Clifford Muse
American historian and archivist
Clifford L. Muse, Jr. (born April 27, 1944, in Highstown, New Jersey) is an African American historian and archivist. He is currently Howard University's archivist and associate director at the Moorland–Spingarn Research Center. He is most well known for his involvement in the diversity issues of the archive profession as well as his research and writings on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frederick Douglass.
Career
Dr. Muse was born in Highstown, New Jersey, where he also attended high school. He graduated from Hartwick College in Oneonta, New York, and Howard University.
He worked as an archivist in the Office of the Presidential Libraries in the National Archives and Records Service (NARS) and was the senior archivist on the Richard Nixon Presidential Materials Project.
The public source identifies “Clifford Muse” as american historian and archivist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Clifford, Muse and American.
Why this record matters
A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Clifford Muse”, the useful work is to connect “american historian and archivist” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 19, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q84146521. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1944.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Clifford Muse” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.