Both the Ghosh and Milligan readings this week present interesting images of archives as they relate to the nations whose history they are archiving. Many scholars find a strong tie between archives and the foundation of nations. This is because archives hold the documents and information that reflect essentially what a nation is about and also how the government of that nation has been functioning.

Milligan, in discussing the French Archives nationales, describes a system where the contents and actions of the archives is representative of the ideals of the state. If the Archives remove and destroy a document to protect an individual, they (and by extension, the government) are putting private interests above the public interest. If a government wishes to be perceived as benefitting the nation as a whole, the way documents are handled in the national archives should reflect this. In this way, the behavior of the archives themselves is central to the creation of nations.

In Ghosh’s essay, it becomes apparent through the both the differing content of archives in Britain and India and the reactions of people in the archives in both nations, that archives are key in shaping and maintaining a particular national identity. The documents in the Calcutta archives that represent an unsavory topic for India are poorly sorted and not often referenced, while archivists in Britain were keen to suggest various organized references that could help find information on that same topic. This suggests that what can be found easily in a nation’s archives becomes the nation’s history.

While I don’t believe the archives at Dickinson could not be said to be particularly influential in either of these ways to the creation of a nation (that nation being the United States), I do feel that the archives are central to how, in a smaller sense, the college community was built. The information in these archives relates to the founding and history of the college, and there is no doubt that what is included and what is easily accessible has shaped the image of Dickinson and its surrounding community. The Dickinson archives function similarly to national archives, but on a smaller scale.