In lieu of a reading response, check out this fantastic animation by Zach van Schouwen:
http://students.washington.edu/zvs/the-block/
"The Block" re-traces the "complete history of Eldridge Street between Stanton and Rivington," an intersection on the Lower East Side. It's like an online, interactive version of R. Crumb's "A Short History of America" (recreated here in Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ym5n-ZZWUs).
Hat tip to Casey B. at La Guardia and Wagner Archives at CUNY
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Migratory Patterns
A JAH-appropriate review of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience. Created and maintained by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library:
The removal of a people is one of the central narratives of the African American experience. In many ways migration, both coerced and voluntary, is the African American experience. The makers of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience recognize this centrality and have devoted a website to its history. In Motion does double duty as an interpretive online exhibit and an encyclopedic archive. Combining chronological overviews with primary documents, archival images, interpretive maps, and recent scholarship, the site is of primary use to students and educators. But a cogent site design, diversity of content, and clean, fluid prose make In Motion a valuable resource for the unique visitor as well. Whether mining the rich material here or simply perusing its pages, visitors are provided a narrative of African American migratory patterns, from the transatlantic slave trade to recent immigration from modern African nations, and leave with an improved understanding of the African American diaspora.
With respect to scholarship, the site leaves most of its interpretative muscle to excerpts from published works and independent essays. Some of the sections suffer from a lack of fresh voices. A page devoted to Haitian immigration in the 20th century, for example, relies heavily on scholarship from the late 1970s and 1980s. To what extent this is a reflection of existing scholarship or in fact editorial oversight is beyond my expertise. Nonetheless, the site is a fantastic introduction to the principal themes and conflicts of African American migration and motivated users have an opportunity to delve deep into the primary and secondary material.
In Motion first came to my attention while an adjunct offering an introductory course on academic writing. A student had included the site in his list of sources for an essay discussing Toni Morrison’s Jazz. Much of our discussion that semester focused on making use of online content and how to best decipher what was appropriate and inappropriate for an academic assignment. In Motion easily represented the upper end of online content submitted for consideration that semester and was subsequently used as a model for students still struggling with the utility of Wikipedia and Microsoft Encarta. By marrying the organizational strategies of a traditional encyclopedia with a historically sophisticated archive of primary documents and visual media, In Motion has performed something of a bait and switch. Young users are familiar with its initial interface, but by the end of their session, they have explored by proxy archival research and the opportunities afforded beyond explanatory paragraphs and fragmentary bullet points. The site further offers an extensive collection of lesson plans and writing prompts for middle and high school educators.
The Schomburg Center has thus provided a content archive appropriate for 6th graders exploring Black History Month and young college users learning how to avoid the pitfalls of the “shallow web.” For their efforts, Schomburg Center and the New York Public Library deserves the attention of educators, scholars, and the open enrollment classroom that we now call the internet.
The removal of a people is one of the central narratives of the African American experience. In many ways migration, both coerced and voluntary, is the African American experience. The makers of In Motion: The African American Migration Experience recognize this centrality and have devoted a website to its history. In Motion does double duty as an interpretive online exhibit and an encyclopedic archive. Combining chronological overviews with primary documents, archival images, interpretive maps, and recent scholarship, the site is of primary use to students and educators. But a cogent site design, diversity of content, and clean, fluid prose make In Motion a valuable resource for the unique visitor as well. Whether mining the rich material here or simply perusing its pages, visitors are provided a narrative of African American migratory patterns, from the transatlantic slave trade to recent immigration from modern African nations, and leave with an improved understanding of the African American diaspora.
With respect to scholarship, the site leaves most of its interpretative muscle to excerpts from published works and independent essays. Some of the sections suffer from a lack of fresh voices. A page devoted to Haitian immigration in the 20th century, for example, relies heavily on scholarship from the late 1970s and 1980s. To what extent this is a reflection of existing scholarship or in fact editorial oversight is beyond my expertise. Nonetheless, the site is a fantastic introduction to the principal themes and conflicts of African American migration and motivated users have an opportunity to delve deep into the primary and secondary material.
In Motion first came to my attention while an adjunct offering an introductory course on academic writing. A student had included the site in his list of sources for an essay discussing Toni Morrison’s Jazz. Much of our discussion that semester focused on making use of online content and how to best decipher what was appropriate and inappropriate for an academic assignment. In Motion easily represented the upper end of online content submitted for consideration that semester and was subsequently used as a model for students still struggling with the utility of Wikipedia and Microsoft Encarta. By marrying the organizational strategies of a traditional encyclopedia with a historically sophisticated archive of primary documents and visual media, In Motion has performed something of a bait and switch. Young users are familiar with its initial interface, but by the end of their session, they have explored by proxy archival research and the opportunities afforded beyond explanatory paragraphs and fragmentary bullet points. The site further offers an extensive collection of lesson plans and writing prompts for middle and high school educators.
The Schomburg Center has thus provided a content archive appropriate for 6th graders exploring Black History Month and young college users learning how to avoid the pitfalls of the “shallow web.” For their efforts, Schomburg Center and the New York Public Library deserves the attention of educators, scholars, and the open enrollment classroom that we now call the internet.
"U will live 4eva in my heart": History and Hypertextuality
Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web
selections from Intersections: History and New Media
Virginia Heffernan, "Haunted Mouses," New York Times (16 December 2007)
Nate Hill, "Hyperlinking Reality," Library Journal (July 2009)
Center for the Future of Museums, "Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures"
Each of the above readings are primarily interested in two concerns:
1) How can historicans utilize increasingly sophisticated technology, whether doing traditional scholarship or public-oriented work?
and
2) When using this new digital tool box, where do you locate the nexus of democratizaton and fragmentation/ corporatization (what Heffernan calls "static")?
With respect to the first question, Cohen and Rosenzweig and the CFM report make a compelling case for the need to embrace these tools. As Cohen and Rosenzweig lay out, the web opens a plethora of opportunities for young and seasoned historians, among them accessibility, flexibility, and interactivity. Likewise CFM demonstrates the need to respond NOW to changing demographics, a turbulent political economy, an even more turbulent fiscal economy, and the sea change that has occurred across modes of communication. Museums need to embrace Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, and begin to develop a language that thinks beyond its traditional audience (One of the report's most telling pieces of data: minorities now represent roughly a third of the total US population, and yet minorities at historic sites represent only around 9% of total visitation).
Nate Hill and a number of the short selections from the AHA Perspectives forum (Intersections: History and Digital Media) provide some examples of what this new work can and will look like. With the use of something called QR codes, bar codes that can be read by a mobile device, Hill imagines the meeting place between "[his] online community and [his] physical community." With the use of QR codes, one can turn nearly any physical setting into a collectively maintained Facebook profile, each passerby offering "status updates" about their own reflections on that space, new information that might otherwise be lost on other visitors, responses to previous inhabitants. Hill uses the example of a park bench. A bench equipped with a QR code could become a portal between digital and physical communities, essentially an online profile that anyone with access to QR readability can "write" throughout the day. A number of the authors featured in Intersections share success stories with digital mapping technology and the relatively cheap opportunities it provide for interactive online content. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, brought to our attention here by co-editor Janice Reiff, is a particularly impressive example (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/).
Truthfully, it all makes your head spin a bit. But whether we like it or not, this is the future of communication. Cohen and Rosenzweig are wise to bring readers to the attention of the dangers as well as the benefits of digital history. But it is no longer our job to debate those terms. We simply have to keep an open mind, maybe take a class or two on HTML, and learn how to interpret the "static."
A QR code (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668443.html?&rid=)
selections from Intersections: History and New Media
Virginia Heffernan, "Haunted Mouses," New York Times (16 December 2007)
Nate Hill, "Hyperlinking Reality," Library Journal (July 2009)
Center for the Future of Museums, "Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures"
Each of the above readings are primarily interested in two concerns:
1) How can historicans utilize increasingly sophisticated technology, whether doing traditional scholarship or public-oriented work?
and
2) When using this new digital tool box, where do you locate the nexus of democratizaton and fragmentation/ corporatization (what Heffernan calls "static")?
With respect to the first question, Cohen and Rosenzweig and the CFM report make a compelling case for the need to embrace these tools. As Cohen and Rosenzweig lay out, the web opens a plethora of opportunities for young and seasoned historians, among them accessibility, flexibility, and interactivity. Likewise CFM demonstrates the need to respond NOW to changing demographics, a turbulent political economy, an even more turbulent fiscal economy, and the sea change that has occurred across modes of communication. Museums need to embrace Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, and begin to develop a language that thinks beyond its traditional audience (One of the report's most telling pieces of data: minorities now represent roughly a third of the total US population, and yet minorities at historic sites represent only around 9% of total visitation).
Nate Hill and a number of the short selections from the AHA Perspectives forum (Intersections: History and Digital Media) provide some examples of what this new work can and will look like. With the use of something called QR codes, bar codes that can be read by a mobile device, Hill imagines the meeting place between "[his] online community and [his] physical community." With the use of QR codes, one can turn nearly any physical setting into a collectively maintained Facebook profile, each passerby offering "status updates" about their own reflections on that space, new information that might otherwise be lost on other visitors, responses to previous inhabitants. Hill uses the example of a park bench. A bench equipped with a QR code could become a portal between digital and physical communities, essentially an online profile that anyone with access to QR readability can "write" throughout the day. A number of the authors featured in Intersections share success stories with digital mapping technology and the relatively cheap opportunities it provide for interactive online content. The Encyclopedia of Chicago, brought to our attention here by co-editor Janice Reiff, is a particularly impressive example (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/).
Truthfully, it all makes your head spin a bit. But whether we like it or not, this is the future of communication. Cohen and Rosenzweig are wise to bring readers to the attention of the dangers as well as the benefits of digital history. But it is no longer our job to debate those terms. We simply have to keep an open mind, maybe take a class or two on HTML, and learn how to interpret the "static."
A QR code (http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668443.html?&rid=)
Sunday, November 15, 2009
It Doesn't Belong To You
Alison Landsberg, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press, 2004)
Jay Winter, "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the 'Memory Boom' in Contemporary Historical Studies," GHI Bulletin 27 (Winter 2000)
I'm not sure what to do with this material. In many ways reading these works alongside each other is evocative of a personal choice I've had to make within the last few years. The question before me: what intellectual and analytical framework would best help me pursue the kind of career I want, and even more deeply, accommodate the worldview I have developed and make possible the kind of life I want to live.
History ultimately won out and in many ways reading these texts is affirmative of my decision. Maybe I've already been indoctrinated, but with respect to the arguments of the above works, the historian's is the more convincing.
I happen to be uniquely qualified to evaluate both. I hold a bachelor's degree in cinema and photography and spent much of my undergraduate years reading works just like Alison Landberg's. For a while I actually assumed I would be producing work of this kind. In other words, the intellectual choices offered by these readings are reflective of the personal choices I've had to make in my own life. When you spend seventy-plus hours a week reading and writing it's hard not to identify personally with the work that you do. There are numerous commentaries on the necessity of those in my generation to "feel good" about their professional life - that a job away from home is no longer simply a means to a domestic material end.
See how easy it is to go on and on about yourself! But talking about yourself is in fact an appropriate place to start with these readings. Both Landsberg and Winter comment on the tendency of contemporary history consumers to personalize historical content. This is not a new concept for us this semester. Rosenzweig and Thelen set the stage here and the challenge has appeared in various other readings. The question repeatedly is what to do with this predicament. How do you reconcile the popular historymaker's interests with the professional historymaker's vision? Landsberg here provides a rather unique model.
Taking the concept of mimetic realism to a whole new level, she argues that memory is a principal mode of knowledge acquisition, and further that memories can in fact be fabricated, "burned in" to the visitor, across temporal and geographic borders. In other words, through mediated content (film, television, comic books, "experiential" museums) you can access and, most importantly, feel the memory of a historical reality you were never in fact a part of. Landsberg is right to recognize the importance of mass mediated content. Films and miniseries are a significant, if not the primary, site of historical engagement for many Americans. These are tools that public historians need to learn how to use, particularly the use of traditional narrative arcs. They also are an avenue into the digital interface, which (if your institution can afford it) is a necessary feature of a museum. Rather than bemoan the use of digital technology, at this point it is best to learn to utilize it toward your age old ends. But I think the utility of Landsberg's study ends there.
I am deeply skeptical of Landsberg's embrace of "prosthetic memory" as a valuable pathway to historical meaning. It's tempting to write off Landsberg's book as a work of theory and to ridicule the vernacular of her field (film theory, essentially). But it's important to remember while reading the book that Landsberg is not, by trade, a historian, and her work shouldn't be evaluated as such. She is a literary scholar. That she can comment on historical patterns and it not be an utter disaster deserves some recognition.
That said, the history here is indeed bad. Much of her argument rests on the assumption that the rise of modernity coincided with the demise of traditional kinship networks built around race, ethnicity, and class. Certainly this is a part of the story of the displacements of immigration, slavery, and the Holocaust. But Landsberg neglects the various kinship networks that developed as a response to these displacements, many of them built upon the very unifying concepts that Landsberg suggests were increasingly obsolete in modern America: race, class, and ethnicity (With respect to slavery, the recent scholarship of Ira Berlin and Steve Hahn bears this out). This is just one of a number of historical bones one could pick with Landsberg. More pressing is what to do with her conclusions, and Jay Winter offers some valuable answers.
Winter offers a valuable reminder of collective memory's proximity to political power. He is leery of state-sponsored commemorative sites, and with respect to the Holocaust and its "transferential spaces" (Landsberg's term) Winter writes:
"None of these sites can 're-present' the Holocaust; nothing can do so in any conventional way. All they can accomplish - and it is a lot - is to suggest what is absent... because of genocide and to leave the question of its 'meaning' open...
...I doubt that 'transference' can really be a framework for those telling and those attending to such narratives."
In other words, prosthetic memory is totally bogus. Landsberg doesn't offer the realm of prosthetic memory as the only site of historical engagement - she rightly recognizes a need to bridge the gap between the 'experiential' (museums, films, etc.) and the 'cognitive' (traditional narratives, academic history). But she fails to recognize the dangers of such a process. Winter reminds us of those dangers and his work is the more cogent of the two.
I'll leave with this. Is it not reasonable for the historian of trauma to tell their audience, "I'm sorry. You weren't there. You cannot possibly know what it was like to be there. Part of this simply does not belong to you. But that doesn't mean we can't try to grasp at its historical meaning."
That often is good enough for me, and at the risk of alienating popular historymakers, it should often be enough for them as well.
Jay Winter, "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the 'Memory Boom' in Contemporary Historical Studies," GHI Bulletin 27 (Winter 2000)
I'm not sure what to do with this material. In many ways reading these works alongside each other is evocative of a personal choice I've had to make within the last few years. The question before me: what intellectual and analytical framework would best help me pursue the kind of career I want, and even more deeply, accommodate the worldview I have developed and make possible the kind of life I want to live.
History ultimately won out and in many ways reading these texts is affirmative of my decision. Maybe I've already been indoctrinated, but with respect to the arguments of the above works, the historian's is the more convincing.
I happen to be uniquely qualified to evaluate both. I hold a bachelor's degree in cinema and photography and spent much of my undergraduate years reading works just like Alison Landberg's. For a while I actually assumed I would be producing work of this kind. In other words, the intellectual choices offered by these readings are reflective of the personal choices I've had to make in my own life. When you spend seventy-plus hours a week reading and writing it's hard not to identify personally with the work that you do. There are numerous commentaries on the necessity of those in my generation to "feel good" about their professional life - that a job away from home is no longer simply a means to a domestic material end.
See how easy it is to go on and on about yourself! But talking about yourself is in fact an appropriate place to start with these readings. Both Landsberg and Winter comment on the tendency of contemporary history consumers to personalize historical content. This is not a new concept for us this semester. Rosenzweig and Thelen set the stage here and the challenge has appeared in various other readings. The question repeatedly is what to do with this predicament. How do you reconcile the popular historymaker's interests with the professional historymaker's vision? Landsberg here provides a rather unique model.
Taking the concept of mimetic realism to a whole new level, she argues that memory is a principal mode of knowledge acquisition, and further that memories can in fact be fabricated, "burned in" to the visitor, across temporal and geographic borders. In other words, through mediated content (film, television, comic books, "experiential" museums) you can access and, most importantly, feel the memory of a historical reality you were never in fact a part of. Landsberg is right to recognize the importance of mass mediated content. Films and miniseries are a significant, if not the primary, site of historical engagement for many Americans. These are tools that public historians need to learn how to use, particularly the use of traditional narrative arcs. They also are an avenue into the digital interface, which (if your institution can afford it) is a necessary feature of a museum. Rather than bemoan the use of digital technology, at this point it is best to learn to utilize it toward your age old ends. But I think the utility of Landsberg's study ends there.
I am deeply skeptical of Landsberg's embrace of "prosthetic memory" as a valuable pathway to historical meaning. It's tempting to write off Landsberg's book as a work of theory and to ridicule the vernacular of her field (film theory, essentially). But it's important to remember while reading the book that Landsberg is not, by trade, a historian, and her work shouldn't be evaluated as such. She is a literary scholar. That she can comment on historical patterns and it not be an utter disaster deserves some recognition.
That said, the history here is indeed bad. Much of her argument rests on the assumption that the rise of modernity coincided with the demise of traditional kinship networks built around race, ethnicity, and class. Certainly this is a part of the story of the displacements of immigration, slavery, and the Holocaust. But Landsberg neglects the various kinship networks that developed as a response to these displacements, many of them built upon the very unifying concepts that Landsberg suggests were increasingly obsolete in modern America: race, class, and ethnicity (With respect to slavery, the recent scholarship of Ira Berlin and Steve Hahn bears this out). This is just one of a number of historical bones one could pick with Landsberg. More pressing is what to do with her conclusions, and Jay Winter offers some valuable answers.
Winter offers a valuable reminder of collective memory's proximity to political power. He is leery of state-sponsored commemorative sites, and with respect to the Holocaust and its "transferential spaces" (Landsberg's term) Winter writes:
"None of these sites can 're-present' the Holocaust; nothing can do so in any conventional way. All they can accomplish - and it is a lot - is to suggest what is absent... because of genocide and to leave the question of its 'meaning' open...
...I doubt that 'transference' can really be a framework for those telling and those attending to such narratives."
In other words, prosthetic memory is totally bogus. Landsberg doesn't offer the realm of prosthetic memory as the only site of historical engagement - she rightly recognizes a need to bridge the gap between the 'experiential' (museums, films, etc.) and the 'cognitive' (traditional narratives, academic history). But she fails to recognize the dangers of such a process. Winter reminds us of those dangers and his work is the more cogent of the two.
I'll leave with this. Is it not reasonable for the historian of trauma to tell their audience, "I'm sorry. You weren't there. You cannot possibly know what it was like to be there. Part of this simply does not belong to you. But that doesn't mean we can't try to grasp at its historical meaning."
That often is good enough for me, and at the risk of alienating popular historymakers, it should often be enough for them as well.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Go Big or Go Home
Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Geographies of Displacement: Latinas/os, Oral History, and the Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” The Public Historian Vol. 31, No. 2 (May 2009)
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.
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.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
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.
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 TildenQuickly 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 WilliamsburgIt’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.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Culture-Led Redevelopment and the Role of Public History
Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (University of Massachusetts Press, 2006)
Diane Lea, "America's Preservation Ethos: A Tribute to Enduring Ideals" in Robert Stipe, ed., A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
We've read some works this semester that served as a kind of call to arms. Last week's reading encouraged an earnest engagement with the "tough stuff of history," namely slavery. Steven Weil's collection of essays promoted the benefits of consumer-based museums and suggested the dwindling relevance of masterful collections. This week, Cathy Stanton has raised the stakes. For Stanton, public historians are essentially political actors, and nothing short of direct, often confrontational engagement with both past and present will get the job done.
Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell, MA
Stanton's book is an intelligent and controversial piece of work, one that invites a lot of soul searching - particularly for aspiring historians with a decidedly leftist bent (like myself). I can relate directly with the personal narratives Stanton provides here of solidly middle-class white professionals who have essentially stripped away their ethnic and working class heritage. Or whom clumsily rationalize their professional advancement and material comforts despite a deep skepticism and distaste for unregulated capitalism. Many of the participants interviewed here were in fact the first generation to transcend their childhood socioeconomic status, whereas I'm two and in some cases three generations removed from that world. I don't feel that my Irish, Italian, or Catholic heritage has in any tangible way defined who I am and I have largely stripped away those identity markers (sorry Pop-Pop). If anything I'm more willing to embrace a broad identification as twentieth century American secular humanist, or even Northeast middle class suburbanite. Stanton is a bit shortsighted here though. She falls into the same trap of denying ethnicity simply because it's WASP-ish. "American" can connote an ethnicity, albeit a complex one. Likewise, to suggest that someone somehow embodies an Irish heritage because their grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the late nineteenth century is overstating the case, to say nothing of the fact that it implies a unified, essential Irish heritage. But we're getting off track here.
Central to Stanton's work isn't necessarily the denial of ethnicity by museum professionals, but rather the unwieldy marriage of historic preservation and economic revitalization. How can public historians in Lowell, MA both be true to the historical record while not interrupting the profit-driven motives of shared institutional spaces? How can an institution lament the sins of capitalism in one era (mill work in the mid-nineteenth century) and yet deny the clear linkages with labor and immigration patterns in their own time? In their efforts to champion Lowell as an urban renewal project, urban planners and historians both neglected the hard realities of postindustrial life in twenty-first century New England. My question, as I read through this book... What the hell were they supposed to do? The opportunities for presentist interpretation in Lowell, MA are undeniable. But how, as museum planners, do you visualize and communicate that pattern? What does an exhibit about de-industrialization look like? Arguably, the Acre tour is just such an attempt, but is it not irresponsible, and frankly disrespectful, to present a living community as a visual representation of urban blight? The Acre tour needs to better incorporate the members of that community if it expects to have any success as a valuable and ethical museum-going experience. As I try to imagine the work involved in such a project, I wonder if I'm truly up for the task.
Diane Lea, "America's Preservation Ethos: A Tribute to Enduring Ideals" in Robert Stipe, ed., A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
We've read some works this semester that served as a kind of call to arms. Last week's reading encouraged an earnest engagement with the "tough stuff of history," namely slavery. Steven Weil's collection of essays promoted the benefits of consumer-based museums and suggested the dwindling relevance of masterful collections. This week, Cathy Stanton has raised the stakes. For Stanton, public historians are essentially political actors, and nothing short of direct, often confrontational engagement with both past and present will get the job done.
Boott Cotton Mills Museum, Lowell, MAStanton's book is an intelligent and controversial piece of work, one that invites a lot of soul searching - particularly for aspiring historians with a decidedly leftist bent (like myself). I can relate directly with the personal narratives Stanton provides here of solidly middle-class white professionals who have essentially stripped away their ethnic and working class heritage. Or whom clumsily rationalize their professional advancement and material comforts despite a deep skepticism and distaste for unregulated capitalism. Many of the participants interviewed here were in fact the first generation to transcend their childhood socioeconomic status, whereas I'm two and in some cases three generations removed from that world. I don't feel that my Irish, Italian, or Catholic heritage has in any tangible way defined who I am and I have largely stripped away those identity markers (sorry Pop-Pop). If anything I'm more willing to embrace a broad identification as twentieth century American secular humanist, or even Northeast middle class suburbanite. Stanton is a bit shortsighted here though. She falls into the same trap of denying ethnicity simply because it's WASP-ish. "American" can connote an ethnicity, albeit a complex one. Likewise, to suggest that someone somehow embodies an Irish heritage because their grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the late nineteenth century is overstating the case, to say nothing of the fact that it implies a unified, essential Irish heritage. But we're getting off track here.
Central to Stanton's work isn't necessarily the denial of ethnicity by museum professionals, but rather the unwieldy marriage of historic preservation and economic revitalization. How can public historians in Lowell, MA both be true to the historical record while not interrupting the profit-driven motives of shared institutional spaces? How can an institution lament the sins of capitalism in one era (mill work in the mid-nineteenth century) and yet deny the clear linkages with labor and immigration patterns in their own time? In their efforts to champion Lowell as an urban renewal project, urban planners and historians both neglected the hard realities of postindustrial life in twenty-first century New England. My question, as I read through this book... What the hell were they supposed to do? The opportunities for presentist interpretation in Lowell, MA are undeniable. But how, as museum planners, do you visualize and communicate that pattern? What does an exhibit about de-industrialization look like? Arguably, the Acre tour is just such an attempt, but is it not irresponsible, and frankly disrespectful, to present a living community as a visual representation of urban blight? The Acre tour needs to better incorporate the members of that community if it expects to have any success as a valuable and ethical museum-going experience. As I try to imagine the work involved in such a project, I wonder if I'm truly up for the task.
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