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

Community, Oral History, and "History From the Bottom Up"

This weeks readings covered much territory.  Therefore, I apologize in advance for the schizophrenic character of my remarks.

One of the most powerful tools in the possession of historians of the recent past is oral history.  At the heart of oral history process is the interview.  Presenting the interaction of a narrator and an informed interviewer, oral history interviews have power to document memories and interpretations that would otherwise be lost.  Fundamental to the project of writing history “from the bottom up,” oral histories are the products of what Michael Frisch calls “a shared authority.”  For Frisch this is precisely why oral history so valuable; it subverts the categories of author and subject and restores agency in the history-making process to individuals and groups who have often been cut off from it.  In the introduction to A Shared Authority Frisch seems confident that the radical political implications of oral history will be realized.  However, the next reading should give us pause before we join him.

             

Leon Fink’s article “When Community Comes Home to Roost” discusses how public history endeavors (of which oral history is a frequent component) can go “bad.”  Fink explores this subject through the story of North Carolina’s Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA), an organization dedicated to preserving the history and heritage of its namesake town.  While New Left refugees Jim and Lynn Rumley founded the CHA, the organization quickly took on a historical and political mission that drew on some of the worst tendencies of southern populism.  The CHA stoked fear of the outside world among Cooleemee’s poor white population, while upholding a sanitized vision of the community’s past that evoked the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy.  Even as it celebrated the idealized cotton mill past of Cooleemee, the CHA ignored analyzing and presenting the political and economic forces that had caused the closure of the town’s mill in 1969.  I was unable to stave off thoughts of the Obama-era Tea Party as I read about the CHA.

This does not mean that the CHA failed.  It was successful in creating a sense of community in Cooleemee, but of a very circumscribed type.  The CHA, while undeniably a public history venture, was hardly the kind of standard-bearer for progress and equality envisioned by Michael Frisch.  For his own part, Professor Fink believes the lesson that we should learn from the CHA is to be more critical of “community,” a concept that is too often treated as an unqualified good by idealistic historians.  Fink’s warning about community is reminiscent of Robert Putnam’s notion of “dark social capital,” or a force that connects individuals but that is otherwise unacceptable.  The KKK is undoubtedly a community, but the affective bonds between committed racists are hardly something to be celebrated.  As Fink writes at the end of article, we must ask “’community for whom?’” and “’community to what end?’”

The final reading for this week does not dovetail neatly with the others, but nevertheless provides essential practical information.  The Oral History Manual by Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan is exactly that which its title implies, but the authors do a good job of getting one to think of an oral history project as more than just the sum of its interviews.  Prior to reading the Manual I viewed oral history in a restricted way.  I thought that it was a method that a historian engaged in largely for her own purposes; if the historian happened to accumulate a body of related interviews that was substantial enough, then she might donate it to a library.  However, I did not consider oral history to be an activity to be done for its own sake.  Sommer and Quinlan quashed my preconceptions and given me a new respect for the both the challenge and importance of oral history.  Of particular value were the chapters related to planning, ethical and legal questions, and preservation of oral history documents.  I imagine that, like me, relatively few conventional historians are familiar with this material.  For those that are Sommer and Quinlan have served up a nourishing, if slightly dry, helping of food for thought.

See you next week,

J

The Significance and the Presentation of the Past: Rosenzweig, Thelen, and Kitch

The readings I am commenting on this week provide an insight in to the significance of the past for ordinary Americans, and the ways in which the past is presented for public consumption.  The two books on the docket for today are The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, and Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past by Carolyn Kitch.

           

Rosenzweig and Thelen’s The Presence of the Past is the product of a remarkable survey conducted during the mid-1990s.  The authors and their team of students phoned a cross-section of the American population and asked them a series of questions about their uses of interest in the (broadly conceived) past.  Thus activities as disparate as looking at family photos and visiting museums were both counted as past centered activities.  The survey participants were asked to rate the quality of their engagement in a variety of these past-centered activities and also to provide qualitative assessments of their experiences.  The bulk of the book is devoted to sifting through the mass of data produced by the survey, but two important points are stressed throughout. 

First, people are most engaged with the past when it is most personal, with around a third of respondents involved in researching their family’s past (Rosenzweig, 25).  Family members are among the most trusted sources people turn to for information about the past.  Many Americans are extremely interested in the past of their own family, often viewing the family past as deeply important to their sense of themselves.

Second, among the least trusted of sources for information about the past are school classrooms.  It would appear that schools do a terrible job of communicating history to students in a way that makes it seem relevant and interesting. Many respondents felt that schools provided a packaged narrative of national development that was “too neat and rosy.” (Rosenzweig, 111) A good teacher could sometimes redeem the experience by becoming surrogate family members and relating their “firsthand experience” to students. (Rosenzweig, 109) 

Third, and related to both respondents’ positive view of family and negative opinion of schools, was their marked preference for unmediated experiences.  Thus, museums were regarded with a high degree of trust for their ability to provide an intimate, unmediated experience.

The unmediated contact with the past provided by museums is a major focus of the other book for this week, Pennsylvania in Public Memory by Carolyn Kitch.  Kitch’s book documents the presentation of “heritage culture,” a phenomenon that is visible nationwide, but particularly prominent in the Keystone State with its wealth of dormant industrial relics.  Kitch’s methodology was simply to venture out and experience for herself the wide range of heritage sites on offer in Pennsylvania.

As Kitch informs us in Chapter 2, Pennsylvania’s heritage industry developed over the course of the twentieth century with is most recent iteration developing in the “postindustrial” period as plant closings and downsizing left a landscape dotted with former hubs of activity desperately in search of ways to revitalize their economies.

However, while ostensibly devoted to preserving the memory of industrial culture, the heritage industry does much more.  Rather than concentrate on one thing, “heritage” in Pennsylvania often means a generalized, chronologically fuzzy, and nostalgia tinged “jumble” which conflates the seemingly irreconcilable.  Thus wilderness and factory production, pioneers and Indians, captains of industry and laborers, and “ethnic” foods and Civil War re-enactors are often presented together in such a way that elides the ahistorical and problematic nature of the pairings.  In this manner “heritage” becomes the common possession of us all and our “ancestors” are reduced to humble folks who made sacrifices wholly on our behalf.

Kitch is a professor of journalism and as such tries to present heritage tourism in an impartial light.  Thus the book largely lacks an argumentative dimension that might have sharpened its focus.  Its greatest value lies in its highlighting of the sometimes strange juxtapositions that arise when historic sites and heritage venues must compete for the public’s attention and money.  At all heritage sites tourism, history, commerce, local identity, and the personal lives of volunteers and visitors swirl together.  Having finished reading Kitch we must ask if a history department seminar room is really the appropriate vantage point from which to adjudicate between these disparate, yet worthy, goals.

Introduction

Good Evening Everyone,
My name is James and I recently started my first year in the Phd program in History at Temple University.  This blog is intended to document my responses to course readings and my first steps in to the world of Public History.

Public History may be a new concept to you, as it was for me, but briefly stated it encompasses all history that is done outside the academy.  While it may be tough at times for us "real" historians to swallow, we in no way have a monopoly on using and studying the past.  As I begin my road toward an advanced degree in history I think it is crucial to keep this in mind.

Public Historians typically immerse themselves in the environment around them. Therefore, I am particularly fortunate to be receiving my introduction to Public History in Philadelphia as my academic interests revolve around American cities and their transformation over the second half of the 20th century.  Through engagement with the historical resources of my new intellectual hometown I hope not only to become familiar with Public History, but to gain new perspectives on topics and issues that have long concerned me.

As I said above, this blog is primarily a reading log, but from time to time I hope to post other interesting material that I come across.  Join me as I learn to navigate the thick historical waters of Philadelphia and, with luck, become a better scholar!

Best,
J