Carolyn Kitch is not a historian by trade, her research interests include media history, public memory, magazines and visual communications. She’s written other books and articles that delve into history such as her 2006 book, Pages from the Past: History and Memory in American Magazines. She teaches in communications and once worked in the magazine industry. She addresses the academic claim of the ‘’amateur historian’’ and how they aren’t equipped to interpret the history. Her addressing this reinforces that all people experience and interpret history, and it isn’t something that only the trained academics are permitted to do. As someone who has felt afraid before to voice my opinions, critiques or questions out of disbelief of qualifications, it’s refreshing to hear.
Carolyn Kitch does cover one of the historians’ important questions, change over time. She uses historical documents such as industrial promotional papers to talk with people and visit historic sites and other memorial activities. When looking at memorialization, she does address that it ‘’has the potential to depoliticize labor history through patriotic rhetoric and its tendency to mourn the industrial dead as a single group’’ (Kitch 98). Public memory changes between places where something such as mining was experienced by those who are still alive, and not just a collective memory of the town.
Carolyn Kitch addresses something we’ve discussed in class last week. This is the economic situation faced by historical sites. She discusses the 2010 federal budget cut to funding from heritage site programs. She says how government-run historical sites must do their own fundraising to survive. This isn’t something that only government-run historic sites do, as most museums and historic sites conduct fundraising. She says this financial strain forces these places to be entertaining and potentially interactive. She gives examples such as making our own pretzels at a factory. She uses these examples to suggest that museums increasingly cater to families with young children and to school programming.
One of the issues with this book is that it was created in 2012. History books almost as soon as they are written and then read become dated. These historic sites she visited, these people she talked to could have changed and this may no longer be what is represented now. This doesn’t discredit this tremendous undertaking that she did in collecting these stories and visiting so many sites and events. I mentioned before about how the author is not a trained historian, but I believe that everyone is welcome to interpret history, because we all experience it.
This book can help us with framing out questions when doing our food truck project, and understanding that the people we talk to may have certain memories or a collective memory of their experience. We also will have to understand the role of the food truck and all the players associated with it. The author discusses regional identity, and food trucks are part of the Temple identity.