Need pointers on wp_get_archives-like fuctionality scoped on specific categories

Hey all.

I’ve been all over the interwebs and codex looking for something that can shed some light on what I am trying to do. What I would like to do is have the site archives for a specific category organized by year and by month, similar to what the plugin Collapsing Archives does, but scoped on specific categories.

So, for instance, on the News archive page I want to see the archives limited to the posts with the category ‘News’. Then of course you click on the link for whatever month you want and you go to the archive page with ‘News’ posts for that month.

What I am having trouble grokking is how to scope out those archives so that they are specific to the category I want to show. Currently, the Collapsing Archive widget shows the posts from the entire site.

I would be interested to find out if there is a template tag that might get me somewhat near where I need to be. I can manage all the nice jQuery stuff to make the archives collapsible, but I don’t know how to conjure up from WordPress a way to run sort of a foreach month of the year list the months and foreach month show posts made during the month. Is this something I would do from ‘query_posts’ and loop through months or is there another tag that I should be looking at. Any help would be appreciated.