"It does indeed seem to be very appealing to a wider public to conduct their own online research," says historian Johannes Spohr. "But, in Germany, these sources have actually been accessible at the Federal Archives since 1994. And there, one can actually obtain much more information than just about these memberships."
"We look at Europe in a global context and we like to highlight the ways that European artists and collectors traveled and traded with the world. Part of that is representing the people who lived in Europe but came from abroad," Adam Harris Levine, associate curator of European art at the AGO, said over email.
The librarian sat me in front of a microfilm reader and brought out roll after roll of film. I stayed there for hours, squinting to decipher the archaic handwriting in the Free Negro Book, which was published annually in South Carolina before the Civil War. The names in each year's edition were alphabetized, but only roughly-all of the surnames starting with A came before all of the surnames starting with B, but Agee might come before Anderson, or it might come after.
