In early January 2025, at the American Historical Association (AHA) conference in New York City, over five hundred members of the organization filed into a hotel ballroom to attend the annual business meeting. It was standing room only, with an overflow crowd that couldn’t even walk in the door. All participants were vetted: we stood in line while a small crew of workers looked everyone up in a database to confirm that memberships were up to date. Those who were eligible were handed a packet of index cards held together with a paperclip.

For me, and in that context, the index cards were a throwback. My first visits to archives were in the early 1990s, before laptops and cellphones. Someone must have told me to use index cards. I was trying to develop a system for organizing what I knew would be a sea of information. I read original documents that I pulled out of neatly ordered boxes, having found guidance from the archivists and finding aids at the Walter P. Reuther Library. I tried to type up my thoughts and observations on the index cards, but they didn’t end up working for me. I switched to notebooks pretty quickly, ordered lots of photocopies, leaned into multi-colored Post-it tabs, and made myself a giant spreadsheet.

By January 2025, every single university in Gaza — as well as most of its libraries and archives — had been destroyed by Israeli aerial bombing, ground-based assaults, and a massive Israeli military campaign of bulldozing and blowing up infrastructure that had merely been damaged in previous attacks. Those original documents, those climate-controlled storage units, those finding aids and reading rooms are gone. Those classrooms, those overhead projectors, those lecture halls have all been targets of this ongoing genocide.