Envoy to the Archives

How a pioneering manuscript librarian and intellectual uncovered buried records that reshaped America’s past

As the London-based agent of the US Library of Congress, Ruth Anna Fisher (1886–1975) profoundly shaped the field of US history. Working at the British Museum and Public Record Office between the world wars, she was responsible for a vast program of identifying and copying up to a million documents related to American history, with prescient attention to the transatlantic slave trade. This monumental achievement has provided countless scholars access to source materials that might have remained hidden in repositories throughout Britian without Fisher’s brilliant discernment and tireless labor.

In Envoy to the Archives, William L. Fox offers the first full-length biography of this remarkable American intellectual. Born to a prominent African American family in northern Ohio, Fisher was keenly aware of racial issues throughout her life. She was associated with key thinkers in the Harlem Renaissance and the twentieth century transatlantic world, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Harold Laski, and J. Franklin Jameson. A trailblazer in historical research, Fisher was among a small group of Black women who first joined the ranks of professional library work, and her efforts in London coincided with the creation and consolidation of the US National Archives in the 1930s. She also mastered technologies that were new at the time, including photostat reproduction and microfilm—precursors to the many historical digitization projects of our own era.

This engrossing biography adds to the growing body of work centered on Black women archivists, librarians, and curators. Fox draws on a wide range of archival sources, including the personal papers of prominent Black thinkers (Fisher’s were destroyed in the bombing of London in 1940), and various institutional records at the Library of Congress and the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Fox also knew Fisher personally, adding warmth and insight into this captivating portrait.