The Peace Corps Community Archive at American University Seeks Your Story
The Peace Corps Community Archive at American University Library is actively seeking the ‘histories’ of RPCVs. The Kennedy Library in Boston has a ‘Peace Corps collection’ from the first years of the agency, i.e., during JFK’s presidency, and there are other collections, including the official records of the Peace Corps at the National Archives in Washington. RPCVs funded one collection of objects in Portland, Oregon, and various libraries have the papers of former students, but American University’s venture is new, impressive, and expanding. Unlike the Peace Corps agency, which appears to deliberately want to ‘bury its past’ having done little over the years to document the successes and failures of the Peace Corps, RPCVs have taken it upon themselves through their writings, films, photos, and organizations to put together the history of their experiences, and now universities and libraries are becoming aware of the valuable items that RPCV have in . . .
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Susan McElrath, University Archivist, at American University also wrote that: “We are definitely interested in acquiring published Peace Corps memoirs…