Schwartz and Cook’s “Archives, Records, and Power” dismantles the professional myth that archives are neutral repositories of historical fact, arguing instead that archives are active sites of power where memory, identity, evidence, and social legitimacy are produced, organised, and contested. Their central proposition is that archives do not simply preserve the past; they help determine which pasts become visible, authoritative, and usable. Against the older positivist image of the archivist as impartial guardian of truth, the authors insist that every stage of archival work—record creation, appraisal, selection, description, preservation, access, and interpretation—involves consequential acts of mediation. The archive is therefore not a passive storehouse but a social construct, shaped by governments, institutions, corporations, families, and individuals whose interests determine what is recorded, retained, privileged, or erased. This argument is especially powerful in relation to marginalised groups, since women, racialised communities, queer people, the poor, the non-literate, and other subaltern subjects have often been excluded from official memory through archival silence. Yet Schwartz and Cook also recognise that archives may become tools of resistance when read against the grain or when alternative communities create their own documentary spaces. Their case synthesis shows that archival power lies precisely in this double capacity: archives can stabilise dominant narratives, but they can also expose their fractures. In conclusion, the authors demand a postmodern archival ethics grounded in transparency, accountability, plurality, and critical self-awareness; to deny archival power is not neutrality, but complicity with the status quo.