Archives and Religion
As anyone who’s spent an afternoon looking through one of the archival collections at the Brooklyn Historical Society undoubtedly knows, archival research is an imaginative exercise. Scrapbooks, ledgers, letters, pamphlets, record books, collectibles, photos – such things work primarily to provoke the imagination, pointing to the human activity that may have produced them. And if one is willing to take the time to look carefully through them, archives can show us important things about a particular historical social world: what was important to the people in that world, where some of their…