"A Smart Parchment-Rooter": Hubert Hall, British Archives and American Scholarship, 1880-1940

The similarities in the ways the archival and historical professions, in both the United States and the United Kingdom, emerged from a single area of joint endeavor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now fairly well recognized. Less well known are the ways that "mutually shared space" fostered professional and personal relationships in networks of British and American "historical workers." Such relationships, now obscured, were of significance not just to the individuals concerned, but because they affected the developing archival landscapes on both sides of the Atlantic. They are considered here from the perspective of Hubert Hall (1857-1944) of the British Public Record Office, who worked with and supported American colleagues from the 1890s until his death in 1944.