The National Archives doesn’t frequently draw media attention. In most respects, this is by design: the National Archives is officially a nonpartisan institution. Since it generally keeps a boundary between its policies and those of the United States government, a front-page news story often signals that either the Archives or some branch of government has breached that boundary. Consequently, it is no surprise that when the Trump Administration fired Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan in February, a media uproar over possible partisan motivations behind the firing erupted.
Shogan’s career, of course, did not begin or end with her firing. On Tuesday, Shogan came to UVA to discuss both her career leading up to her appointment as Archivist of the United States and the general climate surrounding archival work in modern America. Shogan’s talk was moderated by UVA Professor Gerard Alexander and hosted by the History Club and Blue Ridge Center.
Shogan began her summary of her career in the early 2000s, when she was a professor of American politics and history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She had acquired the job shortly after obtaining a PhD in American politics from Yale. After a few years of work there, she began interviewing for positions at other universities. The school she felt most likely to pursue, coincidentally enough, was UVA. However, the stock market crash following the September 11th Attacks led to UVA cutting the position she was seeking, and Shogan instead remained at GMU.
Remaining in the DC metropolitan area, however, offered Shogan a unique opportunity to enter the world of government directly at its seat in Washington, D.C. Her foray into American government began when she was accepted into the American Political Science Association’s Congressional Fellowship Program, which placed her on Capitol Hill for a year. Following that, she became a temporary staff member on Armed Services policy in the office of Senator Joe Lieberman (D-CT). When Democrats took control of the Senate later that year and Lieberman became chair of the Armed Services Committee, Shogan accepted a full-time job in his office.
Following her work on Capitol Hill, Shogan moved to the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress, where she advised members of Congress from both houses and both parties on research matters. Over the years, she moved up the ranks, becoming a division head, then a senior advisor, then Deputy Director of the Congressional Research Service. Shogan emphasized that, as an academic, her expertise in that field could come in handy at times, but that the single largest factor in her promotions was her ability to competently and effectively manage people and report to her superiors.
Following her ascension through the ranks at the Library of Congress, Shogan was made the organization’s representative on a commission celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment. After that, she was recruited for a position at the White House Historical Association, and, finally, found her way to the National Archives, where she was made Director in 2023.
Shogan recounts some of her experiences as Director, in addition to some of the functions of the National Archives. The National Archives, she explained, consists of 13.5 billion individual records, which themselves represent only around 1-3% of total government correspondence. Many records are spread around the country, either due to the convenience of transport or because documents hold up better in a particular area. Many documents, for example, are actually stored in limestone caves in the vicinity of Kansas City, as the cool, isolated environment protects documents from degrading.
Many of these documents are also classified. Among the classified documents Shogan was able to look at include the Kennedy Assassination files, as well as objects related to the files: the gun used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the clothes Oswald wore when he was shot by Jack Ruby, and fragments of the windshield of the car President Kennedy rode in. There were many other objects that Shogan was able to access. When Shogan once mentioned that she had been obsessed with Bill Clinton’s cat, Socks, as a child, a staff member at the Archive mentioned that she could meet Socks just down the hall. Shogan was — understandably — quite shocked when she was shown an urn containing Socks’s worldly remains.
Shogan dedicated much of the rest of her talk to emphasizing the value of remaining nonpartisan when working at an institution such as the National Archives. She emphasized that throughout her career, she had faced numerous charges of favoring one political side over another: first, during her confirmation hearings, where she was accused of being a radical leftist; second, in 2024, when her efforts to change the content of certain National Archives Museum exhibitions drew accusations of being a MAGA Republican. In her view, being criticized by both sides was an honor.
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