Will the Last Historian Close the Door? Thoughts on Conducting Research after January 2020 by BRIAN CATON, Professor of History
Students and faculty at Luther have long been familiar with interlibrary loan services. As long as the source one desires is a published work, and is open to circulation, our trusty interlibrary loan staff can get it. Kathy Buzza carried on this work for many years, making her my favorite person on campus, and upon her retirement the work has passed into the capable hands of Luther alumna Emily Mineart. However, since around 2005, the digitization of books published before 1950 has proceeded in earnest, much of the work in my areas of interest being carried out by the Universities of California, Michigan, and Minnesota. Search engines for Google Books and HathiTrust, for example, permit collation and access to material in ways that previously had been earned through more time-consuming processes of assessing the utility of books based on catalog entries, Library of Congress subject headings, and, often, luck. It allows one to see how information, and even prose, written in an 18
Agora/Fall 2020
early source could be reproduced often enough to take on the trappings of fact. I read through many published works, both digitized and through interlibrary loan, in order to attempt to reconstruct the medieval and early modern history of the environmental and sociopolitical formations in which the British East India Company’s Army built the Government Cattle Farm. I also hoped to determine the relationship between Lt. Col. James Skinner, the founder of one of the most famous irregular cavalry units of the Company’s Army, and Maj. James Lumsdaine, the Deputy Commissary-General who created the Farm. However, published works frequently abridge significant details, and the discovery and retrieval of those details is the essence of archival work. In Fall 2019, I planned to spend January 2020 working at the Oriental and India Office Collections, housed at the British Library in London. The record-keeping practices of the East India Company, and later the British Government of India, included the creation of two copies of official correspondence handled by the several administrative departments
Brian Caton
NATIONAL ARMY MUSEUM, LONDON.
Archival research remains the core of historians’ work. It is true that, over the past forty years or so, historians have begun to experiment or adopt other research methodologies, yet historians seek first the written, printed, or incised word as evidence for what people thought, said, or did in the past. I had hoped to use a year’s sabbatical leave in 2019-20 to pursue archival work at the National Archives of India, New Delhi, in order to form a more complete institutional, intellectual, and social history of the Government Cattle Farm, Hissar.1 Funding and personal considerations required a substantial revision of that plan, resulting in a sabbatical leave in Fall 2019 and January 2020, most of which was spent in Decorah. How can one carry out research thousands of miles away from the archives where the necessary sources are located?
Colonel James Skinner (1778-1841), oil on canvas by an unknown artist 1836
of the Company’s government, with one of those copies retained at Calcutta (later moved to Delhi, and ultimately housed in the National Archives of India) and the other copy sent to Company’s Board of Directors in London (shifted to the India Office after the dissolution of the Company, and ultimately transferred to the Oriental and India Office Collection). These collections now may be searched using the tools available on the British Library’s web site. I happily assembled references to maps and files relevant to Hissar and the Farm, and with great optimism I noted the shelfmark for the “James Skinner papers.” When I arrived at the British Library in January, I was pleasantly stunned to learn that researchers are now permitted, in many cases, to use mobile phones to photograph archival materials. Thus I began my work happily clicking away at the four-inch map of Hissar District carried out by Revenue surveyors in 1832-33 and published from Agra in 1858, to facilitate the transfer of the districts included within the Delhi Division from the province of
