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.
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