Managing Managing History

As a Philadelphian, I have had my fair share of run ins with historical reenactors in Old City. These interactions took place primarily during my teens, where I was both downtown, unsupervised by my parents for the first time, and figuring out my own passion for history. I was somewhat at odds with the actors. While I found myself constantly drawn to the colonial history of Philadelphia, I felt uncomfortable interacting with anyone claiming to be Ben Franklin. I still to this day remember my desire to not be noticed by the reenactors in the street, while being simultaneously, intoxicatingly, drawn to them. Today’s readings and watchings made that emotion make sense to me as an adult.

Azie Dungey’s Ask A Slave series was such a fun watch. I enjoyed the way that she framed her answers, her reactions for her web series were in part the answer she wanted to give when she was working at Mount Vernon.[1] While in character at Mount Vernon she had multiple agendas, one of which was to keep her job and adhere to their goal of entertainment; but the Ask A Slave series acts as the counterpart of that experience where she is able to express the internal voice that she carried with her during her time at Mount Vernon. After reading her interview with Amy Tyson I began to think about the level of embodied experience, as a Black woman, that Dungey had gone through.[2] Both at Mount Vernon and at the Smithsonian, she mentally traversed time. Her insight into the way it affected her was powerful. Dungey noted that her experience as a reenactor, as someone who uniquely embodies the experience of a slave and takes off the costume at the end of the day, juxtaposed modern American life. The question of the emotional labor, which Amy Tyson has an entire book about, Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines, is explicit in Dungey’s interview. The point that she made about her roommate remarking on how draining the job was on her was startling.

Tyson’s work makes an incredibly important argument. Her book, constructed as an ethnographic project in which she interviewed (and worked as) historical interpreters at the Historic Fort Snelling in Minneapolis argues that the rise in historical interpretation coincided with the rise of the low wage service industry.[3] These workers, who become so emotionally invested in telling their story (well, at least some of these interpreters) are vulnerable to the low wage labor in the feminized service industry that was nonunionized and lacked a coherent class consciousness (hello Stayin’ Alive & Cowie…. We all should have read that book for 8101 and I will die on that hill).[4] This emotional drive is not monetarily rewarded. The interpreters however are still there to perform a job before they are to teach history, and that often means watering down the history in whcih they have become so invested in. Embodied experiences are draining. & bad historical interpreters do the public a serious injustice, as seen in the other Tyson article that we read for this week. By not integrating slavery explicitly into any narrative of the American experience is to deny the truth.

That is what bothered me about the Ben Franklin interpreter. That is why I personally have such a hard time historical interpretation as work that is useful. But at the same time, reading about Azie Dungey and the degree of preparation and care she put into her work makes me rethink that idea. Will I personally go to an interpreter to ask about slavery? Most definitely not. Will I feel uncomfortable interacting with any interpreter? Most definitely yes. But is the work a worthwhile endeavor? After reading today’s readings, I would say, maybe…. In the rights hands, with the right supervisor, with a nuanced agenda… it has potential.

I’m still creeped out by the Ben Franklin guy though.

Image: http://behindthescenes.nyhistory.org/whats-it-like-being-benjamin-franklin/

[1] Azie Dungey, Ask A Slave, http://www.askaslave.com/about-azie.html.

[2] Amy Tyson, “‘Ask a Slave’’ and Interpreting Race on Public History’s Front Line: Interview with Azie Mira Dungey,” in The Public Historian 36, (2014).

[3] Mary Rizzo, “History at Work, History as Work: Public History’s New Frontier,” American Quarterly 68 (2016): 213.

[4] Ibid.

I am a sucker for an industrial labor history. I am especially a sucker for a book that opens its prologue talking about the coal industry. While Cathy Stanton’s The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City is outside of my beloved bituminous coal heritage region the story has a similar timetable. Sweeping industrialization capitalizes on a big labor market (for Lowell, it was young women) and over time technology, mechanization and industrial flight bring on deindustrialization in a heart breaking narrative that is all to common across the country. Lowell, like McDowell, Detroit and other areas blighted by deindustrialization encompass communities constantly in flux. Stanton sees flux as an important method of studying public memory.

            In her prologue she opens with a quote from Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett that argues that cultural revitalization projects and heritage museums not only show, but do.[1] I saw this quote as a good way to enter the books main objective, to understand what the active role that the Lowell National History Park was taking. In many ways, Stanton sees the Lowell NHP falling short on taking its criticisms of early industrial capitalism into the present; locking their interpretation of industry in the past. Stanton at many junctures argues that in some ways this locking of Lowell’s history in the past is protective of the burgeoning redemptive narrative, a desire for teleology perhaps. She argues that this happens for different reasons by different agents. In part, the narrative that drops off is driven by the public historians who work at the Lowell NHP and help write the story told at the site.

In her “Rituals of Reconnection” chapter, she examines the three categories of identification for historians who worked the site: explicit public historians, historians without graduate degrees, and historians who stumbled in through the National Park Service. She talks about the ways that these historians were hesitant to examine the ways in which they engaged in cultural processes of community identification that bled into the site from the surrounding city.[2] I enjoyed her inclusion of the back and forth between a historian who asked the question of whether or not the process of reinventing the city’s identity should be a conscious or unconscious choice. In these conversations, the insider versus the outsider, the local versus the immigrant contentions shine through. Stanton uses these moments to capture the importance of reflexivity in public history. In this chapter too, she really forces the reader to understand the ways that public historians are active agents in casting memory.

Reflexivity is the name of the game in Managing History as of late. I really do love the inclusion of I language in historical works, despite some of our colleagues considering it the antithesis of good scholarship. With ethnography, its truly impossible to not be reflexive. Stanton includes herself and her position, literally and figuratively throughout the book. She even forces the entire museum industry to be reflexive at points: arguing that in a model designed to profit, criticizing capitalism can be challenging.

One question I was left asking, also in connection to the NCPH article, is what will become of cultural heritage sites post COVID19? What will become of heritage memory in the future without these sites of remembrance? I am worried for the future of historians… (I say as I continue down the path towards attempting at finding a teaching job…….. will…. that exist when I graduate in X years?)

Image: https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g60891-d105803-i289138291-Lowell_National_Historical_Park-Lowell_Massachusetts.html

[1] Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City, ( Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press): xiii.

[2] Stanton, 147

Another potential title for Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach could have been Exhibit Labels: An Exhaustive Approach in Finding the Commonest Common Denominator and Then Proving They Don’t Exist. In her preface, Serrell notes that her publisher said Exhibit Labels was the book most frequently stolen from their display. This leaves me wondering… what other books was it up against? With that being said, Serrell’s impressive second edition truly showcases the importance of exhibit labels and the multifaceted approaches that go into creating them.

The main takeaway that I got from Exhibit Labels was the concept of the big idea. The prevalence of this question, which might sound as simple as “sharks are not what you think” takes hours of work to articulate and guides the curator at every turn. The big idea, Serrell argues, is more important for the curatorial team than it is for the audience. Without its clarity, everything else can become jumbled. The labels, the design, the layout, the choice of medium, the aim of meaningful experience and so forth, are all built in the shadow of the big idea.

Another large takeaway, that is connected to the Big Idea, is the concept of the common commonest denominator. I found it incredibly interesting, in chapter 4, “Who is the Audience (and what do they want)?” that Serrell advises curators to appeal to the big question, rather than seeking a primary audience. Rather than considering who is my audience, which Serrell argues is inherently alienating, the questions rather should be, what is the best way for me to communicate my big idea? In this, Serrell points out that you can appeal to the broadest audience possible. The common commonest denominator stretches across gender, age, education, race, class, sexuality, you name it, in order to center the exhibition on being accessible. By using non-exclusionary vocabulary, offering translations when appropriate, and by fostering a meaningful experience, Serrell seeks to appeal to commonality rather than difference. I am still dubious about the color-blind approach Serrell argues for, but maybe it works in museums when it fails to work elsewhere.

I was struck by the amount of time that a visitor typically spends in a single exhibit. Serrell works with roughly 20 minutes of attention, and in that time she manages to convey a Big Idea with concise, concentrated words that reach across difference. Serrell lists (and lists, and lists, and lists) the ways that learning styles differ from person to person, as well as between person and exhibit. Different material will elicit different levels of engagement. With this in mind, Serrell emphasizes utilizing other mediums such as digital interpretive devices, images and the real, all paired with labels. The labels are meant to serve a function: aiding in interpretation. They are not to be too assertive, but not too general as to leave their reader confused. Labels ought to be accessible to most people, while not alienating the reader by assuming they know nothing. Ultimately, they need to be justified. Serrell’s book has many lessons imbedded in it, but one for sure is less is often more.

Ironic, is it not though? That less is more for Serrell across the board. She really works to get her reader to understand that information overload is a missed opportunity in the exhibit world. I would honestly argue that this book is an example of just that. At the same time, I don’t think anyone who focuses on writing exhibit labels in their career would need to buy another book on exhibit labels. Maybe it was that niche group stealing her book from the exhibit she mentions in the preface.

 I found that this text spoke directly to Creating Exhibits, not only in content, but in structure. It reads at times like a textbook, but is also imbued with emotion. They are supplementary to each other because Creating Exhibits functions more in a physical space, while Serrell is in the mental space of her visitor. I also found myself thinking about the podcast “Tribal Historic Preservation office Helps Students Map Seminole Life for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum,” and their students use of iPads in the museum. This book, while beckoning to me for critique, has inherent value. Her concepts of label hierarchy, her case studies, thoughtful consideration of the visitor, and emphasis on evaluation are important in this world. This book is packed with lessons and I look forward to pulling more of them apart when we meet to discuss Exhibit Labels.

Serrell, Beverly. Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach. Lanham, Maryland: Roman & Littlefield. 2015.

Image from https://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/museum-worker-adjusts-the-captions-to-a-modigliani-painting-news-photo/1180485733

When I was a senior I worked in the college archives as the archivist assistant. I helped her catalog new materials, but I also created three displays for the library. We did minor planning, talked about the best way to display materials as to preserve them, and created a small exhibit built to foster interaction. As I read Creating Exhibitions: Collaboration in the Planning, Development, and Design of Innovative Experiences, I thought back on the intentions of her process. That what I perceived to be one of fluid collaboration and honestly, creative friendship, was much more pedagogical in design as shown to me by Creating Exhibitions. (the Ursinus College archives, on a related unrelated note are one of the best kept secrets of the school. Carolyn Weigel is meticulous in her work and has done the school more good than most professors).

            I found Creating Exhibitions to be most importantly thoroughly thoughtful. In the opening chapter “Collaboration,” McKenna-Cress and Kamien get into the nitty gritty of how to fix problems in group based projects. I enjoyed the section “Collaboration Killers to Watch For,” as I found that through reading it I recognized ways that I had potentially participated in these actions in the past. This book, by being so thoughtful throughout, not only gives you pointers on what to look for in others and in group spaces, but also what to look for in oneself. Margaret Middleton’s podcast was all about thoughtfulness. I enjoyed their discussion of language in the museum setting. Using intentional language to foster inclusion, allow children to see themselves as artists or engineers, and to prevent making assumptions about familial roles and gender identity is the epitome of thoughtfulness. I would say that another theme (among many) besides thoughtfulness that runs through Creating Exhibitions is that of trust.

            In all of the advocacy chapters the concept of trust is key. Trust in your teammates, your design, your content, your audience, and your museum is crucial. In the “Advocacy for the Institution” chapter the idea of trust is critical in what you’re doing, selecting staff members, and delegating jobs. For “Subject Matter,” trust might turn more inward, gearing towards believing in one’s ability to work as an expert, make content accessible while not watering it down too much, and being selective when it comes to a range of content materials. “Visitor Experiences,” is a slight departure from “Subject Matter,” in that trust is more in the process: trusting one’s team to build something (with of course your input) relevant to both the institution and the visitor at large. I liked this chapter in the book because it forced me to look at the exhibit with the eyes of the public. While the source material a museum has access to might engage the historian immensely, it might not be suitable for consumption on the general public scale. Positioning the visitor at the center of the exhibit is critical to its effectiveness. I also found interesting in this chapter the discussion of the ways institutions can relate to school curriculum as well as current events. It is crucial in the public history world to make exhibits function to some degree for all ages (Margaret Middleton would sure agree).

            The “Design” chapter was the most fun! I think trust here is actually in the designer. Trust in the designer for the rest of the team is important in the execution of the idea. Using space as a medium of engagement goes way over my head and I found this chapter useful in grounding me to what that means in practice. The social, the touch, the engagement! Oh my!

            Overall, while I despise textbooks, I found this one to be one of the most useful textbooks I have ever encountered. I thought the format was engaging, the language changed frequently enough to keep me mindful of the material, and the content to be concise and thoughtful. I look forward to our discussion!

Image: Image from Margaret Middeton’s Display, “Barbie Gets With The Program,” https://www.margaretmiddleton.com/barbie

McKenna-Cress, Polly and Janet Kamien. Creating Exhibitions: Collaboration in Planning, Development, and Design of Innovative Experiences. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2013.

Mental mapping is something that we do as individuals on a daily basis. There are a multitude of maps flowing freely in our heads that inform the way that we move throughout space, and often the way we interact with others within that space. Museums can employ mental maps made into physical maps, geographically mapping the way content is consumed in in order to place more emphasis some topics, in ways that often go unnoticed by the viewer. There is a lot that goes on within museums that goes unnoticed by their audience.

Margaret & Janaye Evans’ beautiful presentation, “Between Apathy and Action,” utilizes maps both physical and metaphorical.[1] I was impressed by the map of content on the audio tour, which physically embodied the way that visitors can skip over portions of history curated in the museum by simply following the common path. By not forcing visitors to engage in the racist history of prisons at every turn, by failing to take a stance on the prison industrial complex from which they profit, Sanford and Evans argue that the museum is complicit in an educational model built on white supremacy.

Within Sanford & Evans’ piece, as well as in Lovisa Brown’s research, “Desegregating Conversations about Race and Identity in Culturally Specific Museums” the constriction of the educator, the educator as an agent, is identified. Brown argues that the educator must find comfort in complexity, and that museums function best when they can place their audience in a liminal space, a space of ambiguity and discomfort.[2] Sanford & Evans also talk about the need for Eastern State to problematize their master narrative and imbue their educators with the ability to go off script and make definitive statements about their, and the museums, stance when it comes to racism or the prison industrial complex. I suppose I had never questioned the role, or the scripted nature, of museums. I must admit that I have only been on a few tours in museums, but I guess I imagined that they were able to talk freely about their subject matter. By curtailing the way questions can be answered, institutions that profit on engagement perpetuate the silencing of narrators.

I really enjoyed the museum archipelago episode “Tribal Historic Preservation office Helps Students Map Seminole Life for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum,” and their use of mapping as well.[3] The opening of this piece explains to the reader that the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki museum was operated mainly by white people with community input. Their project to get tribal youth from the local high school to mental map in GIS as a method of story telling is so brilliant. They framed the podcast by telling us initially how the museum was curated. By positioning the teenagers as commanders of their own narrative, the museum takes a radical turn from old age collections into new age GIS maps displayed on iPads. I loved this. I think it is so brilliant. To restore indigenous teens with control of their story must be so empowering. I think this still also speaks to the role of educators. While you may not initially think a high schooler would be the ultimate educator, every situation calls for a unique understanding of the material being presented. Brown would definitely agree with that too.

There is a critical need to advocate for museum educators. It appears to be at a crisis level of intervention, most definitely worsened by COVID19. It is both of intellectual and financial need. I wonder how we can do that on a grand scale.

Image: “Seminole Indian Reserve, 1834,” Courtesy of the Special Collections Department, University of South Florida, http://fcit.usf.edu/florida/maps/pages/3700/f3704/f3704.htm

[1] Janaye Evans and Margaret Sanford, (2020) “Between Apathy and Action: The Educator and the Museum Mission,

A Case Study at Eastern State Penitentiary.” Death to Museums UnConference, August 2,

2020. https://youtu.be/QlkLGgyk0Ss?t=11328

[2] Lovisa Brown, Caren Gutierrez, Janine Okmin & Susan McCullough (2017) “Desegregating Conversations about

Race and Identity in Culturally Specific Museums,” Journal of Museum Education, 42:2, 123

[3] “Tribal Historic Preservation office Helps Students Map Seminole Life for the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum,” Episode 53,

Museum Archipelago, November 5, 2018. https://www.museumarchipelago.com/53

Scholars and amateur historians who conduct oral histories, as evident in this week’s readings, often find themselves following a research path that they would not have anticipated. Sommer & Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual meticulously walks their audience through the life cycle of the oral history tradition (employing a graph that I truly adored) that outlines the process of creating an idea, planning, interviewing, preserving that interview & making it accessible (location 195). This life cycle made me think about the Fink and Tucker pieces we read for this week and the ways in which their collected data drew then in a different direction than their initial idea may have hypothesized. The Fink piece explored the trustworthiness of heritage history when collected by those with an underlying agenda, even if those collecting the data may not have be self-conscious enough to articulate said agenda. Fink interviewed Jim & Lynn Rumley about their exercise in oral history as well as their role in the Cooleemee Historical Association (CHA) that is engaging in multiple cultural revival projects (120). Over the course of his work he saw that Lynn in particular tended to emphasize regional heritage traditions even when they should have remained a shibboleth (my new favorite word!!!). It is clear that projects like those the CHA were taking up can air on the side of erasure if it means protecting an overtly positive historical heritage.

            Like Fink’s work, Tucker’s data skewed from what she initially intended to uncover. Tucker arrived at her project of female jazz musicians of the post war era and their relationship with the closet through multiple confusing oral history interviews (295). While speaking to her narrators, she is perplexed by their outset intention of staying away from the personal, even though some of her participants outed others in a betrayal of the personal. Tucker had set on questioning if all female spaces, in this situation jazz bands, allowed gay women a haven in a world where being an out lesbian was still taboo. She ran into roadblocks that ultimately raised more questions than answers and are wrapped intimately in the oral history tradition. Tucker was in situations where ethically she could not push it farther. She ran the risk of alienating her narrator base at the cost of explicitly articulating her hypothesis (301). Through her interviews she found that while many of these women may be gay, their identification with being a professional musician stood in the way of their potential identity as a lesbian (308).

            One element of oral history that is evident in these works as well as the manual is its humanity. Its inseparability both from the narrator and their personal convictions, but also from two distinct historical contexts: the context from which the narrator is speaking, and the context from which the researcher is recording. Unlike a newspaper clipping, the census data, or any other inanimate historical source, the research medium and material that oral historians depend on have feelings. They have opinions. They have a public life and a private life. Fink ultimately alienated his source material and had it revoked after Jim & Lynn saw her take on the CHA. Tucker had to stop herself from asking her narrators what she wanted in order to prevent alienating her subjects. I think I simultaneously love and fear oral history for this exact reason. The answer can be right under the surface but never articulated by those you interview. I do however think oral history is such an important source as these articles uncover such interesting material despite the windy road it took to get there.

image 1: Pictured Mary Osborne, Vi Redd, Dottie Dodgion, Marian McPartland & Lynn Milano. From Tom Marcello, in “10 Female Jazz Musicians You Need To Know,” https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/the-top-10-female-jazz-musicians-you-should-know/.

Fink, Leon. “When Community Comes Home To Roost: The Southern Milltown as Lost Cause.” Journal of Social History 40 (Autumn 2006): 119 – 145.

Sommer, Barbara and Mary Kay Quinlan. The Oral History Manual. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018. Kindle Edition.

Tucker, Sherrie. “When Subjects Don’t Come Out.” In Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, edited by Sophie Fuller and Lloyd Whitesell, 293 – 311. Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. 2002.

As someone who has studied deindustrialization in West Virginia’s bituminous coal regions, Carolyn Kitch’s book Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past struck a chord with me. I have attended coal museums that act as heritage tourism destinations. I have done highway tours through old coal towns & have seen the scars left behind by an industry who’s heyday ended in the early 1980s. I grew up on the same block as Dr. Walter Licht & have been heavily influenced by his work in the anthracite region since I found my love of history in the 5th grade. This book was something I wish I had read when it was published in 2012.

Robert Weible’s article, the NCPH piece on public history & Rosenzweig and Thelen introduction all speak to one of Kitch’s main points on audience. The question of who is public history for, and how does audience shape what becomes memorialized is something I have failed to acknowledge prior to these readings. The example of the Strasbourg train museum, which should be in Altoona where the railroad history is richer, makes me think about the reenacting of historical reality being utterly fixed in a world centered on capital (Kitch, 176). These historic sites that seem to often emerge out of industrial dearth are both testaments to what was and an attempt to play a role in what is to become. In the Weible article, he quotes Orwell in what seemed to me to be a great way to summarize Kitch’s book: “he who controls the present controls the past, he who controls the past controls the future.” When reading this I thought of the Harley Davidson factory, the Hersey factory, Pittsburgh & her steel memorials and the coal tours (often run by former coal miners themselves).

In the same way, the heritage tourist sites are so locally driven it is impossible not to see audience when reading about them. I found it interesting when Kitch was recounting her time in a steel museum that she was the only one who seemed to come into the experience without the background knowledge of how steel was made, proving to her that the audience of many of these sites is locals. Local residents of deindustrialized spaces are caught in a liminal zone: on one hand they want to preserve the identity that their family built over generations, or maybe the identity that their immigrant ancestors depended on to make it in America’s workforce. On the other hand however these sites invoke a sense of communal anger (Kitch, 139). These memorials, museums & heritage sites have a duplicitous meaning. They are meant to remind its audience of the everlasting presence of industrialization while simultaneously remembering the fact that it no longer exists like it once did. Kitch is right in that these heritage/cultural (a contesting term I need to have flushed out) tourist sites make it feel that these extractive industries have fallen to the wayside, rather than emphasizing the reality that they still exist and are often still environmentally destructive.

I found it difficult to follow Kitch’s terminology when it came to comparing cultural tourism & heritage tourism. In the first half of the book I thought it was clear: cultural tourism refers to things like fairs, where the commodity is goods, food, or immigrant ethnicity (the “Babushkas & Hard Hats” in Pittsburgh for example. Heritage tourism however is entirely place based; that is where the coal museums that emphasize national sacrifice are located. However in her epilogue I thought it became skewed, as she uses the term “cultural tourism” to talk about what I had previously defined as heritage tourism. In this quote she writes “Cultural tourism”… constructs a notion of identity…. certain events also emerge as dominant in heritage memory, not only occupying their own times but oozing into other eras as well” (177). I feel that I need to flesh it out more so, as both of these terms will be so useful to my own research, but only if I am confident in using them correctly.

Ultimately, I adored this book. Her method of travelling to as many cultural/heritage tourist attractions was new and refreshing. I thought her ongoing discussion of the importance of volunteers in the pubic history world is something we need to talk more about. The question of who’s history is it will be something all academics and “amateur” historians should be battling with daily. As we move farther from the deindustrialization of PA, and more Water Front shopping malls are erected in front of old steel mills, it is pertinent to consider the questions Kitch raises. Who’s story is it?

image 1: Erin Hogan. “Old Navy returns to Homestead’s Waterfront, Versona also signs lease” in Trib Live, https://triblive.com/local/pittsburgh-allegheny/old-navy-returns-to-homesteads-waterfront-versona-also-signs-lease/.

Kitch, Caroyln. Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2012.

Weible Robert. “DEFINING PUBLIC HISTORY: IS IT POSSIBLE? IS IT NECESSARY?” in The Magazine of the American Historical Association Perspectives on History. March 1, 2008. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2008/defining-public-history-is-it-possible-is-it-necessary