There are few printed objects more intimate, or more revealing, than a funeral program. Meant to be held briefly, folded into a pocket, and eventually set aside, it is the kind of paper most archives were never built to notice. And yet, within Black communities, the funeral program has long functioned as something far more durable than its paper stock suggests: a record of lives lived, networks sustained, and history preserved when other institutions failed to do so. Funeral

There was a moment in the twentieth century when the most dangerous machine in America wasn’t a printing press or a radio tower - it was a beige box humming in the corner of a copy shop. The photocopier, invented to save office workers from carbon paper and aching wrists, accidentally handed the means of mass reproduction to anyone with a few coins and something to say. And in the downtown scenes of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s - Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, SoHo, Hai

No one sits down with a blank notebook and thinks, I am about to become a primary source. Diaries are not written for history. They’re written for survival. People write because they are lonely, or bored, or furious, or in love, or frightened, or simply trying to understand what just happened to them before the day disappears. That is precisely why diaries matter. They do not tell us what a nation wanted remembered. They tell us what it felt like to live inside it. Official r

Every archive has its official story — the finding aid, the catalog record, the tidy description that says what a collection is. And then there’s the other story: the one hiding in the margins, on the backs of envelopes, in pencil scribbles that were never meant for anyone else’s eyes. That’s the story I’m most interested in. Open almost any box of ephemera and you’ll find it — the unintended narrative running beneath the surface. A program from a community theater show annot

Most people greet the New Year with resolutions, planners, maybe a gym membership they’ll abandon by mid-February. But if you really want to understand how humans face the future, skip the self-help aisle and head straight for the archives. Ephemera — those scraps never meant to last — turn out to be some of the most honest New Year storytellers we have. They catch the moment before the moment, the hope before the outcome, the resolutions before the inevitable unraveling. Con

Detail from The Black Panther (April 27, 1969) highlighting the Free Breakfast for Children Program. Courtesy of Marxists.org (digitized historic issue). The Black Panther Party did not set out to create an archive. They set out to feed children, monitor police, educate neighbors, and survive sustained state repression. The newsletters—mimeographed, offset-printed, folded, stapled, and handed out on street corners—were tools of communication, not monuments. They announced me

Most people who save things don’t think of themselves as archivists.
 They’re just… avoiders of the trash can. But history has a long memory for hesitation. Somewhere right now, a future curator is thanking the person who shoved a concert handstamp into their wallet and forgot about it for 30 years. Or the club kid who plastered stickers on every street sign in town because it felt like rebellion. Or the activist who ran off a hundred flyers after midnight and stuffed them in

Let’s be honest: most of history shouldn’t exist — at least not on paper. Political manifestos that were supposed to be incinerated before the secret police arrived. Underground club flyers wet with beer and teenage sweat. Pamphlets urging workers to rise up and overthrow their bosses (all printed on the boss’s stolen paper stock). These were the documents meant to disappear. And yet, somehow, we keep finding them. Stuffed in shoeboxes. Wedged behind filing cabinets. Pressed

If you’ve spent any time digging through boxes of ephemera (and if you’re reading this blog, I’m assuming you’ve at least flirted with the habit), you know there’s always that one item. The piece that stops you cold. The one that makes you stare at it like it’s just whispered, “You have no idea what I’ve seen.” A flimsy handbill for a 1972 feminist consciousness-raising meeting.
A matchbook from a long-gone gay bar in Dupont Circle.
A crumpled flyer for a punk show that defin

If you’ve spent any time digging through boxes of ephemera (guilty), you know there’s always that one item that makes you stop and think: How on earth did this survive? A flimsy handbill for a 1972 feminist consciousness-raising meeting. A matchbook from a long-gone gay bar. A crumpled flyer advertising a punk show that definitely violated several fire codes. A menu from a coffeehouse where poets once held court until closing. These pieces were meant to be used, pocketed, ign

How music once lived on paper — and why these scraps still hum with history. Somewhere between a ticket stub and a love letter lives a forgotten kind of artifact: the paper trail of music. Before playlists and streaming links, before even mixtapes and CDs, our relationship with sound was mediated through print — sheet music, concert flyers, record sleeves, and lyric broadsides that gave shape to what we could only hear. Think of the riot of color and collage on a 1960s psyche

How a single sheet of paper turned ideology into an everyday accessory. If you wanted to terrify the American public in the 1940s, you didn’t need a manifesto — you needed a mimeograph machine. Enter the American Women Against Communism, a small but zealous organization that printed broadsides warning citizens of imminent revolution. One such gem, titled “Communists Incite Racial Uprising and Bloody Revolution Among Negroes of Dixie,” reads like a fever dream of midcentury Am

The Paper Trails Blog #9 There was a time when a poem could pay for your coffee—or at least get you a refill. In the Greenwich Village of the 1970s, poetry wasn’t something you went to graduate school for; it was something you inhaled, recited, stapled, or scrawled in the margin of a menu. The Village was still an unruly mix of radicals and romantics, and its cafés were the beating heart of that cultural bloodstream. The Bitter End on Bleecker Street still smelled of beatnik

A ticket stub is a peculiar kind of proof—half torn, half treasured. It’s what’s left when the event ends: the confetti of a life attended. Collectors love them because they collapse distance. A train ticket from 1912 still smells faintly of soot. A county fair admission shows the price of nostalgia—fifteen cents for the Ferris wheel and a chance at a cheap stuffed prize. And the holy grails: concert stubs. One of my favorites is a wrinkled ticket from Janis Joplin’s 1969 con

Where the music was loud, the lights were low, and freedom lived off the record. The Harlem Renaissance wasn’t just about poetry and jazz—it was also about permission. Between 1920 and 1935, Harlem’s streets pulsed with a kind of creative electricity that didn’t stop when the clubs closed.
 And if you knew the right door, the real revolution started after hours. The Clam House on 133rd Street was one such place—run by Gladys Bentley, a tuxedo-wearing blues singer whose deep v

When readers become co-authors, the margins turn into a secret conversation across time. Most of us were told never to write in books. But the best readers—collectors, scholars, insomniacs with pens in hand—always do.
Each underline, exclamation mark, and coffee-ringed note tells a second story, one the author never meant to publish. Marginalia is the ephemera of thought: it turns reading into correspondence. I once found a copy of Langston Hughes’s The Big Sea filled with sh

From the parlor table to the protest line, women’s scrapbooks preserved what official history overlooked — the personal, the political, and the beautifully ordinary traces of a life.

A picture worth a thousand stories—and one small stamp that carried them across time. 
 Before emails and emojis, there was the postcard—a single image that captured a place, a feeling, a fleeting connection. This post uncovers how these modest cards became cultural artifacts, mapping personal histories one handwritten line at a time. It’s easy to dismiss a postcard as a vacation cliché—a quick note from somewhere sunny, scrawled in half a hurry and sent off with a stamp and

When Paper Speaks: The Secret Life of Ephemera Sometimes, while following the paper trail, a single scrap can stop you cold. Not all history is bound between covers. Some of it slips loose. Ephemera—those fugitive scraps of print meant to be discarded—carry the pulse of their moment more vividly than most official records. They were never meant to survive, which is precisely why they matter. A handbill promising a rally “rain or shine,” a dance card filled in pencil, a ration

(A First Dispatch from the Margins of History) Sometimes history doesn’t announce itself in a book or a monument—it hides in a flyer, a...