Matthew Headley on Public History

Reading through Amy Tyson’s, The Wages of History is something I believe everyone working in non-profits, or the humanities in general. This kind of work entails a tremendous amount of emotional labor whether this is in work-life balance, devaluation, or in the museum field the subjects that are interpreted. I advise anyone studying the humanities or starting a career in the field to read this book. 

Work-life balance especially when it comes to interpretation is problematic. This kind of work comes home with you, as you study and prepare for your next day or tour. Tyson discusses how teachers and other jobs in the humanities often have to work outside of the time they are on the clock. She also talks about how the job changes your life. She tells how her eating patterns and speech patterns changed. This is also seen when she discusses the suicide of Robert, who did a bock burial of a soldier two weeks before. He said he was going to Valhalla, which could be referencing his fictional military experience as a living interpreter.   

Tyson worked at Fort Snelling with her fellow customed interpreters. She talks about how some people don’t take the job seriously, and are joking during the introductory meeting, as well as others who were recognized for going above and beyond in customer care. One of these people is Kathleen, who put off an event at the school she works to be at the meeting. She loves her job, but she needs the money because her daughter just recovered from a 3-week coma. As someone who worked for over 2 years on the front lines in museums, I’m familiar with both situations. I’ve had to work 2 jobs to make ends meet and my coworkers did as well. I also had people ask me if I was paid to do my job, or if I volunteered. The devaluation of front-line work comes both from the administration which doesn’t offer benefits, enough hours, or enough pay, and from guests. Which makes a job that should be enjoyable into something soul-crushing. I was one of the lucky ones. I had a full-time position with health insurance, I didn’t always have to work multiple jobs like my coworkers for a little over a year of my time. Tyson talks about job security, and she is right. A bad interaction with a guest or something going wrong could lead to firing or being passed over for promotions or raises. 

Beyond this book’s study of the struggles of the work being done by people on the front line of history, it offers a lot of insight into how history can be done productively. We see the evolution of interpretation at the Fort. She also talks about visual cues when engaging with people. Tyson’s work brings forth the troubles in the field, and while reading her book I felt a deep comradery and commiseration with her experience. Even though I never served as a costumed interpreter, the experience of devaluation in every sense of the word, and the difficulties in making a living in the field resonates with me.

Public historians have a responsibility to present history accurately, and not turn away in our interpretations of our past from difficult memories. Both books, All That She Carried and How the World Is Passed do just this. Both use different means, but they are perfect companion pieces to read. 

All That She Carried:
This book was written by Tiya Miles and was released in 2021. The book tells the story of Rose’s sack that she packed for her daughter. The family was enslaved and lived in fear of separation and the auction block, among other atrocities committed against them. Rose packed a sack for her daughter, Ashley. The record is recorded in the fabric of the sack and preserves the memory of an enslaved woman, whose voice and stories are mostly lost to us, due to the historical preservation, the archive, and a legacy of white supremacy.
Tiya Miles relates the story of Ashley to her own life and the stories she hears from her Grandmother. The story of Ashley’s sack is preserved because of her daughter, Ruth Middleton. Ruth preserves the history of her family’s sack and inscribes its meaning on it. She actively challenges the devaluing of women like Rose in the records of American slavery. Rose’s story is a story of love for her child in a country that stole her from her own and then stole her daughter from her.

How the World Is Passed:
Clint Smith’s book explores the story of slavery at 8 locations in America and one outside of America. Clint Smith visits the plantations of Monticello and the Whitney. He comments on how most of the visitors to Monticello are white. This is something we discussed during our tour of Eastern State Penitentiary, most of their guests are white. Smith’s conversations with employees and visitors at Monticello are something that I understand well from my experience working at Eastern State. People came to see the house but weren’t fully aware of the horrors that Jefferson committed, or were unwilling to hear them in the slavery tours offered. Smith also noticed how tours differ depending on who is giving them. This is something I’d like to explore myself. I have some experience from my time at ESP seeing how each guide handles the subject matter in different ways.
The Angola Prison is still open and is built on a former slave plantation. The prison system serves as a legalized form of slavery. Smith sees an image there of a white man on a horse herding black prisoners, and he is amazed by how recent the picture is. His experience with the museum is how it separates ‘’criminals’’ from those who watch them.
I’m failing in my attempt to simplify these complicated stories. Both books deserved to be read. Clint Smith and Tiya White write in such a remarkable way that keeps you engaged and reading, even in the face of the horrible atrocities perpetrated by white supremacy.  

Historians have an ethical responsibility to document, preserve, and educate the public on the voices and people who have been excluded from the historical record. The concept of big man history continues to be challenged by a form of history from the bottom up. The battle for personal identity and representation continues. Whether it be in the form of gender expression and identity, to race and ethnicity. The way that history is preserved and presented continues to be challenged, but the white supremacist narrative through our education systems and narratives prevails. 

‘’How to Become a Women’’ is an article from 2020 that starts by discussing the government response to the question of defining what a women is. The explores identity and sexuality as well as sex work. Carolyn’s, Greta’s, and the authors stories that she tells throughout the article is a wonderful representation of meaningful history. These stories document an experience that is often over looked, and is a fundamental read.

‘’When community comes home to roost’’ highlights some themes we discussed while visiting Eastern State Penitentiary. These being displaced people by historical projects and race represenation in the historical record. Cooleemee’s memorialization of its communal mill town attempts to discuss the subject of race and inclusion, but it still falls short. A letter also revealed an uglier side of Cooleemee. They complained about the establishment of section 8 housing and would bring about crack houses and disturb the heavily white racial balance. (Fink 126). We disccused how the question of race was addressed by Eastern State Penitentiary, and the demographic change of the Fairmount area through the historic preservation project. 

The Injustive Never Leaves You is a difficult read due to it’s subject matter, but incredibly gripping. The racial voilence experienced by hispanic people in Texas by the Rangers was something that was so well known that people even knew where to go to find where bodies where most likely dumped. The Texas Rangers were formed as a reactionary militarized force to protect Anglo expansion and supremacy in the region. The Texas Rangers became the state police. This voilence was also protected as the Rangers where able to act unimpeded. The death of Florencio, even though witnesses had saw him with Texas Rangers and even integrated with the Rangers as they asked for rope. They also denied that his father, Garcia has positively identified his bones. They were able to refute witnesses as well. The cause of death was also excluded from his death certificate. 

These two articles and the book we read leave the reader with questions in mind, who are we? Who’s stories deserve to be told? How do with the past and present systems of oppression? How do we define our communities?

David Young’s book interprets public history efforts of Germantown over the course of the last one hundred years, as he spans from World War I to modern day. David Young is someone who is passionate about his community, and his dedication can be seen throughout the book. His book centers on the puts practice in action, as he works with individuals in the community to understand and interpret the history of Germantown.

David Young’s microhistory of Germantown illustrates where history has gone wrong in the past, and highlights and suggests ways that historians can and should engage with the public to establish a better understanding of the topic. He does this by weaving narratives of lived experience of the people with these historic houses. He argues against insular historian practices and entrenched interests that led to preservation of Germantown and presentation of a certain way, ‘’These new public historians began to overcome tendencies to insular, self-serving narratives with openness to innovative ways of looking at the colonial period that have encompassed the difficult histories of slavery, racism, and class distinctions’’(Young 13).  

The Upsala house being put on the market is something I look forward to discussing in class, but it is not something I’d like to write about here. I want to focus on the Chew house and Cliveden’s adaptation of programming. As well as Stenton’s approach. 

The Chew house embraced it’s history of slavery and the issues, but not originally. A remark from Gary Nash in 2002 frames how programming was originally done, ‘’Visitors to Cliveden… will learn a lot about its builder, Benjamin Chew, attorney general and provincial councilor of Pennsylvania. But they will learn little about the dozens of slaves employed by Chew at Cliveden and on his Keny County, Delaware plantation’’(Young 52). In order to avoid suffering the same fate as the Upsala house, the Chew house changed programming to shows its history of slavery and plantation records. 

The Stenton house adapted in a different way in order to avoid the same fate as the Upsala house. They work focused on outreach with neighbors to become a location that hosted Easter egg hunts, music, and yoga. (Young 53). The idea was to bring in people who may not have come to a historic site normally, but still be able to enjoy the site for something outside of history. They opened the site to bird watchers, weddings, jazz concerts in order to attract more people to the house. Some fear that this may distract from the importance of the historic site. This kind of event planning is something that is happening at other institutions now. People get married at the Museum of the American Revolution, I’ve seen people do their vows at Eastern State Penitentiary.    

This shift in programming is something that I think we will discuss more the week we visit Eastern State. It’s a conversation I’m excited to have. How does programming adapt at historic sites to remain relevant?

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. 

My first blog post will be highlighting the relatively new work by Jason A. Heppler. Paul Schadewald, and Rebecca S. Wingo as well as the co-authors and contributors to this book entitled, Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy. I was surprised by the price of the book and the fact that it would take weeks to get a copy delivered. I did a quick search online and found a fully free version. Partnering with TOME (toward an open Monograph Ecosystem) to make a full digital copy of this book available for free.

This book was an incredible read. Each chapter is a case study covering a range of topics and ideas. I’ll briefly discuss the role that the historian plays in society, but I’d like to spend most of my time discussing two interconnected questions. Who owns history? Who controls the narrative?

The book is a demonstration of how historians can engage with their community, and what that partnership can bring about. From co-authored pieces with collaboration from 16 community and campus partners to oral histories to examining the creation of archives for the people. This quote from Sara Ludewig, who participated in three History Harvests in Chapter 5 is a great representation of ideas put forward in this book and aligns with my beliefs as well. ‘’The History Harvest I have worked on changed my perspective on how historians experience and archive the past. I got to be an active participant in the preservation of history by listening to people’s experiences and documenting the artifacts they wanted to represent them.’’

My next question on who owns history, and who controls the narrative is answered in chapter 2 by the actions of the People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland (PAPVC). The archive already existed, but they were able to assist with digitalizing it on a web space. This chapter also delves into the narrative, with a specific example being the different narratives around the death of Tamir Rice, and how the narrative pulled away from him. The PAPVC helps by telling the stories of the people of Cleveland, and their experience with police violence. Our jobs as historians should be to help give voice to our communities, and those we work with.       

This book is helpful to read when preparing for our Owl Walk and food truck project at Temple University for a multitude of reasons. The introduction of the book addresses how the work isn’t all-encompassing, and how some voices are left out of this work to some degree. Community engagement is going to play a critical role while gathering information on the history of food trucks. The archival record most likely leaves out a lot of information. We can gain a lot of information from conducting oral histories and through community outreach. Some alumni’s memory may have faded, but their stories still matter. Perhaps they have pictures or menus that they could share as well.

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