So for this post, I went and had a look at some issues of The Crisis and The Masses, as well as the two issues of Blast (which is kind of cheating but they have been on my mind recently). For The Crisis, I looked at the first and last issues, in addition to vol 9 issue 1, to see the amounts of change in policy and stance on issues across the length of the war. I did the same with The Masses, looking at the first and last issues, and then Vol. 6 No. 6.

One of the most essential aspects to each of these periodicals is the political aspects running through them. The Crisis focusing on black civil rights and uplift, both before, during, and after the war, The Masses with its socialist leanings, and Blast's fairly obvious facistic leanings. All of these varying political perspectives coexist within the archive of the Modernist Journals Project, which I find fascinating. The description of The Masses acknowledges it's "radical politics," and does The Crisis, but the description for Blast doen not outright mention the political ideals the journal presents. Do we, as archivists, have a responsibility to contextualize the material we choose to preserve, especially when some of the materials push violent and potentially dangerous ideologies (I am aware that some people would leverage the same political questions towards The Masses that I am at Blast)? Because the discussion of archival and preservations can center around similar discussions of ethical consumption that we were having at the end of last week, with regards to the #MeToo era. Is it even up to the archivists to decide if anything is too "problematic" to preserve?