As archivists document modern society and its institutions, choose and preserve recorded evidence of past precedents and social ideas, they control the past. Helen Samuels’s documentation strategies made a significant influence on North American archival thinking and especially on archival appraisal, having inspired her fellow archivists to rethink and address an important theme: how, in documenting modern societies and their institutions, the archivist’s control of the past may be transformed in ways more appropriate for our twenty-first-century world.