Eric O’Keefe, “Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East,” New York Times (12 November 2007)
Cary Carson, “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?,” The Public Historian Vol. 30, No. 4 (November 2008)
What do oral historians in gentrifying San Francisco, an eccentric Northeast mayor collecting Old West relics, and a retired museum professional from one of the most recognizable historic sites in the country have in common?
Give up?
They are reflective of the fact that public historians, faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, may in fact have no freaking idea what they are doing. This is not to dismiss the work of Mirabel, Carson, or even Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed (who unbeknownst to his constituents spent upwards of $8 million in public funds amassing what appears to be a stellar collection of objects and artifacts from the late nineteenth century). More to the point, these readings are reflective of a crisis moment, and the individuals discussed here earn an A for effort.
Lately, we've been trying to figure out how public historians can reconcile their personal and institutional politics with the public work that they do. Most of our readings have come to the conclusion that whatever your political compass, you cannot realistically separate those biases from your institution's role in the community. Whether patriotic or polemic, history is always political, and I've more or less accepted this argument. The question then is how do you consciously and responsibly utilize that political stance to valuable historical ends. Though I was initially reluctant at the prospect of openly politicizing a museum's mission, I'm increasingly beginning to recognize the value of such an approach.
Nancy Mirabel ends her discussion of gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District with an indictment of the public historic markers that litter the Embarcadero and Fisherman's Wharf tourist district. Though accurate (we hope), as Mirabel notes they have a tendency to commemorate the distant past - the history of whaling and the wharf, architectural curios, personal anecdotes - and do so at the expense of the more recent, and often more difficult, past. This impulse to remember and eulogize the "safe" past lies at the heart of the problem of failing historic sites today. They deny conflict and moral complexity in the service of visitor comfort. This model has simply go to go, and the closing remarks of Mirabel's essay are a poignant reminder. (Mirabel also offers a solid condensed history of late 90s gentrification in the Mission, its devastating effects on a local Latina/o population, and the cultural, racial, and ethnic battles at stake in such a process - though I'm not entirely sure what her article says about oral history, if anything. She never really describes to what extent the oral history project had any impact on local efforts to counter gentrification).
"Lilli Ann," a public mural by Jesus Campusano, imaginatively recreated here on gleenbphoto's FLickr account (http://www.flickr.com/photos/flairinnovationmayhem/3094296264/). Campusano's mural was "whitewashed" and used for ad space when a local dot-com purchased the above building.
Cary Carson recognizes a dilemma but he is by no means a political animal. Carson is far more interested in the need to re-invent and make more popular the work of museums and historic sites while still staying true to their century old missions of public education and cultural preservation. He calls for more media-conscious programming, online content that not only reaches wider audiences but also dangles a carrot to lure new visitors on site, and recognizes the centrality of stories and narrative to visitor expectations. He even lays out a vision for online historical soap operas that place viewers into the the world of the past (which visitors, apparently, often want and expect from a museum); something on the order of quality programming that treats historic subjects with the same "dense, noisy, collage-like" sophistication of HBO serials.
I hate to break Carson's bubble but HBO itself has already gone down this road with David Milch's Deadwood, a fantastic show that made up for its historical anachronisms with nuanced and morally complex characters. The show received great critical response and a devoted following but got canned after three seasons, HBO citing cost demands as a major reason (period dramas are exorbitantly expensive and Carson's answer seems to be a pie-in-the-sky collaborative network between regional institutions, the same institutions who are often deeply protective of their collections and business plans, and who regularly compete with their neighbors for dwindling state, federal, and private funds.
Al Swearengen (played here by Ian McShane), the brutal yet charismatic star of HBO's Deadwood.Carson further recognizes the need for technologically-sophisticated exhibits, and not simply the already obsolete headset-and-touchscreen dog and pony shows. Museums need to develop an entirely new way of communicating the past to young visitors. In short, they need to reconsider how twenty-first century audiences construct not just historical meaning, but even more broadly, existential meaning - Who am I? What is my role in this history? And how does this configure into my daily life?
That's probably the tallest order we've encountered all semester. Carson's answer? Let teenagers take pictures of exhibits with their iPhones! I don't mean to dump on Carson. His accessibility and willingness to think outside of the box should be applauded. His investment in the sustained future of museums is earnest. But he does have a tendency to intelligently articulate some of the biggest problems facing museums today, only to offer some pretty boneheaded solutions. My hunch is that he suffers a bit from a generational gap. Nonetheless, a great piece that stimulated much of the above writing.
So what's a public historian to do? My thinking at this moment - and it's changing weekly - go big or go home. Tired of watering down your museum's content to make it more palatable to a wider visitor pool? Bring out your big interpretive guns and tell the story the way you think it's supposed to be told. I'm ambivalent about social history as an entrenched methodology - the best histories often combine the social and the structural (and for a good recent example see Seth Rockman's Scraping By, an examination of bottom-of-the-barrel working class in antebellum Baltimore). In order to sustain the livelihood of museums, though, there simply needs to be a larger commitment to incorporating social narratives, both distant and recent, into the framework of public historic sites. That means acknowledging conflict - often it means foregrounding conflict.
I spend an inordinate amount of time ripping the Baseball Hall of Fame (I've probably mentioned it at least two or three times in class and I've commented here as well). Nonetheless, the BB Hall of Fame should have an exhibit about steroids. That uncomfortable story is just as central to the history of baseball as the breaking of the color line (which does receive a modest exhibit at Cooperstown). Philadelphia Musuem of Art should have a standing exhibit about the development of the Franklin Parkway and its impact on residents and business owners in the 1920s and 1930s. Cliveden should find space to comment on its role in a diverse and ever-changing urban neighborhood. Though his private use of public monies is completely unconscionable, there's something to admire about Mayor Reed's stance in acquiring his Old West collection, which responds to public ambivalence about such a project and says, in essence, "You know what, I'm building it anyway." Let's start building.
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