What's Next?

Despite their volubility about their research historians are often inarticulate about why their discipline matters as a whole.  It seems to me, at least, that historians are rarely able to put forth a convincing case for why history matters that has more than personal relevance.  Indeed, graduate training in history often seems to consist in (blindly) grasping towards a personally satisfying answer to that question, in addition to whatever smaller historiographical questions we may be trying to resolve.  As the end of this semester draws near, and I seek to renew my historical faith in the face of a hefty workload, this week’s readings on the prospects of public history are particularly enlightening, as well as unsettling.  First up, we have James Chung et. al. with “Coming Soon: The Future: The Shape of Museums to Come,” which provides a vision of the possible future of museums in light of on-going structural changes in American society.  Second, we have Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service, a recent study on the practice of history in National Parks, prepared by the NPS and the Organization of American Historians.

           

In “Coming Soon: The Future,” Chung et. al. try to envision the future of museums in a country that is projected to become older, more racially and culturally diverse, and increasingly unequal with regard to income and wealth in the coming decades.  As is so often the case with cultural institutions, the future, as forecast by Chung et. al., will depend on money, whence it comes and where it goes.  As energy costs increase, making transportation more difficult, museums away from public transportation may suffer.  As wealth becomes more concentrated museums may become even more beholden to large donors than they already are.  As “digital natives” mature and leisure time more scarce museums will have to adjust their content to meet new expectations for accessibility and flexibility.  Everything about museums will have to change it seems except the place of museums as both respites from the outside world and sites of dialogue about, and for, the outside world.  The Chung projections seem built around a large intuitional model of museums, a model which discounts other, more informal, types of exhibition (such as those studied by Tammy Gordon in Private History in Public), yet they provide useful food for thought about the relationship between structural change and cultural institutions.

           

Imperiled Promise, compiled in 2011 for the NPS and OAH by Anne Mitchell Whisnant, Marla Miller, Gary Nash, and David Thelen, is a report on where history stands in the NPS based on an electronic survey of NPS employees in history-related fields (its method and rationale is not unlike that of Thelen’s earlier study The Presence of the Past, conducted with Roy Rosenzweig).  According to the report, history in the NPS is a mess.  Few NPS employees in historical positions have graduate-level training in history.  The few credentialed historians the NPS possesses are often segregated in cultural resource management, rather than in positions that involve interpretation and interaction with the public.  History is too often presented to the park-going public as a fixed, objective set of facts about the past rather than an ongoing, dynamic process, the interpretations of which change in light of developments in the present.  In short, history in the NPS too often resembles history in an old textbook or a cheap television show.  Whisnant and company would like history in the NPS to more closely resemble, and maintain a closer relationship with, history in the academy.  Doubtless there is much that could be gained from this, but in making their recommendations Whisnant, Miller, Nash, and Thelen have a tendency to romanticize professional history (most evident on p. 17-9).  These four historians (it must be admitted) occupy privileged positions in the profession that, while undoubtedly well deserved, may insulate them from seeing how the forces that have pulled apart history in the NPS have their parallels within an increasingly entrepreneurial and bottom-line focused academy.  NPS historians are not the only ones isolated from professional networks and opportunities for professional development: graduate students and adjunct faculty frequently are too.  Fixing history in the NPS appears to be a small part of a much larger necessity: fixing history.

           

That said, there are glimmers of hope, particularly here in Philadelphia.  The 2012 report of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance on the economic impact of cultural ventures in the region (http://www.philaculture.org/research/reports/arts-culture-economic-prosperity-greater-philadelphia-2012) presents evidence of the growing economic footprint of cultural work.  The figures speak for themselves, but suffice it to say that even if the NPS and the historical guild can’t come through we historians may yet have opportunities in the coming years.

Until Next Time,

J

On the "Front Lines"

Amy Tyson’s The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines provides an in-depth look at the world of costumed historical interpreters.  Employed in numerous historic sites across the country, costumed interpreters are rarely considered in the way the Tyson considers them in her book: as laborers occupying a precarious position in a customer-centric service industry.  Tyson provides a scathing indictment of a system of non-profit cultural institutions that exploits the skilled interpreters whose work on the “front lines” ultimately makes those institutions meaningful for the people who visit them.

Tyson examines this phenomenon of exploited “emotional” labor in the environment of Minnesota’s Historic Fort Snelling, an 1820s U.S. Army fort managed by the Minnesota Historical Society.  Her study combines archival research on the history and development of the interpretive program at Fort Snelling with ethnography of the interpreters she worked with at the fort in the late-1990s to the mid-2000s.  Fundamental to the nature of interpretive work at Fort Snelling is that it is carried on only on a seasonal basis.  For most of its history as a tourist attraction (since the 1960s) Fort Snelling’s interpreters have had to reapply for jobs each season.  While working at the fort interpreters earned a meager wage with no benefits and were accorded little respect or consideration by the historical institution that employed them.  Nevertheless, Fort Snelling most interpreters became deeply invested in their work, going out of their way to enhance their knowledge and tailor their interpretations to the emotional needs of visitors.  Many interpreters reported feeling deep satisfaction from their interactions with visitors despite the otherwise poor conditions under which they labored.  For Tyson, the exploitation of interpreters hinges on the poor pay they receive despite their devotion and expertise.

Tyson raises important questions about how cultural and historical work is carried out in the United States, if not the world.  Among these is the question of whether there is a meaningful difference between non-profit and for-profit corporations with regard to how they view and treat their non-managerial workforce  in the post-industrial, neo-liberal order that has emerged over the last half-century.  Regrettably, she spends little time discussing the parent institution of Historic Fort Snelling, giving the impression that the Minnesota Historical Society is a cold, faceless bureaucracy (although it is conceivable that that is the point).  However, one would expect that the MHS is staffed by individuals whose background is similar to that of the interpreters on the ground (college or higher education, grounded in the humanities).  If this is the case, then what accounts for the apparent lack of sympathy of employer for employee? 

Of course, as with any ethnographic  work one must ask of Tyson’s Wages of History just how particular are the experiences she describes to the milieu in which they occurred.  Tyson repeatedly compares interpreters with waitresses, graduate students, and temporary workers, in other words, with other workers who are perceived as not having “real jobs.”  However, she does not entertain the possibility that even more generally valued jobs can also exact a sizable emotional toll.  That of physician immediately comes to mind.  To get a sense of the ways in which even workers at the top of the capitalist food chain are exploited in similar ways, Tyson’s Wages of History could be profitably read in tandem with Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street.  Forty years ago, when the modern service economy was only beginning to come in to view, Daniel Bell observed that in contrast to earlier eras in which humans battled against nature and against the physical limitations of their technology, “the post-industrial society is essentially a game between persons,” (The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, p. 488).  Tyson’s study of historical laborers in a consumer-centric environment helps us envision what such a game looks like, and what effect it has on its participants.

Capitalism and Slavery, Yesterday and Today

We may most often associate America’s National Parks Service with geysers and wide-open spaces, but park rangers can be found interpreting landscapes and historic sites in urban areas as well.  In 1978 Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the first industrial cities in the United States, became home to the first urban National Historical Park.  The public historical exhibition of Lowell, and its intersection with the city’s attempts to reinvent itself for the post-industrial age is the subject of anthropologist Cathy Stanton’s book The Lowell Experiment. 

           

Based on several years of field work in and around Lowell’s historic sites and economic development projects The Lowell Experiment highlights the paradox of public history and historic preservation: public history and preservation must serve multiple and contradictory masters.  According to Stanton, public historians working in the Lowell National Historical Park are often politically left-leaning, harboring suspicions of the economic system of capitalism.  However, they are also public servants, beholden to the public’s expectations, not to mention the expectations of public officials and local business more interested economic development than historic interpretation. 

           

Lowell is particularly embroiled in such contradictions due to its industrial past and present.  Fundamentally a creation of capital, Lowell faced dire consequences when capital retreated, taking with it much of the manufacturing that had been the city’s lifeblood since its founding.  Still, manufacturing lingers on in the town, complicating the task of interpretation.  Park rangers struggle with conveying the industrial past whose contours remain so palpable in the present, often failing to make the connections between past and present. 

           

Stanton also subjects Lowell’s public historians and National Park visitors to anthropological scrutiny, revealing some important information about the kinds of people are drawn to Lowell and why.  Public historians, it turns out, are largely white with weak ethic affinities.  Most often they have working class roots that are within living memory (parents or grandparents), but are themselves insulated from the working class by their education and cultural capital.  The public historians encountered by Stanton occupy a liminal space in contemporary capitalism.  Neither rich nor poor, neither elite nor working class, cultural service workers such as public historians are “new cultural intermediaries,” a concept Stanton borrows from Pierre Bourdieu.  The visitors these intermediaries guide around Lowell most often hail from similar positions in society.

           

As Lowell’s interpreters struggle to link capitalism’s past with its present, interpreters all over the U.S. struggle with slavery.  Nearly a century and a half after its demise Americans still have difficulty discussing slavery.  The essays in James and Lois Horton’s edited volume Slavery and Public History present the various dimensions of this national struggle.  The contributors to Slavery and Public History point to a divergence in the past five decades between scholarly and popular perceptions of slavery.  Scholars, many of whom were deeply sympathetic to the cause of African American Civil Rights, substantially revised their narrative of slavery.  Historians conclusively demonstrated how integral slavery was to all aspects of the development of the United States, yet little of this knowledge permeated the walls of the universities.  Many Americans continue to think of slavery as important only to the South, and only for a brief period preceding the Civil War.  Many white Southerners, hesitant to tarnish the memory of their Confederate forbears, resist accepting slavery as a cause of the Civil War.  Tom many African-Americans slavery remains painful to contemplate.  The core message of Slavery and Public History is this: if Americans are to overcome slavery’s legacies of racism and inequality they must learn to discuss it; public history can help foster such discussions.

Understandably, many of the essays in Slavery and Public History overlap with the subject of the Civil War.  The memory of the Civil War is big business and a very particular memory of the Civil War, which portrays the war as a Second Revolution for states’ rights, has become one and the same with Southern “heritage.”  As in Lowell (and in many of the other areas of inquiry covered by the books I have reviewed recently) heritage is a double bind for public historians.  Heritage is at once the most likely contact point between interpreter and public, and the point at which “good” history is most likely to be ignored or trivialized. 

See you next week!

-J

History On Display

I cannot speak for all, but for me few experiences are as enjoyable as a visit to a good museum exhibit and few are as tedious as viewing a bad one.  What goes in to the production of an engaging exhibit?  What characteristics do good museums share?  These are among the questions addressed by Tammy Gordon in Private History In Public and by Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet Kamien in Creating Exhibitions.  Gordon’s book provides a window on to the world of small, private museums with an eye to what large, professional museums can learn from them.  McKenna-Cress and Kamien provide a detailed model for the conception creation of museum exhibits through collaboration.

           

Everyone who has lived in the United States for a long period has been to one.  With things old and odd scattered haphazardly about, much of it potentially for sale, small, private museums are a feature of many American landscapes.  Blurring the boundary between museum and private collection and between treasure and trash these small historical exhibitions deserve scholarly attention, argues Tammy Gordon in Private History In Public.  Toward that end Gordon devises a “new typology of historical exhibition in the United States,” identifying five types: academic, corporate, community, entrepreneurial, and vernacular (a helpful chart of the five types and their characteristics is provided on p. 17).  Since scholars have already studied academic and corporate exhibition Gordon spends the remainder of her book discussing the latter three types. 

           

Community exhibitions are what might be conventionally called local museums.  They are created by members of a community or locality and document the history of that community from the perspective of its members.  Entrepreneurial exhibitions are those that document the history of trades, professions, and small business, often with an emphasis on their “craft”-like character and their relation to the American ideal of the independent craftsman or businessman.  Finally, vernacular exhibitions are those that are in the context of everyday activities, in particular commercial activities, and are intended not so much to teach a history as to make visitors “feel a part of” the exhibited history (think sports-bars with framed jerseys).

What these three “private” types of historical exhibition share, beyond their usually small size, is an intimacy with the exhibited objects and the curators who assembled them, and who are often contributors to the exhibited history.  As we learned a few weeks ago from Rosenzweig and Thelen in The Presence of the Past, Americans are particularly drawn to history when they can get up close and personal to historical objects and historical actors and private historical exhibitions are often good at providing such apparently “unmediated experience.”  However, Gordon notes that private historical exhibitions also employ “hybrid epistemologies” which at once endows them with a democratic potential, while placing them beyond the bounds of what academics would deep appropriate.  Gordon is not very specific regarding what these “hybrid epistemologies” entail.  It is conceivable that an epistemology could be so hybridized as to hardly count as a method for determining any widely agreed upon truth at all.  (Of course academics, historians in particular, employ hybrid epistemologies as well…) If there is one criticism that can be laid at Gordon’s door it is that she does not go far enough in interrogating how private exhibitors go about determining what is worthy of exhibition.  Presumably this method varies from museum to museum, but there are also, presumably, commonalities, but more of sense of these would have been a welcome addition to Gordon’s book. 

To academic historians collaboration is often a four-letter word.  They just don’t do it.  Unfortunately, this translates in to trainee-historians like myself having no idea what collaboration is, or even that valuable work can be accomplished by means other than going solo.  To people like me Polly McKenna-Cress and Janet Kamien have provided a guide to the process of creating museum exhibitions that doubles as a primer on collaborative process more generally. 

While the authors of Creating Exhibitions clearly hail from the world of prestigious professional museums, they have taken pains to create a book that will be useful to a wide range of museum professionals, indicating how their suggestions could be scaled up or down.  McKenna-Cress and Kamien organize their model of collaboration around five advocacy positions that they feel should be represented on any team planning an exhibition.  By ensuring advocates for the Institution, Subject Matter, Visitor Experience, Design, and the Project team, the resulting exhibition should fulfill the needs of its various stakeholders.  As McKenna-Cress and Kamien often remind the reader, exhibitions are for someone, not just about something.

Until Next Week!

J

             

Place, Preservation, and the Public Historian

Almost by definition cities are in constant flux.  Given this fact how is it possible to document the history of cities?  And, what is the value of doing so?  The readings for this week, Beyond Preservation by Andrew Hurley and The Power of Place by Dolores Hayden, can help us answer these questions.

In Beyond Preservation Andrew Hurley, a historians an veteran of public history endeavors in the St. Louis, Missouri area, tries to resolve a problem that is manifest in many American cities: how can one foster preservation of distressed urban landscapes without also inviting gentrification and population turnover?  Preservation, as it has been practiced since the late twentieth century, has generally been an economic development strategy.  Developers took an interest in restoring run-down gold coast districts in the hopes of luring the well-healed back to the city in the years after suburbanization.  The resulting historic districts, for example Boston’s Beacon Hill and Philadelphia’s Society Hill, were often sterile.  They attempted to tell one story (usually an elite one) and presented a unified appearance that covered up the diverse and contested nature of the urban past.  To make matters even more problematic, preservation often led to the displacement of existing communities, as poorer residents were forced to flee in the face of surging rents and property assessments.

Despite the troubling track record of preservation, Hurley is not prepared to give up on it.  For Hurley the answer to saving preservation is interpretation.  By constructing interpretations of neighborhoods through public historical and archaeological work, it is possible to endow neighborhood inhabitants with a sense of belonging and ownership.  In turn, a community revived in such a way will be amenable to preservation, but on their own terms.  The case studies presented by Hurley reveal that the projects that result from a fusion of the preservationist impulse and a “bottom-up” historical sensibility are far different, and far more true to the past of the cities and their existing social reality. 

Drawing on Dolores Hayden’s experience leading a Los Angeles non-profit of the same name The Power of Place is also concerned with the interpretation of urban landscapes.  However, Hayden is less concerned than Hurley with harnessing the power of interpretation for preservationist ends and more interested in public historical projects for their own sake. 

Towards this end, the first part of Hayden’s book provides an introduction to the concept of place and the social construction of place.  Following Henri Lefebvre, Hayden discusses the production of urban places through social and environmental operations.  As Hayden sees it the task of the public historian lies in making manifest the constructed nature of place and explicating the numerous ways different people have contributed to it.  Like academic historians interpret texts with an eye toward documenting the complexity of causality and the contingency of events, public historians (as well as public artists) must aim to interpret urban landscapes in a way that recovers the complexity and inclusiveness of the processes that produce all of its parts, from houses and commercial spaces to infrastructure like roads and streetcar lines.

Of the two authors I find that Hayden lays out the more promising agenda.  By highlighting the constructed nature of place, as Hayden recommends, public historians can present urban history as a process that continues in the present.  On the contrary, making preservation and “stability” part of our agenda, as Hurley supports, seems to leave public history vulnerable.  There is too great of a risk of history becoming heritage, therapeutic rather than challenging.  To his credit, Hurley is well aware of the risks and diligently points out the potential for danger in his case studies, but he has not convinced me that the risks are worth it.  

Until Next Time,

J