What Can a Box Tell Us About Life?

On Wednesday I got to dig into one of the “Japan Years” boxes and all of the folders inside were either dedicated to letters that were sent to Edgar Bankroft, or sent by him to other people. A lot of these letters and documents would require me much more time to look through if I wanted to get a more concrete idea of what their use was, however, a lot of the documents that I was able to skim through allow us to learn some interesting things about Bankroft’s life. Many of these documents were various invitations and what almost seemed like courtesy letters, requesting that Bankroft attend a dinner or a meeting of various types, or thanking him for attending something of the like. I find things like these interesting, especially when we want to consider the impact an individual had on other people or groups of people. These types of documents also provide a pretty good map of where the individual was/may have been at any given point in time (given that all of the documents are dated). A lot of the other documents seemed to lean strongly into his career as an ambassador and were much more on the formal side with official stamps and logos. These kinds of documents could easily tell us what kind of environment an individual is involving themselves in as well as the condition of that environment which I think I find the most interesting about it.