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Trudy Peterson

Trudy Peterson
Trudy Peterson

Archives around the world

From the Hoover Library to South Africa, Trudy Peterson has spent her professional career preserving history.

Sorting through endless stacks of mundane governmental memos is the life of a federal archivist.

A career many would shun because it sounds boring.

Correspondence, maps, sound recordings and photographs however have always interested Trudy Peterson ('67 English and history). Even the mundane ones.

In a career that has spanned working in the Hoover Presidential Library in West Branch, Iowa, to the acting Archivist of the United States, Peterson has worked with history virtually every day of her professional career.

"I go into an archives almost every day," Peterson said. "I really like reading someone's letters - it's the raw materials of history. There is a vibrancy of being in touch with a piece of history."

Peterson rose through the ranks of the National Archives becoming the deputy archivist (the senior civil servant) at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Then for two plus years during the Clinton Administration, she was the acting Archivist of the United States.

Along the way, she has dealt with some mundane government documents.

But she has also worked with fascinating historical items from the Kennedy assassination. She was a Commissioner on the U.S.-Russia Joint Commission on POW/MIAs that attempted to resolve the fate of people missing from World War II, the Korea War, the Cold War, Vietnam and Afghanistan.

During one of her trips to the former Soviet Union, Peterson was shown the KGB files at the notorious Lubyanka Prison in Moscow.

"There were rows and rows of filing cabinets filled with index cards," she said. "It's hard to imagine that an American archivist would wind up in the basement of a Russian prison looking through these records."

She was also in Moscow just after the 1992 coup attempt.

"The Russian archivist that was escorting us took us into this big auditorium filled with bags of records from the offices of the coup plotters," she said. "There the archivists were trying to sort out the records so that they could be used if the coup plotters were tried."

After leaving federal service, Peterson has continued her work as an archivist. For a time she worked out of Budapest, Hungary as the founding executive director of the Open Society Archives an organization established by George Soros. There she providing training and support for Eastern European archivists after the fall of Communism.

In South Africa, Peterson provided advice on what to do with the records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was established to deal with what happened under apartheid. This experience led Peterson to write a book Final Acts: A Guide to Preserving the Records of Truth Commissions, published this year by Johns Hopkins University Press, which is available at www.wilsoncenter.org/press/peterson_finalacts.pdf.

She has also worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, dealing with records of refugee situations throughout the world, including Africa, the Balkans and Southeast Asia, selecting records from the post-Vietnam War era that should be saved.

"History helps stitch us together - the good, bad and ugly," said Peterson, who is now an archival consultant. "We save the glorious records - the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence - but we also have to save those records that don't make us feel as proud because those records are our history too.

"You need the contrast of the good to make the bad understandable."