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.