Brett Brosky (he/him) HST 312 African American Women / Dr. Harris Ashley D. Farmer, “In Search of the Black Women’s History Archives,” Modern American History (2018), 1-5. In Ashley Farmer’s “In Search of the Black Women’s History Archives,” she explores the field of evidence with the lens of Black women especially in America. The ways and methods in which people study these documents have changed over time and continue to evolve as this field has been often overlooked with regards to the group of people that it concerns. Some of these ways of understanding Black women’s experiences in history. By using the gaps and silence in historical records, historians can better outline those lived experiences during American history, such as in the colonial …show more content…
All this vastly increases the degree to which struggles, or even day-to-day records of Black women have not been recorded in historical archives. As for sources that were used by Farmer when structuring her article, there are a few that can be discerned and a few that are directly mentioned. The first of these are obviously the historical archives of sources which she analyzed for perspectives of Black women to see how well, or unwell, they had been documented throughout the years. This is a great starting point for Farmer as she goes on to cross-analyze this with other authors’ works which look at the existing records and challenges the narratives, especially when it comes to the records of Black women being on “record primarily as property or victims.” This was part of their experiences but fails to capture the entire extent of their stories. Given the sources and arguments outlined within the article, Farmer poses and addresses some questions within her writing. The most glaring of these is how historians reconcile biased historical records with incomplete histories in the field they