The Long Reach of Freeman Tilden

Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage (University of North Carolina Press, 1957)

Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New History in an
Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Duke University Press, 1997)

Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House Museums (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999)

Published in 1957, Interpreting Our Heritage is something of a relic. It’s tempting to note the publication date and write Tilden off as a dinosaur, a distant voice from a distant historical moment. What can a mid-century NPS employee, already long in the tooth at the time of his writing, really have to offer a young, technologically savvy, postmodern museum professional? Amazingly, quite a bit.

Freeman Tilden


Quickly surveying our readings this semester, Tilden’s influence is readily apparent in nearly all of them. Beginning with our first monograph, Ian Tyrell’s Historians in Public, the academic wrangling over specialization and accessibility is of a piece with Tilden’s desire to access the “personality and experience of the visitor” (the first of his six principles). That desire is a step or two removed Stephen Weil’s call for consumer-based holistic programming. Rosenzweig and Thelen’s “popular historymakers” are a twentieth century rendering of Tilden’s “amateurs.”

With respect to exhibit planning, Tilden calls for nuanced interpretation and provocation (principles II and IV respectively). The latter is certainly evident in the arguments offered by Horton and Horton’s collection and most recently Cathy Stanton’s book. Moreover, both Slavery and Public History and The Lowell Experiment seek to provide a complete portrait of US history, blemishes and all, “a whole rather than a part” (principle V).

Lastly, principles III and VI are reflective of the field today. The notion that interpretation is a teachable art, conscious or not, envisages the development of public history and its presence within the university. Further, the need to recognize young museum visitors is evident in the contemporary clamor for intergenerational programming and educational outreach.

This is not to say that Tilden should be treated as gospel. Handler and Gable directly question the usefulness of (Tilden-inspired) visitor-oriented programming at Colonial Williamsburg and lament its tendency to produced largely celebratory, uncritical work (227). Handler and Gable argue that historians and staff at Williamsburg, in their perceived need to offer uncontroversial content and good customer service, essentially over-anticipate the desires of the museum-going public. They underestimate the ability and willingness of their visitors to grapple with difficult content. Despite a staff of historians seemingly committed to incorporating the narratives and interpretive framework of the new social history, Colonial Williamsburg offers an experience that is, in fact, rather vanilla.

Dames and Sires at Colonial Williamsburg


It’s a bit more challenging to find echoes of the Tilden gospel in Patricia West’s work, given that her subject essentially stops where Tilden’s writing begins. At bottom, both Tilden and West recognize the political utility of historic sites. Tilden is hardly a political animal, but his frequent calls for “love,” “beauty,” and “humanity,” as opposed to say, industrial progress, territorial expansion, or heroic leadership, provide an inclination as to his political leanings (He does offer praise for Colonial Williamsburg, though it’s a bit unfair to compare Tilden’s perspective in 1957, with the museum-city in its relative infancy, to our own vantage point from twenty-first century social history). West, meanwhile, skillfully weaves the narrative of historic home preservation in America and how, from the outset, historic preservation was governed by political ideology and yet de-politicized its presentation. In someone else’s hands Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House could serve as a women’s history museum charting the a story of gender, suffrage, and intellectual culture in nineteenth century America. As it stands, it is essentially a monument to domesticity, a part rather than a whole, and one with which Tilden would likely express dissatisfaction.