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Helton holds a joint appointment with the Department of History and the Department of English at the University of Delaware, and specializes in American literature and history of the twentieth century Cultural Interview an emphasis on African American print culture and public humanities. Her research and teaching interests include archival studies, material texts, race and memory, gender and sexuality, and the literary history of social movements. Her current book project, Collecting and Collectivity: Black Archival Publics,explores the emergence of African American archives and libraries to show how historical recuperation shaped forms of racial imagination in the early twentieth century.

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What do you believe is the importance of Cultural Interview American print culture to broader African American intellectual history in the twentieth century? But how many of us in recent years would have paused in that room to browse the catalog or consider its history? Inaugurated in by librarian Dorothy B. Porter, this card catalog served for much of the twentieth century as a rare and indispensable portal to African American print culture —and a more radical intervention in Black intellectual history than might seem obvious at first glance. In my essay, I reconstruct the creation of this catalog to show how Porter contravened the routine misfiling of Blackness in prevailing information systems and designed a capacious taxonomy to order Black Cultural Interview.

Katie Olsen

She rewrote Dewey decimals, created bibliographies, and fielded research inquiries from across the African diaspora. It was pioneering intellectual work that, over the course of her four-decade career at Howard, helped create a scaffolding for the field of Black Studies.

Those genres Cultural Interview be difficult for historians to critically interpret, and Porter herself only rarely drew attention to her own Cultuural. In occasional interviews, she described her struggles with standard library tools, especially the Dewey Decimal Classification.

She noted that in most libraries in the s through s, only two Dewey numbers were typically used to classify works on Black subjects: for slavery, and Cultural Interview But rather than simply move books to a different classification number, Porter took the additional and unauthorized step of rewriting the Dewey decimals to invent her own classification scheme.

How did her classification system work? What ideas did it represent? Her personal papers had been held privately by her daughter, Constance Porter Uzelac, but Yale University had recently purchased them at auction.

Clifford Muse generously agreed to review unprocessed materials so that I and other researchers could access her early files.]