The works above exemplify the outstanding scholarship underway within specific departments of the humanities at Berkeley. The Emma Goldman Papers Project is another vital research endeavor, yet it is a collaborative, interdisciplinary undertaking that transcends departmental boundaries.
This research revolves around a truly international figure, Emma Goldman, and like Goldman herself, the project speaks to a wide range of issues that are of interest to scholars in multiple fields. Topics ranging from free speech to women's rights, from the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War, come to life through the collected papers of Emma Goldman.
Since 1980, project director Candace Falk has worked to collect and publish all of the extant documents -- some 40,000, at last count -- written by or related to Emma Goldman, a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived from 1869 to 1940 and whose role in history has been both marginalized and misunderstood. "I never really felt the project was just about her. I always felt it was a point of entry into a fascinating period of history and an incredible array of issues that still resonate with people today," says Falk, who wrote the Goldman biography Love, Anarchy, and Emma Goldman (Holt, 1984; Rutgers paperback 1990, 1999).
Emma Goldman's reams of personal correspondence -- along with assorted newspaper clippings, legal documents, government surveillance records, lecture notes, and interviews -- reveal her influence on figures as diverse as socialist Eugene Debs, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, and the leader of the Union of Chinese Writers, Ba Jin. She was an anarchist, but her complex concept of anarchism ran counter to its popular misconception as a destructive disavowal of order. She supported free speech advocates and political activists in Mexico and Japan, while her own public lectures often were banned. And she helped organize the first Free Speech League, inspiring Roger Baldwin to found the American Civil Liberties Union.
Emma
Goldman,
Russian-
born
anarchist
and advocate
for human
rights.
See reference
page
Recalls Falk, "My own first interest in Emma Goldman came from my admiration and respect for her as a woman who represented a passion for politics that enhanced rather than obscured the passions of personal life; who stood for liberty in its finest dimensions; and who dared to confront hypocrisy and to take on the role of inspiring others to move toward freedom. In an era when women were taking their first steps in that direction, Emma Goldman was a role model."
The papers project was initiated by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission of the National Archives, which sponsors similar documentary projects at universities across the country. The deputy director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, Charles Palm, has said of the Emma Goldman Papers, "Few documentary projects have been so successful in capturing a nearly lost intellectual heritage."
Falk directs the project in conjunction with a board of UC Berkeley faculty who represent the fields of history, women's studies, law, sociology, political science, and literature. The project also collaborates with faculty from several language area studies. Chairing the faculty board is American History Professor Leon F. Litwack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian.
The group spent the first 10 years collecting some 20,000 documents for a 69-reel microfilm edition published by Chadwyck-Healey in 1991, which is now available in libraries nationwide. Falk and her collaborators also wrote a guide to the microfilm reels that won the Kanner Award of the Western Association of Women's Historians in 1995 for the best bibliographic work in women's and/or gender history.
The group currently is editing a three-volume selected book edition of Emma Goldman's papers during her years in America. Unlike the microfilm, which shows facsimiles of the original documents -- many of which are handwritten and difficult to read -- the book edition contains transcriptions of select papers, thoroughly annotated so the reader can understand each document's context and references.
Now at the University of California Press, Volume 1, Made for America, tracks Goldman's rise from an immigrant laborer in 1892 to an influential figure advocating labor rights in 1905. Volume 2, Making Speech Free, will cover 1906 to 1916 and will showcase Goldman's lecture tours and magazine, Mother Earth; while Volume 3, The War Years, will document her activities from 1917 to 1919, when she was on trial and subsequently deported for her stand against conscription.
The Emma Goldman Papers Project is housed just off campus in a former dentist's office, which has been transformed into a mini-museum of sorts. Enlarged black-and-white photos of Goldman's earnest, bespectacled face are posted above filing cabinets that line almost every wall. One shows her looking typically defiant -- brows knit, chin squared, frowning slightly -- in a police mug shot. Law enforcement authorities arrested and imprisoned Goldman several times for speaking out on ideas that at the time were considered radical, such as union organizing and the eight-hour workday, sexual freedom and birth control, and women's independence.
A visitor also can see a framed copy of a letter from J. Edgar Hoover that refers to Goldman as the most dangerous woman in America, as well as a mean-spirited political cartoon that celebrated the deportation of "Red Emma" and 248 other radicals under the 1919 Sedition Act that grew out of the Red Scare. Ironically, after Goldman was exiled to Russia, she earned the enmity of communists by confronting Lenin on issues of free speech and condemning his persecution of anarchists and other activists.
"I never really felt the project was just about her. I always felt it was a point of entry into a fascinating period of history and an incredible array of issues that still resonate with people today."
Candace Falk
An integral part of the project's mission, says Falk, is to bring this material to the general public's awareness. To that end, Falk and her collaborators created two curricula for middle and high school students, as well as a traveling exhibition for display in community centers and university libraries. Much of the project's work, including the curricula, digital reproductions of Goldman's papers, and excerpts from the book edition, is accessible to the public online through an award-winning web site at http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/Goldman, part of UC Berkeley's Digital Library SunSITE.
The collected papers represent a scholarly resource that will live beyond most interpretive historical works. "You can't write history unless you have the source material. We're filling in gaps in the American historical record," says Falk. "Preserving the authentic documents of a person who had the courage and foresight to stand for freedom, in all its varieties of expression, both strengthens our understanding of the past and is an inspiration for our own times and future generations."
Falk thus is disinterring and disseminating integral resources that other humanities scholars can view through a variety of interpretive lenses. Her work and the work of other scholars featured here remind us of the indispensable role the humanities play in preserving, communicating, and critiquing cultural artifacts.
Berkeley professors throughout the humanities are engaged in an incredible array of research projects that study intellectual and artistic activity around the globe and across historic periods. Their work is notable for both its breadth and depth, and thanks to it, we know more about the world around us and our relationship to it.