Earlier this year we released the third season of Not Even Past. My impulse behind this batch of episodes was to hear from scholars outside of academia about why they are driven to tell hidden histories and do so without a lot of recognition. Once the host and I picked six entries to be the subject of each episode, I researched guests we could interview to highlight their own work and complicate the entries with their perspectives. In the Encyclopedia, we try to demonstrate that there are many ways to understand a topic by encouraging nuance in the writing and including primary documents and media, but ultimately we have one entry with one author and that perspective becomes the definitive one on the subject. The six women featured as guests in this season show how we can piece together a more representative history (including voices of those left out of the historical record) through mediums beyond the archive like cemeteries, archaeological digs, and oral histories and how their personal stories allow them to generate unique insights.
In episode 2 Chardé Reid, an archeologist working at Historic Jamestowne, argues that archeology can enrich the historical record with clues about people who have been excluded from it. She tells the story of Angela, one of the first twenty Africans to arrive at Jamestown in 1619. The 400th anniversary of their arrival in Point Comfort is being marked this weekend with events at Fort Monroe. I also highly recommend the special 1619 section of the New York Times Sunday Magazine, which digs into the far reaching legacy of this moment in American history.