In conjunction with our latest exhibition Eastern Europe and Beyond: Photographic Albums Revealed, join us for this gallery talk with one of its curators and the former Associate Director of the Hoover Institution and Director of the Library & Archives, Elena Danielson.
The “Eastern Europe” in the title of the new exhibition refers not so much to a specific geographical location as to the cultural fault line between Western Europe and Russia/Soviet Union. This area has seen political and military turmoil for centuries. It drew the attention of the entire world in the early twentieth century as the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires precipitously collapsed during the era leading to the Great War and then its aftermath. It also drew the attention and energy of an American mining engineer working in Russia at the time, Herbert Hoover. The participants in the events went to great pains to document their dramatic experiences, and Hoover had the foresight to collect this documentation.
As portable cameras became more widely available, the photographic evidence is telling, showing the expressions on faces, the ragged clothing, the fleeing armies, and refugees. The photo albums, often lavishly decorated, commemorate the dramatic events.
Curator and Visiting Fellow Edward Kasinec and his colleagues, including Elena, completed a census of the Russian, Soviet and Eastern European photo collections, and a small selection of the albums are presented in this exhibition together for the first time as an ensemble that sheds light on the cultural fault line of Eastern Europe and provides context for current events.
This gallery talk will provide an archivist's behind-the-scenes perspective of the exhibition and its albums.
Following the event, the Library & Archives invite guests to explore the Eastern Europe and Beyond and Hoover@100: Ideas Defining a Century exhibitions in the Hoover Tower.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Elena S. Danielson retired as associate director of the Hoover Institution and director of the Hoover Library and Archives in 2005. As Archivist Emerita, she has published two books that draw on her experience in the Hoover Archives: The Ethical Archivist in 2010, and Hoover Tower at Stanford University in 2018. After joining the nationally renowned Hoover Institution Archives in 1978, Danielson began working in technical services, then reference, outreach, and finally collection development. She was named archivist in 1997. She also served as curator of the Institution's West European Collection. With more than sixty million items, the Hoover archival collections constitute one of the world's largest repositories of materials on twentieth-century social, economic, and political change. The collections are organized into seven areas: Africa, the Americas, East Asia, East Central Europe, the Middle East, Russia/Commonwealth of Independent States, and Western Europe. Danielson organized the acquisition of several hundred archival collections on a variety of subjects, including Romanov family letters, the papers of Soviet dissident Andrei Siniavsky, files of the Berlin organization Notgemeinschaft für eine freie Universität, and oral history interviews with German public figures. According to Danielson, "The goal is to anticipate research trends in all areas of the social sciences and assure the acquisition of the complete record for the use of our researchers." Danielson wrote and published extensively on the collecting activities under way at the Institution. She wrote for a number of academic and archival publications, such as Slavic Review, Vestnik Arkhivista, and American Archivist, and delivered papers on the holdings of the archives at conferences in Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania, and Russia. She was a regular contributor to the Hoover Digest. Learn more about her background and publications.
