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
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