Envoy to the Archives Ruth Anna Fisher and Hidden Transatlantic History

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.