My BA thesis was on the retention and creation of national identities among immigrants to America, particularly focused on Irish, Puerto Ricans, and Jews in New York. This reading reminded me a lot of the research I was doing on memory, identity creation, forgetting, and political mobilization, in part because I relied heavily on people like Benedict Anerson, and also because Cook discusses the ways in which memory and identity are political tools and products. While a lot of what I wrote was the ways in which different class factions created or mobilized these identities to present their particular interests as universal, I tried to also explain why this tactic worked, my explanation being that the process of selecting traits, events, and lineages out of the ever accumulating and complex manifold of history as meaningful and important, over other traits, events, and lineages, is an empowering and emotionally impactful thing to do, both as a group and as an individual. This selection also necessarily involves the creation and implementation of values, and a process of forgetting (which Cook also discusses). This process is as dangerous as it is powerful, but if we were incapable of selecting and forgetting, we would not be able to act (be it as immigrants, citizens, or archivists). While my thesis focused largely on nationalist parties, organized crime, secret societies, churches, and labor movements, it’s interesting to think about this stuff in the context of museums and archives. In the revised edition of Imagined Communities, Anderson actually adds two chapters, “Census, Map, Museum,” and “Memory and Forgetting” which I think are highly relevant to this piece. I did not touch on them in my thesis as much, as the diaspora groups in the time period I was writing about were not creating these institutions yet, but it’s cool to revisit it now while pursuing a library science degree. The other interesting thing about all this is that Cook isn’t only talking about the content of archives and identity formation (such as the early Irish republic trying to forge a coherent identity), but also about the archival community trying to find a universal identity that can paper over its internal differences toward a common goal. I have not thought about not explicitly political communities (like archivists) in this way before, although it makes perfect sense to do so in retrospect. Any institution has that potential and involves that process of selection and forgetting. In addition to Anderson’s book (or at least the aforementioned chapters), I highly recommend the short Nietzsche essay “On the uses and disadvantages of history for life,” which deals with the power granted from learning history and the simultaneous stupefying effect an overaccumulation of history can have on a person. While he’s talking about psychology, I think it’s interesting to think about it in the context of more practical questions archivists face when faced with the physical constraints of their disciplines. Both popular culture and archives laude preservation and remembering, so its thought provoking to read about the virtues of forgetting and destruction (even if you don’t agree)! I think of Rosenthal’s bug bag and water bottles here.