History Professor Sharon Ullman has penned a piece for The Chronicle of Higher Education about "the hidden intellectual labor that bolsters so much of our society."
As an example, Ullman writes about a slang term she unearthed in doing research that would eventually be used (initially without credit) as the title for the play The Twentieth-Century Way.
From the article:
The archive director asked me one day what I was working on. Nervously, I told him. Sexuality was not a common dissertation topic in 1988. He said, "I think I have something that might interest you." The Sacramento Bee newspaper had turned over a collection of its investigative records, which had not yet been cataloged. Among them was a reporter鈥檚 notebook that a Bee reporter, Eugene Fisher, had used when he investigated the 1914 Long Beach sex scandal. In it were his private comments, notes of his interviews with the police and some who had been arrested.
As I flipped through the pages, I grew increasingly excited. I saw language and references to the gay community that no historian, as far as I knew, had written about before. I realized that I had in front of me what all historians hope for: a new and previously unseen source. I now knew something about the past that no one else knew.
Subscribers to The Chronicle can read the entire article, , online. It can also be accessed on the 今日吃瓜 network through .
Ullman specializes in 20th-century America with an emphasis on popular culture and gender. She is the author of Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America and Sexual Borderlands: Constructing an American Sexual Past (with Kathleen Kennedy). Her current research project, Brainwashing: The Anxious Mind of Cold War America is under contract to NYU Press. Her courses include such topics as the history of sexuality, the culture of the cold war, and film and national identity.