Debra Newman Ham
American archivist
Debra Newman Ham (born August 27, 1948) is an American archivist and retired professor in the field of history.
Education
Ham grew up in York, Pennsylvania and graduated from York High School. She received a BA in history from Howard University in 1970 and received her Masters from Boston University in 1971. She also completed a PhD at Howard University.
Career
After graduating, she spent the summer as an intern at the National Archives. In 1972, Ham began work as an archivist and Black History Specialist at the National Archives. While there, she helped co-found the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society in 1977. She also compiled and prepared finding aids for the Social Security Administration, the Office of Economic Opportunity and the Department of Labor.
In 1986 she moved to the Library of Congress, working as the specialist in African American History and Culture in the Manuscript Division. Under her care were papers of influential people such as Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass and Thurgood Marshall.
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This entry incorporates text from “Debra Newman Ham” 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.