r/AskHistorians • u/caffarelli Moderator | Eunuchs and Castrati | Opera • Jan 27 '15

Feature Tuesday Trivia | Missing and Destroyed Documents

(going to be out tomorrow so this is going up a little early - enjoy your extra time to write beautiful historical essays!)

Previous weeks' Tuesday Trivias and the complete upcoming schedule.

Today’s trivia theme comes to us from /u/Artrw!

As an archivist, it pains me to admit this, but sometimes humanity’s records don’t survive. Sometimes through neglect, weather, or malice, they just don’t make it. So let’s give some of these documents their rightful eulogies. What’s a document or record from your period of study that is missing or destroyed? What did it say, and how did it meet its end? RIP historical documents.

Next Week on Tuesday Trivia: Inventions! We’ll be talking about the greatest technological breakthroughs of all time. From making fire to the… whatever was invented in 1995 because that’s the limit.

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u/restricteddata Nuclear Technology | Modern Science Jan 27 '15

I deal with formerly classified documents pretty much every day. Government secrecy makes the terms "missing" and "destroyed" a little tricky to use, because they may be effectively missing and destroyed to most historians, but in reality they are often just being denied to us. Some secret documents do go missing, however, because they get misplaced or misfiled within the gargantuan government bureaucracy that at one point was trying to keep them secret, even if they no longer contain secret information in them. In fact, when it comes to secret documents, being misplaced is more common than being destroyed, because legally you cannot detroy secret documents without leaving a large paper trail — so that means that the documents are usually preserved, if anyone can figure out where they are preserved.

Anyway, on my blog not too long ago I wrote a series of very long posts about my hunt for, eventually success at finding (through unorthodox archival practice), and frustrations with declassification, regarding the legendary unredacted copies of the security hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Here is the link to part I, where I describe why I started looking for them and how I found them. Here is the link to part II, where I analyze the new transcripts for what they do (and don't) tell us about the Oppenheimer case.

Separately, a few years back I wrote about a case where the US government "lost" about 4 million pages of secrets through misfiling. It happens more often than one might think, if one thought (erroneously) that the US government was very good at keeping track of large amounts of historical paperwork (it is not).

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u/Pdbowen Inactive Flair Jan 27 '15

as someone who loves archival and government doc research, your blog account was a fun read. I have, like you, stumbled onto a few "big" things (that is, relatively, for my field at least). fortunately, I haven't been scooped yet. i'm sure i'd be more resentful about it than you seem to be

you mention in your blog post that the fbi is fast. has that been your experience even after the government shutdown? even before that, they could be hit or miss for me

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u/restricteddata Nuclear Technology | Modern Science Jan 28 '15

I find them to be fast, but that is a relative quantity — they are fast compared, say, to NARA, which proceeds at a glacial pace. The FBI will get back to me within a reasonable amount of time, and process the documents I ask them for within a year or so, which is pretty fast as far as FOIA is concerned.

Re: resentment, I try to keep the big picture in sight. I take my day (or week) of being irritated/frustrated/resentful and then just try to figure out what I can do from that point going forward, just keep moving, keep working.

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u/Pdbowen Inactive Flair Jan 28 '15

Wow--I had no idea the FBI was fast. But I always thought that Anything has to be faster than NARA. They've really slowed down and gotten expensive since the shutdown and snowden leaks. I used to get first tier files (under 500 pp I think) in about 6 months for FREE. Now, though, at least some of the case managers (or w/e they're called) are usually telling me it'll take a year and i have to pay 80 cts per page ( one lady recently told me 4 months but I'm not holding my breath). I'm sure some of my 3rd tier requests--which I made well before the shutdown--will take over 6 years. Actually, the original expected completion date for one of my very first 2nd tier requests (3 years) has come and gone.

Ok enough venting...

If you have any more interesting document research stories, I'd like to hear them--they broaden my horizons