The centrality of archival research is established in historical practice, and archives are used to produce knowledge/s about the past. As multiple perspectives have come to dismantle epistemological hegemonies, the power embedded within "official" archival "constructions" is questioned. The erasures of the archives have been brought to focus; scholars have attempted to expand the meaning of the archives, locate alternate archives, combine archival research with ethnographic and literary/fictional methods, etc. The tension in the archive, between what is located in it, and how it may be read, to the questions that historians take to it, has been a generative one. This course studies the debates that constitute this "archival turn."