Quoted: Stephen Kantrowitz, a history professor, was on a task force charged with considering the history of the Ku Klux Klan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He said delving into an archive can be complex.
“Anybody is free to go into an archive and explore, and many people are good at it,” he said, but historians are trained to assess what they find in relationship to other archives and to what other scholars have found. They can sometimes see things others wouldn’t, he said.
“It’s rarely the case that a single document tells you something so dramatically new that it upends everything else that you already knew,” he said.