Your Land, Our Land

New Book Samples NARA’s Regional Archives

By Monroe Dodd

S ome of the National Archives’ most interesting treasures don’t

reside in its Washington-area facilities.
The evidence is in a new book, Your Land, Our Land: Two Centuries
of American Words and Images from the Regions of the National Archives.
Its 240 pages sample scores of intriguing items from each of the
Archives’ 13 regions—from fanciful, full-color posters for early 20th-
century carnival attractions to snapshots of lifeboats filled with Titanic
survivors to the document indicting Susan B. Anthony for illegally vot-
ing in the 1872 election, a half-century before women won equal suf-
frage in the 19th amendment.

Above: Students from the Seneca Indian School in northeast Oklahoma Territory in 1905. The school
was founded by Quakers in the late 1860s and named for the Native American tribe that ceded the
land to the government. It closed in 1980.

6 Prologue Fall 2009


Recruits lined up for their picture as they entered the service at the
Great Lakes Naval Training Station in 1933 and then posed again
shortly thereafter in full uniform.
The autographs of some of America’s most famous sons
and daughters on documents both highfalutin and hum-
drum appear in its pages. Ordinary Americans are repre-
sented, too, some of them because they’re having to make
way for big projects like the Tennessee Valley Authority
and others because they were at the mercy of experiments
on the nature of venereal disease.
More than a quarter of the Archives’ holdings reside
somewhere other than in the columned building on the
National Mall in Washington, D.C., or the state-of-the-art
archival facility in College Park, Maryland. They’re in the
regional facilities from Boston, New York, Philadelphia,
and Atlanta in the East to Chicago, Kansas City, and Fort
Worth in the Midwest, to Denver, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Seattle, and Anchorage in the West and in the
National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.
Your Land, Our Land was a joint project of the National
Archives and the book-publishing arm of the Kansas City
Star. The idea was born in 2006, when the Archives’
Your Land, Our Land
Chilkats—Alaska Natives whose language was Tlingit—showed off
their regalia beneath a Panting Wolf carving at a potlatch, a ceremoni-
al gathering of clans, near Sitka in 1904. The gatherings were outlawed
in Canada, but Natives in American territory continued the practice,
although often in secret.
Central Plains Region worked with the Star to produce a
full-color volume about the holdings in Kansas City. The
success of that project, Great Plains Originals, inspired
Reed Whitaker and his staff at the National Archives at
Kansas City in the Central Plains Region to propose a
book showing off the wares of all the regional archives.
Central Plains would be the clearinghouse, asking each
region to suggest documents and images. Choosing from
among those, Star Books would organize, write, edit,
design, and produce the book.
The key to the book’s appeal and its success would lie
with Archives staffers in each region. Only they had long-
term familiarity with the tens of thousands of cubic feet of
material stored at their location. No visitor could hope to
cover the same ground in a reasonable time; no scholar
would be intimately acquainted with oceans of documents
outside his or her subject area.
In spring 2007, at Whitaker’s request, regional staff
gathered a first round of digital versions of their favorite
Prologue 7
 Above: A poster announcing the coming of Buffalo Bill’s
Wild West Show to New York City for the 1907 season.

Left: Elvis Presley was inducted into the Army on March

24, 1958, to the disappointment of his fans.

Below: Imprisoned at the Atlanta Penitentiary for break-

ing into a post office, Joe Fleming of Clarksdale,
Mississippi, wrote to a Memphis resident named Pearl
Robinson in 1918. He wrote that he would soon be
free, wanted to live in Memphis, and would like “to have
a good girl like you to spend my money on and to love.”

8 Prologue Fall 2009

Left: Arthur Voegtlin, producer of a 1906 film called “The Great Train Robbery,” sued William F. Cody over his train-robbery production in the Wild West Show.
Right: A cable dated December 7, 1941, notified U.S. Navy installations of the raid on Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands. This copy was received by the Squantum
Naval Air Station in Quincy, Massachusetts.
items, copied them to compact discs, and
delivered them to Kansas City. Working
through archivist Tim Rives in Kansas City,
editors at Star Books sorted through the
discs. They found intriguing items from
throughout American history and, of
course, from all over the map.
From Denver came a surreal black-and-
white photograph of turn-of-the-century
hard-rock miners at work on an irrigation
project in western Colorado, their smudged
faces lit by flash.
San Francisco sent an appreciative letter
written to John Steinbeck in 1936 by the
director of a migratory labor camp, the
same man who became the prototype for
the camp manager in The Grapes of Wrath.
From Chicago came a court paper with
the signatures of the Chicago Eight—
Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Jerry
Rubin, et al. before the departure of Bobby
Seale made them the Chicago Seven.
Philadelphia delivered cloth tobacco
Your Land, Our Land
pouches, a manifest from the airship
Hindenberg, and a letter from an African
American woman named Eleanore Sawyer
to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, asking for
help in landing a job at the Navy Yard.
Sawyer said she had been turned down
because she was black.
Some of the regional archives gems date
from the 1790s. There were slave ship man-
ifests and prosecutions for violating the
laws against slave trading, images of sailors
and soldiers off to war, and exhibits sub-
mitted by scores of companies off to sue
other companies for infringing patents or
copyrights or trademarks.
Indeed, federal courts through the years
have produced not only reams of pleadings
and boilerplate but also visual treasures
introduced as evidence to protect their
brands. A “Students’ Magic Slate” boasted:
“No pencils to sharpen. No slate to break.
No paper to buy.” Planters trotted out its
smiling, monocled Mr. Peanut to advise
retailers how best to display its product.
Of conflict there was plenty—fliers call-
ing for student protests at Kent State in the
fateful year of 1970, calls for a strike by
dressmakers in southern California in the
1930s printed in both Spanish and
English, a broadside against the despolia-
tion of the Alaskan coast by the wreck of
the Exxon Valdez.
By 2008, the book’s editors were asking
the regions for even more. After Rives left
for the Eisenhower Library in Abilene,
Kansas, archivist Lori Cox-Paul took over
the clearinghouse chores in Kansas City.
In later rounds of offerings, Anchorage
sent a 1904 image of a Chilkat potlatch, for
which Alaska Natives dressed in ceremoni-
al garb and lined up beneath a massive
carved totem of a Panting Wolf. From
Chicago came photographs showing agents
hired by the Ford Motor Company as they
pummeled union organizers during a shift
change in 1937 at the Dearborn Plant, an
Prologue 9
This new volume reveals just a sampling of fascinating American stories that are held in the documents and images housed throughout the National Archives system
in its regional archives.
incident that gained fame in labor history
as the “Battle of the Overpass.”
Atlanta offered a full-color photograph
of researchers testing men of Macon
County, Alabama, in the infamous
Tuskegee experiment. Los Angeles deliv-
ered hand-tinted views of cliff dwellings in
Canyon de Chelly and panoramas of
Monument Valley. It also sent a letter from
an atomic scientist who rode along as the
first bomb was dropped on Japan; the
scientist, writing aboard the bomber,
described to his son the terrible sight of the
blast and his hope that the mere threat of
its use could prevent future wars.
The introduction of Your Land, Our
Land is by historian and screenwriter
Geoffrey C. Ward, who collaborated with
Ken Burns on his acclaimed television doc-
umentaries. Ward compares the thrill of his
10 Prologue
own research in the Archives with the
objects in the book: “Nearly every page . . .
makes us want to know more.”
“That is its fascination,” he says, “for any-
one even remotely interested in our past.”
For Your Land, Our Land, the Archives’
regions mined a rich lode of America’s won-
ders, but also some of its warts. That’s in
keeping with the Woody Guthrie ballad
from which the title is drawn. Although his
“This Land Is Your Land” is remembered
today mostly for its evocation of America’s
natural beauty—its golden valleys, dia-
mond deserts, redwood forests, and gulf-
stream waters—Guthrie’s lyrics did not
ignore the country’s flaws and frailties. He
sang of Americans down on their luck and
wondering about their share of it all. The
country, he said, was ours to accept or
change because it belonged to us.
The same goes for America’s heritage, the
greatest treasure in the holdings of the
National Archives. Your Land, Our Land puts
a small part of it on display in hopes that
Americans will turn to their regional archives
to find out more about their land. P
Author
Monroe Dodd, editor of Your
Land, Our Land, is the editor or
author of several books about the
history of Kansas City and its
region, including Great Plains Originals, based on the
collections of the National Archives at Kansas City,
and The Ike Files, drawn from the holdings of the
Dwight D. Eisenhower Library and Museum in
Abilene, Kansas. He holds a bachelor of science in
journalism and a master’s degree in history from the
University of Kansas. From 1976 to 2008 he was an
editor at the Kansas City Star.
Fall 2009
discover America’s heritage

s h op on l i n e at estore.archives.gov