Introduction
Archive Mission
We have created this online archival collection in order to support understanding of anthropological, sociological, political, and historical implications of the exhumation and repatriation of U.S. soldiers that were killed in Archangelsk, Russia while on the Polar Bear Expedition. This exhumation and repatriation event offers a cross-section of insights concerning the U.S. as a whole and certain of its community members’ social and political value systems. We are invested in illustrating the complex and grey reality that was the Polar Bear Expedition and its social and political contexts and ramifications.
Archive Selection of Materials
Through the efforts of an array of people and institutions, many materials relating to the Polar Bear Expedition have been preserved and are accessible. We have worked with the Bentley Historical Library to provide access through our site to Polar Bear Expedition materials housed in the Bentley’s “Polar Bear Expedition Digital Archive". The materials featured on our site were selected based on the following criteria:
- Materials provide insight about the Polar Bear Expedition exhumation and repatriation efforts in alignment with our archival mission;
- Materials feature identifiable temporal information (i.e. specific dates) in alignment with our collection’s arrangement approach; and
- Materials feature identifiable geolocation information at a minimum of the city level in alignment with our collection’s arrangement approach.
Archive Arrangement and Description
In order to ensure that our visitors retain the autonomy of thought and critical analysis necessary to perform their own research, we have opted not to offer excessive narrative analysis of our materials. We have endeavored to provide high-quality representations of the original materials in order that archival visitors may perform independent analysis for their own purposes.
We have also worked to ensure that scholars have access to as much provenancial information as is within our capacity through using Dublin Core metadata entry and display options.
Timeline and map visualizations of the collection provide access to our archival collection in a non-hierarchical manner. Given that collection materials come from multiple creators, we felt it especially important that we do not predispose site visitors to imagining one creator’s materials more important than another’s. Though we recognize that our process of selecting materials necessarily builds in preference of some materials over others, within our collection of selected materials, we seek to mitigate hierarchical statements of importance as best as possible.