Heidi Tworek: We would like to encourage interest in the history of the United Nations
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It usually takes a decent amount of time for an independent researcher to get access to any information contained in archives of various UN bodies. Not anymore! Harvard University’s new project solved this problem by collecting massive archival history and other materials related to the United Nations in one place. In this interview for the Russian International Affairs Council, project coordinator Dr. Heidi Tworek shares interesting details about the project, its mission and long-term goals.
Foreign opinion
It usually takes a decent amount of time for an independent researcher to get access to any information contained in archives of various UN bodies. Not anymore! Harvard University’s new project solved this problem by collecting massive archival history and other materials related to the United Nations in one place. In this interview for the Russian International Affairs Council, project coordinator Dr. Heidi Tworek shares interesting details about the project, its mission and long-term goals.
Interviewee: Heidi J. S. Tworek, Lecturer on History and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies, Harvard University
Interviewer: Maria Prosviryakova, Russian International Affairs Council
and Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies,
Harvard University
Dr. Tworek, How was the idea of the project conceived?
The idea of the project goes back to the early 2000’s. There was a project in Cambridge University in connection with Professor Emma Rothschild, Director of the Joint Center for History and Economics. They held several meetings to discuss the history of the United Nations and the main point was to encourage all sorts of historians to use UN archives not just in terms of intellectual history, but also much more broadly. The participants started talking about how we could encourage United Nations history from below.
A few years later, Professor Emma Rothschild and Professor Sugata Bose began to talk about doing something larger and broader at Harvard that would include some sort of a website. They wanted to broaden the geographical prospective to be able to see the history of the United Nations from Asia and Africa as well as from its central geographical focus of New York. Additionally, they wanted to put emphasis on the large amount of resources that were being made available online.
Finally, we received a grant from the United Nations Foundations with the aim of creating this sort of website.
How is the project different from or integrated with other initiatives, such as “History of the UN”, UN Intellectual History Project, UN Oral History and so on?
Obviously, we have been really lucky to be able to build on these great initiatives and to integrate their resources into our website. There are quite a few ways in which we differ.
Firstly, we are very focused on compiling the excellent extant resources for teaching and researching the history of the United Nations. We have created all kinds of research guides and included other international organizations. We included the UN as well as independent organizations such as Amnesty or Greenpeace in our archival guides.
We also included twenty descriptions of research experiences by international scholars who have written about their experiences in archives of internationalism such as the United Nations or the League of Nations around the world.
We also focused on creating a new set of sources for teachers based on a course that was taught on the global history of the United Nations at Harvard in spring 2011. We have provided thirteen major themes in UN history that could correspond to a thirteen week university course. We have provided timelines, annotated bibliographies for each of those themes.
And we have provided ideas for all sorts of creative student projects on the history of the United Nations.
The project is about the history of the UN, what is UN’s involvement in the project?
The United Nations’ involvement has actually been there from the start. We have relied on the archivists of all of the United Nations agencies to supply a lot of information for our archival guides.
We are also very fortunate to have Jens Boel, who is the UNESCO’s Chief archivist, sitting on our Academic Advisory Committee. He gave us an in-depth interview which is available on the website about experiences with United Nations’ archives and how scholars can interact with them.
What is the mission of the project? What are its main functions?
UN Security Council adopts UNSCR 1325
(The United Nations Security Council Resolution
1325 on women, peace and security), 2000
The main function is to encourage research and teaching on the history of the United Nations and international organizations. We have also put a large emphasis, from the outset, on conserving existing archives and other records.
One example is the project by Ike Achebe who has done a very interesting survey of the records that exist in Nigeria – which we have put on our website. We absolutely encourage other contributions by other scholars who worked in countries that we haven’t been able to cover to tell us all about the kinds of records that exist there so that we continue to add them.
So in terms of functions we really want to provide resources for scholars or anybody who is interested in working on the history of the United Nations. We have got guides to archival sources – from physical archives to all sorts of online archives that now exist.
As I have mentioned before, we have all sorts of research experiences written by various scholars to encourage others to think about what kinds of research they could perform on the history of the United Nations.
As well, we have lots of resources for teachers – a large compilation of all of the syllabi that we could find online about various aspects of the history of the United Nations. We have timelines and featured sources that teachers could use in courses either at high school level or at the university level.
The website is in English are you planning on having materials in other UN languages? In Russian?
We have materials about all kinds of sources for UN agencies and international organizations all around the world. And a lot of these sources are contained in archives in other languages.
We began by putting the website in English with a Google translate bar to enable anyone in any language that it provides to be able to access the website. We very warmly welcome further contributions on UN archival, online material, syllabi or scholarly networks in Russian or other UN languages.
Who is the project funded by?
The Project is made possible by the generous support by the United Nations Foundation to the Harvard University's Asia Center and also by the Joint Center for History and Economics at Harvard and Cambridge.
What is the long-term plan for the project?
The long-term plan for the project is obviously to encourage scholarly and general interest in the history of the UN and its facets. And we hope to continually improve upon the guides to sources that we have.
For example, even since we launched at the beginning of October we already received some useful contributions, including information on Trygve Lie’s personal papers in Norway. The long-term plan is to continue to expand our archival guides and our guides to syllabi to make them as comprehensive and as global as possible.
We really hope that this archive will become the primary go-to site for anyone working on the history of the United Nations or international organizations. And most of all we hope to encourage teachers and professors to include the history of the United Nations to their courses, and to make the general public more aware of the importance of the United Nations’ history to understand not only its past but also its present and future.
Dr. Tworek, thank you so much for the interview.
United Nations History Project: unhistoryproject.org
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