Embracing the Flood: Questions About Collecting Twentieth-Century Non-Literary Works

Abstract

We are only too well aware of the voluminous records, in both manuscript and printed forms, which have been produced in this century and perhaps tend to assume that, because our own historical period is so well documented, we have made the task of providing balanced and reasonable historical interpretation easier. Yet there is not now, and may never be, a clear and generally agreed upon account of such a recent historical event as the assassination of President Kennedy. Events of the distant past often seem clear because our understanding is based on incomplete and over-simplified information, all of which . . .