Historians should read primary sources together.

Usually, we think of gathering archival materials as a solitary activity. Yet the next step—making sense of all the documents one has gathered, turning disparate pages into a meaningful story—is also often a lonely task. It doesn’t need to be that way. The joy that comes from sharing a draft of a work in progress can be found even earlier in the research process by collectively analyzing primary sources, with powerful results.

I am speaking from experience here. My recent article published in the Winter 2025 issue of the Journal of the Early Republic evolved from a close reading of a brief 1822 New York Supreme Court decision, Overseers of Marbletown v. Overseers of Kingston (“Overseers”).[1] While much of that close reading was done on my own, the true richness of this source came into focus by investigating the case in a room with other historians.

New York Laws of 1799, “An act for the gradual abolition of slavery.” From New York State Archives.

The Overseers case tells the story of a young Black woman, Francisca, and her daughter, Dinah. Both were technically “born free” in Ulster County, New York. Francisca was born to enslaved parents in 1800, one year after New York’s state legislature passed “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” granting freedom to all Black children born to enslaved mothers.[2] Unfortunately, there was a catch. As per the law, her freedom could be obtained only after over two decades of indentured servitude—either to her mother’s enslaver, or through the town-based local welfare of the Overseers of the Poor.

The law became involved when Francisca died soon after her daughter Dinah was born. While Dinah was born to a free mother, thus making her legally free, her father—unnamed in the historical record—was enslaved. His lack of freedom meant that he had no legal claim to raise his daughter. Instead, Dinah was forced into indentured servitude through the Overseers of the Poor, the same fate that befell her mother. Mother and daughter were both born free, but pushed further away from freedom as indentured servants during the messy period of gradual emancipation. As I argue in the article, their distinct movement away from freedom during a legal transition towards abolition complicates our understanding of how slavery ended in New York.

As I alluded to above, these key insights drawn from the Overseers case did not occur to me in a vacuum. The heart of my article took shape while I was in a graduate seminar, where students brought in key primary sources from our research that we could analyze collaboratively. With so many sets of fresh eyes, new details and questions began to emerge for all our projects.

When my turn came, I presented on the Overseers case. I was confident I had a strong handle on Francisca and Dinah’s timelines. I was able to trace the small towns they moved between across Ulster County, how their legal statues changed along the way, and how, throughout their lives, gender shaped the type of labor they were forced to perform.

“Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Judicature, and in the Court for the Trial of Impeachment and the Correction of Errors, in the State of New York.” By William Johnson, Counsellor at Law. Vol. XX. Albany: Published by E.F. Backus, State-Street, F.B. Clayton, Printer, New-York, 1823.

Yet one of my peers noticed something else. The case notes that in 1817, Francisca married a man who was enslaved to a Mr. Hasbrouck. The record states that Francisca and her husband “cohabited together,” yet later also states that “during all the time of their marriage, and ever since,” her husband “resided with his master.” As one of my colleagues pointed out, that meant Francisca, a free woman, was almost certainty living on the property of her husband’s enslaver.

I was only able to reckon with the full implications of what such a choice may have meant to Francisca after sharing this case with my peers. What freedoms might Francisca have given up, not just by marrying an enslaved man, but by living on his enslaver’s property? I question this in more detail in my article, but it is unlikely that I would have engaged with this choice of Francisca’s so seriously if I had not been analyzing my sources with other scholars.

This type of early collaborative archival exploration works particularly well within a microhistory framework. As Jill Lepore notes, one of the central tenets of microhistory is studying heretofore unknown actors—everyday people—who have left behind “slender records” that, when probed deeply, allow historians to uncover “small mysteries” that tell big stories about the larger world our subjects lived in.[3] By bringing diverse perspectives to these fragmentary records, scholars can more quickly break down the mysteries at their center, or discover new mysteries to solve.

I would argue, though, that collective archival analysis would be beneficial for those working across all types of methodologies. Even historians that aggregate and synthesize tens of thousands of pages could obtain help reframing a larger collection set by sharing one representative example with colleagues.

Many of us already do this in our classrooms. Primary sources are the building blocks for teaching history. I have found in my own teaching that when students work through primary-source material in small groups, the world opens up. They bounce interpretations off one another and arrive at more sophisticated analyses then what they could have singularly achieved. Why don’t professional historians do this more amongst ourselves?

Our discipline has developed strong apparatuses to combat the solitary nature of historical writing. There are numerous seminars and workshops for reviewing works in progress. In these settings, we often meet scholars when they have a relatively strong handle on their material and have begun to make meaning of it. We work together to make our writing and argumentation stronger—why not do the same with archival analysis?

For another example, conference settings could be places of primary-source analysis in conversation. Experimental panels might circulate short primary sources to interested participants in advance, or presenters could prepare brief interactive handouts with primary-source excerpts for in-the-moment exploration.

Sharing short snippets of primary sources offers an opportunity to further break down topical silos. Some of the most useful feedback I received on my primary sources came from scholars who, although well outside my own fields, sensed a thematic kinship with my source material.

While collective readings of primary sources may already be happening in fits and starts, creating institutionalized opportunities for this sort of communal archival scholarship, as I have experienced first-hand, can be incredibly generative. For me, the best parts of scholarship are communal, and primary-source analysis can be too.

Endnotes

[1] Overseers of Marbletown v. Overseers of Kingston, 20 Johns. 1 (N.Y. Sup. Ct., 1822, LEXIS 47).

[2] “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” Mar. 29, 1799, Laws of the State of New York: Volume IV (Albany, 1887).

[3] Jill Leprore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” Journal of American History 88 (June 2001), 129–44.