During the pandemic, a lot of businesses re-imagined themselves.

Local breweries shifted from kegs to cans. Restaurants focused on to-go orders.

But historians were also affected by the pandemic. Much of their work is done in libraries and archives, places where lockdowns didn’t get a lot of publicity.

Ron Dungan/KJZZ

The Polly Rosenbaum Archives and History Building is a repository of tax rolls, newspapers, maps, court records and other government records.

“I’ve always had a passion for history. My dad would take us to ghost towns,” said Erik Berg, an Arizona historian who has published a number of articles in historical journals.

Although Google might want us to believe that all history is just a few clicks away, that’s not the case. Historians do use the internet, but they’re looking for new material, and you don’t necessarily find that online.

“I definitely like stories that haven’t been told, and for a lot of that means going back to primary sources,” Berg said.

That often means a trip to the archives. An archive is like a museum of historic papers. There are several branches of the national archives located throughout the country. Arizona has a number of collections as well. These collections might contain millions of documents. It can take days to find just one salient fact.

“But when you do find something particularly something unexpected, or,…