It is a process familiar to every historian. Whether combing through finding aids, poring over dusty correspondence, or looking through old newspapers, we stumble upon things we are not looking for. Sometimes it is a letter or a photograph, other times just a name. At first these fragments seem unrelated, even irrelevant. Over time, however, they take hold in our imaginations, and so we collect them, slowly accumulating more material than we could ever hope to use. These fragments then live on, often forgotten, in notebooks, on hard drives, and in cloud storage accounts. This panel seeks to bring attention to the value of archival fragments. Why do we collect them? What use are they? What methods have historians developed for gathering them together? And what can these fragments tell us about our research practices?

Scholars have long considered archives as objects requiring analysis in their own right. More than simply repositories of knowledge, archives are sites of exclusion, monuments to authority, and technologies of rule (Trouillot 1995; Burton 2006; Stoler 2008). Reading an archival fragment is thus not only about understanding its content, but also about understanding the historical context of its preservation, the form of its collection. The papers on this panel draw on unique sets of sources to consider the pitfalls and promises of archival fragments, while simultaneously analyzing the ideological frameworks that produced these fragmentations.

Philip Janzen focuses on a UK Colonial Office file about the 1934 death of Alfredo Frisina in British Guiana. The file, an investigation into Frisina’s death, includes fragments of Frisina’s diary, a shadow archive that defies its own classification and reveals a network from Shanghai to Rio de Janeiro. Samuel Daly’s paper analyzes a series at the US National Archives that contains the personal effects of deserters from the US army. In particular, Daly traces the history of a seashell picked up by a soldier in the Philippines in 1900 and considers the false promises that such fragments can hold for historians. Finally, Lara Putnam examines a bundle of foreigner’s registry cards from Cumaná, Venezuela, created in 1931. The registry cards, rich with possibility for established methods as well as newer AI research tools, also raise crucial questions about how historians might work with archival fragments in a digital age.

The panel employs diverse geographic perspectives—from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States, Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia. It also bridges a variety of methods, from analog to digital and linguistic to ethnographic. Above all, the panel analyzes the obsession with archival recovery and offers new models for reading and assembling archival fragments. Rachel Nolan, who has worked with a range of unique archives in Central America, will chair. Brent Hayes Edwards, who has written extensively about archives and fragmentation, will serve as commentator. The panel will attract a broad audience across chronological and geographic divisions and will provoke a lively discussion about research methods and the creation of historical narratives.