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