? Let us know!

Digitized archives

A recent article in the New York Times talks about some recent grants by the Levy Foundation to private organisations or institutions to digitize their archives. It emphasizes the positive, that such digitization is unearthing works which were previously uncataloged.

If you are a researcher that had worked with both paper and digital archives, what are your thoughts? Is it possible to conduct comprehensive research from digital archives alone, or must one imperatively see the paper in person?

Public Lecture: Global migration and the crisis: Do we still need immigrants now?

From the Programme for the Study of Global Migration:

Global migration and the crisis: Do we still need immigrants now?

Philippe Legrain, Journalist, Writer and Visiting Fellow at the European Institute (LSE)

Monday 26 October 2009, 12:15

Location: Room CV 342 (third floor)
La Voie Creuse, 16 - 1202 Geneva

An event organized with the Editions Markus Haller, publisher of the French version of Mr. Legrain’s book Immigrants - Your Country Needs Them/Immigrants - un bien nécessaire.

The library: making your research easier

The HEID library recently updated its landing page, as well as added some new tools for research, the most interesting of which is a downloadable toolbar with quick links to the Geneva library catalog, the UNIGE A to Z journal database, database listings, etc. I've been using it for a few days now, and I can attest that it really saves time!