Off the Wall

Where the universal present meets the personal past: "The Wilderness Downtown"

2011-12-27T13:46:00.000-08:00

For most of us, music videos don’t immediately bring to mind historical engagement. What’s more reflective of the current epoch than a viral YouTube video featuring feline euphony or Rebecca Black’s ultra-present-focused “Friday”?

But Arcade Fire’s “Wilderness Downtown” collaboration with Chris Milk, featuring their hit 2010 single, “We Used to Wait,” is a remarkable exception to this rule. Chris Milk’s interactive video, a “Google Chrome experiment,” got some significant buzz in tech and advertising circles after its release, but why should it interest public historians?

This interactive video is essentially an exploration of personal nostalgia, providing a bridge between childhood and the present through the wonders of Google street view. There have been some notable digital history projects in recent years that work with this feature, enabling users to superimpose historical views on the present or even overlay multiple historic maps on a given geographical region. But this video gets directly to the emotion of the matter by enabling users to plug their childhood addresses into the video’s algorithm, generating scenes from the places where they grew up as the music evokes a ever-more-distant past when, “we used to wait for letters and sign our names.” At the end of the video, viewers are given the opportunity to “write their childhood selves a letter” using a remarkable digital paint program that turns their words into branches and floods the scene with birds. This evocative moment concludes a “trip” through the universal present and the personal past.

In The Presence of the Past, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen conclude that our personal histories provide the strongest, most present connection to the past, providing a gateway for broader interest. When I began the process of reviewing this video, beyond my initial “Oh cool!” first reaction, I asked some friends and family members for their thoughts. My brother, Micah Langer, a 21-year-old almost-college-graduate provided a wonderful personal analysis: “Arcade Fire seems to really speak to a generation of people who grew up in between spaces--in the suburbs and edge cities of North America. Growing up in such places, at least for me, it is easy to feel adrift and disconnected from the rest of the world. Perhaps those are universal growing pains, but I think the anonymity and uniformity of suburbs amplify them. It's interesting how the video gives one a bird's-eye-view of a town or a school, places that seemed to be the beginning and end of the world during our childhoods. Seen through a wider lens, one sees how these places fit into a bigger picture. It is an exploration and elaboration of the dizzying nostalgia and disorientation one might feel upon dialing in their sentimental places on googlemaps, and it's somehow comforting to realize that you aren't alone with that feeling.”

I think it’s that notion of not being alone with this fascination with the personal past that makes this video particularly resonant. It’s a useful reminder for public historians that the place we start when we explore history is inevitably our own backyard.

~ Adina Langer

A New Paradigm for Institutional History?: Looking at the Smithsonian Archives’ New Website

2011-12-19T15:25:00.000-08:00

The Smithsonian is, of course, not the only institution associated with the federal government that maintains an archive about its own history. The National Park Service, for example, has made a substantial investment in documenting the histories of its parks. The Park Service's institutional histories, however, generally exist on a park-by-park basis while the Smithsonian's efforts are more centralized. For the Park Service, this allows for great diversity in its histories. It also means, though, that few people will access the information contained in them. Indeed, most of these histories are for park staff and NPS administrators, not broader public consumption—although some, like Seth Bruggeman’s Here, George Washington Was Born, reach a somewhat larger academic audience when published as books. With the launch of its new website, the Smithsonian Institution Archives points toward a new era of accessibility and engagement for institutional archives.

When I first visited the Smithsonian Archives almost a decade ago, the reading room and staff offices were located in the Arts and Industries Building (above)--the original home of the United States National Museum. A far cry from its heyday in the late nineteenth century, the building had been emptied of exhibits and collections, and everyone kept telling me that the ceiling was going to collapse. Still, it was a thrill to be working in this historic structure, especially since I was researching a dissertation on the history of cultural exhibitions at the Smithsonian. From a comfort and convenience standpoint, however, it was less than ideal. There was nowhere to get lunch--I usually ended up eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the Hirshhorn sculpture garden--and the reading room was cramped. Consequently, I was pleased when, a few years ago, the archives moved to a newly constructed building a couple of blocks from the Mall. What this shiny, climate-controlled office building lacked in character, it more than made up for in creature comforts.

Now the Smithsonian Archives has a new website to match its new home. Happily, with its digital presence, the archives has not had to sacrifice character for comfort. In fact, the new site does a much better job than the old one of highlighting the services available for researchers and showcasing materials from the collection. Simple, clean, and user-friendly, the website also features the extensive institutional research that archives staff, volunteers, and interns have done.The value of this website, however, may go beyond practical concerns. It just might suggest a new paradigm for institutional history.

Unlike NPS's mostly internally-oriented histories, the Smithsonian's new website is geared towards engaging a broad audience of online users with its content. On the homepage are links to a blog, discussion forum, featured exhibits, and a section called "Today in Smithsonian History." Perhaps most interesting is the extent to which the institution has embraced the interactive web in creating this site. For example, the current front page features a link to the Smithsonian's photostream on Flickr, which displays rare photographs from the Scopes trial. (These photos were discovered by a volunteer researcher at the archives in the records of the Science Service and published in Reframing Scopes: Journalists, Scientists, and Lost Photographs from the Trial of the Century.)

And from a social media perspective, the website is a gold mine, with lots of fascinating things to tweet and post to Facebook. Given the prominent social media logos on the homepage, this was clearly a major topic of discussion in the development process. As someone who is always looking for interesting content to disseminate to my students and others, I appreciate this focus on sharing. The deeper question, however, is whether a website focused on sharing institutional history with a broad audience will be successful. Or, to put it more bluntly, does anybody (other than a relatively small group of public historians and museum professionals) care about institutional history?

Anecdotal evidence points strongly to the fact that people like to go behind the scenes at museums and historic sites--to pull the curtain back on the processes that go on in collections storage facilities, exhibits labs, and staff offices. Therefore, maybe the Smithsonian Archives’ new website will encourage more people to take a peek behind the curtain and begin to think critically about the ways in which history, culture, and science are packaged and presented by institutions such as the Smithsonian. And, maybe they’ll have some fun doing it.

~ Will Walker

Participatory Mapping: Place-Making as Process in Montréal’s Mile End

2011-12-07T13:50:00.001-08:00

Maps are more than pieces of paper. They are stories, conversations, lives and songs lived out in a place and are inseparable from the political and cultural contexts in which they are used. (A. Warren, cited in Giacomo Rambaldi, "Who Owns the Map Legend?")

Places resonate. They are keepers of stories and avenues for remembrance. As the Mile End mapping project demonstrates, community place-based projects offer opportunities to give shape to the past, outline the present and envision the future.

Home to 24,000 residents, the Mile-End boasts eclectic architecture, locally-owned businesses, vibrant streetscapes and a diverse population mix of ultra-orthodox Hasidic Jews, Greeks, Portuguese, Eastern and Southern Europeans, university students, creative types and émigrés from France. Increasingly, African, Asian and Latin American immigrants to Montréal are settling there as well. While fears of gentrification and the sanitizing properties that accompany it have been raised cyclically since the 1970s, today the Mile End remains the most ethnically diverse neighborhood in Canada.

Since 2007, the artist and volunteer storefront collaborative articule in Montréal’s Mile End neighborhood has drawn attention to the area’s arts organizations and creative spaces by producing a biannual community art map. Last year, spurred on by activist artist and articule outreach coordinator Coco Riot, the group added a twist to their initiative. They began by asking questions like, “Who decides what is and what is not art?” “What makes the Mile End a creative place, particularly friendly for artists?” “How do we add residents’ daily improvisations in space to our definition of artistic vitality in the neighborhood?”

These questions were explored in a series of community map-making workshops. They were coordinated by local, grassroots groups and individuals--Pied Carré (a nonprofit neighborhood collective dedicated to preserving affordable artists’ spaces in the Mile End), Bricolage urbaine (a newly-formed group dedicated to urban education and community action around urban planning issues), subjective cartographer Emmanuelle Jacques, civic initiative Ouvert/Open and Les Amis du Champs des Possibles, a volunteer-run environmental group focused on preserving green space and biodiversity in the neighborhood. A local sixth grade teacher devoted a month of classroom time to the initiative.

Large, colorful and productively chaotic, the twenty or so maps produced by more than two hundred Mile End residents throughout the series of workshops were exhibited at articule in October. These participatory maps engage history in different ways. A group of former residents of the neighborhood returned to their old stomping grounds to participate in the activity, to reminisce and to affix their memories to a map. Their finished product offered useful and interesting historical data, showing the regularity with which each mapper had moved within the area in childhoods marked by residential displacement in a city of renters, the community’s hubs and boundaries, the fault lines to be negotiated with “outsiders” and “others” and the spaces and institutions that have endured, lending character and stability to a dynamic, diverse community.

One group of urban explorers spent a few hours walking the brownfield site along the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks. They gathered and displayed over 30 different kinds of plants, historic evidence of decades of plant migration due to the transcontinental train route. Another map explored railway rights of way by asking people to use thumb tacks and cue cards to map out their routes and crossing spots along the CPR train tracks, which until recently were accessible to pedestrians but have since been fenced off.

For strangers who made maps together, conversation led to sharing of intimate, personal histories as well as discussion about the area’s most treasured historic buildings and significant places. The map became a process for meeting neighbors, finding points of convergence and drawing shared meanings of place. While some items appeared random – like the running ground of abandoned cats and the best people-watching site in the neighborhood, they reflected a spirited and detailed conversation.

Sixth graders made a series of transparent, overlapping maps that documented historic sites, memorials and monuments as well as traffic flows, bike paths, locally owned business – even the architecture of surveillance through security cameras and locked gates. They claimed their neighborhood, pinpointing graffiti, which they designated either pretty or ugly, “secret passages” and other information known and recognized only by residents of an area.

Riot reflected that the project both documented and created community, adding that the completed maps will be archived in a library for research and community access. Citing it as a strong start to what is hoped to be the first of many mapping initiatives, Riot was heartened by the response.

The process helped organizers identify strategies for wider community involvement and begin to ask, if not answer, tough questions about a problem that confronts most local, participatory initiatives in economically and culturally diverse neighborhoods -- the finished product represented a narrower historical and lived experience of class, culture and ethnicity than the neighborhood itself reflects.

In the first year, participation was dominated by, though not limited to, residents who identified as “belonging” in the Mile End, those who felt comfortable coming to a new place for an event and who had the free time and energy to attend. While diverse linguistically and in age and nation of origin, they were generally middle class and not new immigrants.

Riot is eager to apply lessons in place-making to widen participation. Addressing the practical realities of diversity in their neighborhood, organizers are locating spaces of regular interaction and engagement amongst all residents as sites to hold future mapping activities. They are also working with interested representatives from Hasidic and new immigrant communities to figure out the nuts and bolts of their future involvement in community mapping.

Perhaps the transparent, layered maps made by middle school student participants can be a model for the future of the project. As in any diverse urban neighborhood in the 21st century, there simply is no one map of what it has been or what it will be. But by getting a wide array of residents to create many maps, and by finding ways to look at them together as parts of a complicated and ever-changing whole, articule is poised to develop a model for participatory place-making that acknowledges difference while locating and fostering spaces of convergence.

~ Margo Shea

The Toynbee Tiles: Viral exhibitry from the pre-Internet world

2011-11-28T05:00:00.001-08:00

The Toynbee Tiler's main style, in Philadelphia's Center City.

At its heart an exhibition is a display of objects, grouped together by a shared theme, style or message, and designed for public consumption. In the award-winning 2011 documentary Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles, four men from Philadelphia search for the creator of an idiosyncratic series of public art pieces that, in its consistency and repetition, can be seen as an exhibition.

While the film plays out as History Detectives for hipsters, the story is compelling. The tiles have a central, cryptic message that invoke historian Arnold Toynbee and filmmaker Stanley Kubrick:

“Toynbee idea
In Movie 2001
Resurrect Dead
On Planet Jupiter"

The Toynbee Tiler has been prolific, installing his piecessince the 1980s in the asphalt of urban streets from his home base in Philadelphia,across the Rust Belt, to South America. The tiles defy explanation, though theyhave the stylistic consistency of a single artist. While the basic messagedoesn’t vary, he adds, at times, addenda and marginalia that range frommentioning the USSR to critiquing the media.

While the film is fascinating on a variety of levels, one of its most poignantaspects is the way the filmmakers create a portrait of the unknownTiler. Through interviews and by tracing clues scattered in the tiles,newspapers, and minutes of an esoteric organization, they suggest that thetiles were primarily a means of communicating a public message in apre-Internet world. Today, the Toynbee Tiler would have an easier time writinga blog, but the film shows his attempts to use other methods to find an outletand audience for his message, from ham radio transmissions to calling in totalk radio shows. These strategies were small and inconsequential, and he foundhimself blocked by corporate media control of the airwaves.

City street as faulty archive: remnants of a decaying tile.

His response? An exhibition of public street art, curated against asphalt grids, through the creation and placement of a series of tiles carved out of linoleum and adhered to the street with tarpaper. (To try this tiling technique yourself, check out the tutorial from Make magazine.) The ultimate ephemerality of the pieces as they erode under years of traffic renders them less archive than temporary exhibition. While the message of his tiles is unsettling--including one known as “The Manifesto” that disturbingly veers into anti-Semitism--the audacity of it as exhibition practice is intriguing.

Of course, in the age of the Internet, interest in the tiles has only grown as scattered individuals who had seen a tile in their city became aware of their spread. Interestingly, contemporary art groups have incorporated the tiles into their own street art. House of Hades, one of the more prolific of these collectives, createstheir own tiles that critique the media, adopting one of the Toynbee Tiler’s favorite themes while purging it of its more unsavory aspects. Such approaches preserve the formal qualities of the tiles while effacing much of the haunted affect inhering in the obsessive repetition and syntactical unhingement of the originals. Connected today with a street art culture derived from graffiti and expressed in ways that strategically repurpose public space (for example, in the images of artists like Banksy), the contemporary tilers’ method is necessarily different in meaning from the Toynbee Tiler.

Other artists adopt the tile technique for less ambiguous messages.

While it seemed that he utilized his unique exhibition method for lack of other options, today’s street artists reclaim public spaces as an explicit means of countering corporate dominance and its ubiquitous expression through advertising. Like the tiles, today’s street art injects mystery into the public sphere, making familiar territory unfamiliar and altering perspective but its purpose is much more knowable. It aims to challenge power while also sending a message--a DIY ethos shared by the contemporary craft movement and quite different from the solitary statements of the Toynbee Tiles.

Not only are the messages themselves quite different, they are now received by more jaded eyes. For instance, many people leaving a screening of Resurrect Dead in Philadelphia admitted that they first assumed the tiles were either a student art project or a viral marketing campaign. Changes in technology, meaning, and modes of dissemination since the 1980s have gutted the semiotic landscape in which the Toynbee Tiles first appeared, leaving us more knowing about these kinds of visual languages but also perhaps nostalgic for the more truly mysterious affect of the Tiler’s exhibits. While contemporary modes of cultural signification build off his techniques, they also make impossible this kind of unknowable world created by a singular vision.

~ Mary Rizzo and Whitney Strub

Easily missed at 9th and Walnut, this small tile's ambiguous message can be read as step one of an instructional series or a plaintive expression of solitude.

(All photos are by Mary Rizzo and Whitney Strub.)

The Reality of Fiction in Post-Pinochet Chile: Los Archivos del Cardenal

2011-11-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

I have been traveling to and from Chile for various reasons at various times since 2005, acquiring a deep appreciation for the country and its cultural subtleties and social mores—to say nothing of a Spanish accent steeped in Chilean slang. But if I have learned anything since my initial days, it is that one must exercise sensitivity when approaching the dictatorial past. On my most recent flight here, for example, I found myself especially mum when engaged by a well-dressed, middle-aged Chilean woman about my upcoming adventures. Instead of revealing my true intentions—a year’s worth of historical research related to human rights and memory—I reverted to the tourist line: surfing, senderismo (trekking), and sun. And we continued our conversation concerning Chile’s naturally beautiful landscape, not its unattractive past, maintaining the unspoken but readily recognizable veneer aimed at keeping the dictatorial past contained to the quiet corners of private, personal conversations rather than something to be discussed openly with strangers on airplanes, public transport, or other places where class and political lines may cross.

That is why I was particularly pleased with the recent release of a new mini-series—Los Archivos del Cardenal—on Chile’s national broadcast channel, Televisión Nacional de Chile (TVN). The series, consisting of 12 "chapters," takes cases collected by the Vicaría de la Solidaridad under Cardinal Raul Silva Henríquez during the dictatorship and reproduces them for public consumption. For those not in the know, the Vicaría, an organization of religious and lay Catholics, as well as non-believers, was arguably Latin America’s most active, if not high-profile, human rights organization during the 1970s and 80s. It worked to protect Chileans suffering from Augusto Pinochet’s persecution by offering legal, medical, moral, and financial help, as well as establishing numerous national and international networks of support. It is no secret, then, that the Vicaría is intimately linked to human rights activism and, moreover, that it has created an archive that documents crimes against humanity.

Neither is it a secret that Los Archivos is a fictitious account of the past, however based in and inspired by the actual Vicaría. Nicolás Acuña, director of the show, has taken the sensitive subject of dictatorship and exposed it through the commonplace medium of public television—to the chagrin of some and championing of others. In a conversation with Acuña, I learned that among those who supported the creation of the show—a group that includes former Vicaría social workers and Chile’s first transitional president, Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994)—are historians and other academics who helped with the series’ stories. Acuña, born in Chile in 1972 and raised in exile in Sweden after the coup, wanted to create an “historical document that pays tribute to Vicaría workers,” something that he feels fell through the cracks during the center-left Concertación governments between 1990 and 2010.

The careful avoidance of Chile's tumultuous past has made itself felt in both opposition to the show and the creators' caution in approaching stories of resistance. Senator Carlos Larraín voiced the conservative response when he said, “The series takes events that occurred exactly 40 years ago, but with an obvious political connotation: the left as victim, and this is what gives fans the fire to act politically with a certain amount of superiority” (author's translation). Moreover, Acuña told me that to attract more viewers (or put fewer off), the team “couldn’t play too much with the theme of human rights.” This, then, is why the series is also laced with racy scenes of love and has, well, a fictitious feel of a “police-investigative series.”

But in an interview on Chile’s popular 24hrs, Acuña and actor Francisco Melos also spoke of the responsibility to show, despite the hardships of dictatorship, that people still lived, loved, drank whiskey, and laughed. Thus, the debate that is circulating in op-eds, public discourse, the political circus, and my circle of friends, revolves not only around the usefulness of fiction versus history, but the reality of present and past politics, to say nothing of the demands of TV as a dramatic form. Meanwhile, for the first time on public television, open references that damn the dictator(ship) are flashing across millions of Chilean screens.

However, even if the (political) line between the Vicaría’s history and the fiction of Los Archivos is unclear, what is clear are the paralyzing scenes of torture, daylight disappearances, and the discovery of human remains in hidden graves. Too, the series is not short on uncovering moral motives and struggles. In one particularly moving scene, Chileans are invited to muse on the moral compass of a torturer of the country’s infamous National Center of Intelligence (CNI) as he returns home from work to stroke the cheek of his sleeping son. As a viewer, I find that these images send shivers down my spine, a response that combines the emotive, the moral and the political. Moreover, and especially important, I think, is that for the interested and/or skeptical, follow-ups and fact-checking of each “chapter” can be cross-referenced to the “real” or “archived” case vis-à-vis a project directed by the Universidad Diego Portales. There is also the option of visiting the Vicaría’s successor organization, La Fundación de Documentación y Archivo de la Vicaría de la Solidaridad (pictured above), to continue the historical inquiry.

Approaching the past in post-dictatorship Chile is no easy task. From fictional crash-course lessons on public television to more established forms of memory-making through museums and memorials, any entranceway into Chile’s painful past is significant—and controversial, given the national and international public attention and debate that Los Archivos has generated in interviews, articles, and reviews. As historian Steve Stern recently suggested while speaking at the “Memories in Construction” seminar at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Los Archivos is another step in the "materialization of memory in the physical-cultural landscape of a new generation of Chileans too young to have a direct remembrance of the dictatorship."

Los Archivos, like other films and television based on history, raises the question: when (or) is it useful to fictionalize the past? Or can fictionalized history serve a special purpose when approaching sensitive issues such as crimes against humanity? Whatever your answer, in Chile, for better or worse, the “materialization of memory” of such crimes for today’s generation is taking root in the form of Acuña’s “historic document”—a collaborative but careful effort that is more loyal to the past than it is faithful. Yet, despite this reality of fiction, I look forward to what I hope is a not-too-distant future when my airplane conversations can focus on Chile’s physical-cultural landscape, not just its natural beauty.

~ Zachary McKiernan

History, history everywhere

2011-11-02T13:47:00.000-07:00

On my walk from the commuter rail station to Tufts University the other day, I was struck by a kind of instant stage set or living history environment or nostalgic theme park created by an organic food delivery truck trailer parked behind the Porter Square Shopping Center in Cambridge. The owner of the company and his mom were both featured on the side of the trailer, not an uncommon strategy for organic and family/local food producers as ways to differentiate themselves from more anonymous or purely commodified supermarket food.

What made this really interesting, though, was the fact that the back of the shopping center is itself painted with heritage-oriented murals depicting various periods of the neighborhood's existence. Images of the mansion, cottages, and gardens that pre-dated (and were torn down to build) the plaza decorate the architecturally undistinguished back view, along with portraits of neighbors and some generic "olde-tyme" street views.

And more interesting yet, for the purposes of thinking about how historical materials, narratives, and knowledge are encoded in contemporary landscapes, is the plaque historicizing the murals themselves.

This blog is devoted to reviewing historical exhibitry in an age of "ubiquitous display," and this kind of landscape of instant/casual/under-the-radar documentation and memorialization is exactly what we mean by "ubiquitous display." If someone had happened to ride past on a vintage one-speed bicycle while I was standing there taking pictures, my day would have been complete!

~ Cathy Stanton

Explorations in “Historical Hotness”

2011-09-22T06:35:00.000-07:00

Hey, handsome stranger
Saw your pic in the archives
Too bad you're dead now

Rebecca Goldman, winner, Archival Haiku 2011

Mustaches are really hot right now.

Not modern mustaches—though handlebars seem to be making anironic comeback—but the facial hair of the past. Seeing through the facial hair to the faces, viewers move,perhaps, toward a more empathetic view of people of the past.

Mustaches of the 19th Century was an early harbinger of thistrend. Beginning in 2007, the blogposted photos of unidentified gentlemen with interesting mustaches, completewith snarky faux-historical commentary. The photos all came from thecollections of the University of Kentucky Archives; the blog was jokingly conceived as an online exhibit by a photo archivist there.

This year, a Smithsonian Magazine poll celebrated the CivilWar sesquicentennial by asking visitors to vote on the best facial hair among those who served in the conflict. As of late August, 2011, Ambrose Burnside, whose eponymous whisker styleis now known as “sideburns,” was blowing away the competition. The comments arefull of nominations of other Civil War figures with notable facial hair(“Where’s Longstreet?”), laments for the lack of Southerners among the 25 photos in the poll, wishes for the return of such arresting facial hair, and comments on thebeauty of the officers' hair and eyes.

Facial hair is not the only suddenly compelling part ofhistory’s faces. My Daguerreotype Boyfriend, a tumblr blog situated “where early photography meets historicalhotness” presents photos of men from the 19th century. Most of the photos identify both theperson pictured and the repository, a tribute to the care for accuracy of thesite's founder, Michelle Legro, a writer and editor. The site became a minor meme, possibly due to its locationon tumblr, a lightweight blog platform that makes sharing trivially easy.

And as a response to the popularity of the men-only MyDaguerreotype Boyfriend, Jerry Simmons, an archivist at the National Archives,started My Civil War Girlfriend, “a place to share photos of your favorite1860s-era cutie.” A photo of Sarah Emma Edmonds is captioned “I think my Civil War girlfriend can beat up yourdaguerreotype boyfriend” and, while soliciting submissions of photos withclever captions, the site comes with a caveat to treat all the photo subjectskindly.

These sites showcasing the appearances of the people of thepast do objectify those people--but in a gentle, silly way that affirmstheir—and our—common humanity. Whoknew sideburns could be gateways to the soul?

~ Suzanne Fischer

IMAGE: Albert Wolfe, c. 1901 from My Daguerrotype Boyfriend

Ice wars: The rebirth of the Winnipeg Jets

2011-09-04T17:08:00.000-07:00

Canadian governments on both sides of the political spectrum since the Second World War have been much less willing to invest in the country’s military (the world’s fourth-largest in 1945, but only the 56th today) than in the image of Canada as peace keeper (most notably through the invention of the UN Peacekeepers by Canadian diplomat and later Prime Minister Lester Pearson). Indeed, the Canadian Forces recruitment campaign ads on TV feature the forces rescuing explorers in the Arctic, and assisting at the sites of natural disasters. For many Canadians, this is our interaction with the Armed Forces: they bail us out of floods and, in Toronto, snow storms.

Recently, however, two occurrences have upset this traditional view of Canada and its military within the country. In June, the Winnipeg Jets hockey team was re-born. The Jets had been a member of the National Hockey League from 1979-95, when the team, plagued by a tiny arena and a sinking Canadian dollar, flew off to Phoenix to become the Coyotes. This spring, however, the Atlanta Thrashers were sold to Winnipeg businessmen and moved back to the capital of Manitoba. The problem of the small arena was solved by a new building downtown and that of the economic issues by a Canadian dollar that is at par with the American greenback. Never mind the fact that Winnipeg, with a population of just over 500,000, is the smallest city in the National Hockey League.

The name “Jets” has a long history with the city of Winnipeg, given the city’s involvement in the aerospace industry in the country, and the Royal Canadian Air Force, whose 17 Wing is based at CFB Winnipeg. The Winnipeg Jets 1.0, however, did not capitalise on this connection, beyond the team name. The Winnipeg Jets 2.0 have a different idea. The new team has patterned its logos on the classic Second World War symbols of the RCAF, complete with the roundels (themselves based on the British RAF) and maple leaves. The colours of the team, military blue, gun metal grey and maple leaf red, have a definite martial feel to them. The Jets’ chairman, Mark Chipman, stated, “We felt it was important to authenticate the name Jets and we believe the new logo does that through its connection to our country’s remarkable Air Force heritage, including the rich history and relationship that our city and provinces have enjoyed with the Canadian Forces.”

The timing of the Jets’ return and Chipman’s announcement were interesting. Last month, the Canadian government announced the restructuring of the Canadian military and the re-naming of the forces. In particular, the Canadian Navy and Air Force got their “Royal” monikers back, after losing them in 1968 during the last restructuring of the forces.

In 1968, the country was riding a high of (Anglo-Canadian) nationalism, coming off the success of Expo ’67 in Montréal. The nation’s literati extolled the virtues of the “True North, Strong and Free.” That same year, Canada got a sexy, young Prime Minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, who inspired “Trudeaumania”, as women from coast to coast dreamed of the PM (I’m not making this up, my mother was obsessed with Mr. Trudeau after her crush on Paul McCartney wore off). The removal of the “Royal” from our military seemed an imperative, as did the rationalisation of the Canadian military.

In 2011, the Conservatives are back in power after a long walk in the wilderness and after a frustrating stint as the leaders of a minority government. The Conservatives, just like the Liberals in 1968, are bent on re-making Canada in their image, but the image is a rather different one. Stephen Harper’s government is focussing on allegedly “traditional” Canadian values: the military, the north, and hockey (they forgot beer and Tim Horton’s, but that’s another story). Canada’s government spends a lot of time extolling the virtues of the nation’s armed forces and is spending a lot of money on refurbishing the military’s hardware. At the same time, Canada is a belligerent in Afghanistan (though, to be fair, this campaign began under the previous Liberal government) and has provided support in Libya.

This has been somewhat of a shock to many Canadians; the Twittersphere and blogosphere have been chirping about the “un-Canadianess” of the focus on the military. But, as a friend of mine, a former member of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (once based in Winnipeg, no less) noted in a discussion about the re-naming of the military, a strong martial culture has long existed on the Prairies and the Maritimes, at odds with the peace-keeping trope that has dominated in the nation’s largest cities and the industrial cores in Eastern Canada and the West Coast. Having said that, Canada’s martial history is largely centred on the two world wars. Canada does not have a great military tradition outside of the periods from 1914-18 and 1939-45.

In short, what we have is a very blatant struggle for a usable past in Canada between the federal Conservative government and the opposition Liberal and New Democratic Party. Beyond that, it is a struggle for a usable past on the part of Canadians of different political stripes. And the Winnipeg Jets 2.0 have ventured, perhaps unwittingly, into a very loaded political minefield.

~ Matthew Barlow

Fear and loathing at the Coliseum

2011-08-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

There's no doubt that my favorite news story of the week is the one about policemen in Rome going undercover as tourists, garbage collectors, and--yes--gladiators in order to cool the jets of rival groups of real faux gladiators who pose for tourists' photographs near the Roman Coliseum and elsewhere. Apparently some of these bad boys had been fighting amongst themselves over prime pieces of tourist turf, and the police stepped in to try to restore order.

Having studied military reenactment for a number of years, I can attest that the public seems endlessly fascinated by the antics of men in arcane military garb, and I'm not surprised that this story has been flitting through the mediascape as a quirky novelty item. I also suspect there's more going on than the basic news story is capturing, but even the bare-bones version raises questions for me about the place of self-outfitting performers within historical places and productions. Whether it's hobbyist reenactors providing a corps of extras for a History Channel project, "natives" of various kinds pursuing the time-honored strategy of performing themselves for the tourist gaze, or "olde tyme" tour guides taking visitors around a city near you, encounters with the past increasingly seem to involve these entrepreneurial costumed figures who animate the landscape and give their audiences a little jolt of "pastness," along with a good photo op.

As I say, there may well be much more to this particular story, but it makes me wonder whether this is just an Italian thing--wise guys in leather skirts--or whether our globally straitened circumstances are producing new tensions at these frontiers of the knowledge and service economy. If there aren't enough tourist euros to go around, do the costumed performers start turning on each other, making represented warfare into something real? In a year that's already seen camels and donkeys from tourist concessions at the Egyptian pyramids ridden into the midst of a revolutionary gathering as an intimidation tactic, maybe we're getting hints that the boundaries of the real world and historical make-believe are not only blurring, but becoming impossible to sustain at all.

~ Cathy Stanton

Teddy Roosevelt's rocks: Speak softly and carry a big history

2011-07-29T16:59:00.000-07:00

The recent reviews of Ken Burns’ National Parks film in The Public Historian got me thinking about the NPS site in my hometown, Oyster Bay, Long Island. Sagamore Hill was the home of Theodore Roosevelt for most of his adult life, and it was where he died in 1919. Many years later, it was also the place where I began my career in public history, as a seasonal park ranger. I often return to this site, both physically and metaphorically, when pondering issues in our field.

One of the things that I love about Sagamore Hill is the way it allows visitors to explore both history and nature—appropriate for a site that honors a person who was both president of the American Historical Association and an ardent conservationist. The focal point of the site is Roosevelt’s house, which is filled with trophies from his many hunting expeditions, a dramatic, if not universally appealing display of Roosevelt’s visceral connection to the natural environment. The farm fields, orchard, woodlands, salt marsh, and beach near the house are even more important evidence of the influence of nature on Roosevelt. (Currently, NPS is implementing a cultural landscape rehabilitation project at the site that includes restoration of the historic farm fields and orchard.) Fittingly, other Roosevelt-related sites--Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the Badlands of North Dakota, and Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River in Washington, D.C--share this trait of intertwining historical and natural landscapes.

So what does this have to do with rocks? In addition to Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay is filled with memorials to Theodore Roosevelt and the Roosevelt family. (In fact, I’m writing this post in the town’s public library, which contains a memorial to the president’s son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., who died during World War II.) As a kid, I went to Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School, visited the Theodore Roosevelt Bird Sanctuary, and played on the playground at Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Park.

In that park is a curious little memorial that, although not under the purview of NPS, sums up why I think Roosevelt is the perfect link between historical and environmental narratives. It is literally Roosevelt’s story written in rocks. The rocks were collected in the early 1920s, shortly after Roosevelt’s death, from various places where significant events in his life occurred. For example, there is a granite block from Moosehead Lake, Maine where Roosevelt went as a young man to regain his health and a boulder from San Juan Hill, Cuba where his “Rough Riders” made their famous charge for American imperialism. There is also a boulder from the Adirondacks where he learned that McKinley had been shot, another from the Culebra Cut of the Panama Canal, and a piece of anthracite coal from Pennsylvania which was a gift from Gifford Pinchot (see image at top).

Although historians don’t often use rocks as artifacts to interpret history--we generally think, perhaps rightly, that furnishings, clothing, tools, and other pieces of material culture offer more compelling interpretive opportunities--these rocks are strangely captivating to me. I think it’s because I see in them a way to think about history more expansively--almost as a geologist might. They might even lead us toward an approach that some scholars have labeled “Big History.” Proponents of this type of history like to examine things on a grand scale--the really longue durée. (Check out this TED talk from David Christian where he traces the history of the universe from the Big Bang to the Internet in 18 minutes.)

As used in the memorial, the rocks are little more than relics, similar to the handfuls of dirt that people took from the old Yankee Stadium before it was demolished. Yet they represent epochs of earth’s geological history and multiple human histories as well. Thinking of them in this way requires some imagination and a willingness to think beyond their narrow association with Roosevelt and ponder much longer time spans and processes. Imagine using the San Juan Hill boulder to probe the arrival and habitation of Native peoples on the Caribbean islands, Spanish conquest, and American intervention in support of Cuban anti-colonial fighters. The natural history of the island is an essential part of any of these human histories. Similarly, picture using the piece of anthracite coal to explore the exploitation of natural resources, industrial development, the politics of energy, and labor struggles. Indeed, each one of “Teddy’s rocks” is exploding with interpretive possibilities. If given the opportunity, a good park ranger could make these connections come alive for visitors.

As we struggle on a global scale to understand the long cycles of climate change and the consequences of human use and misuse of resources, this kind of interpretive shift may be not only intriguing but essential. For me, it is Roosevelt’s history--as both conservationist and historian--that encourages thinking in this way. Speaking in Jamestown, Virginia in 1907--another appropriate location for thinking about the intersections of human and environmental histories--Roosevelt said, “The conservation of our natural resources and their proper use constitute the fundamental problem which underlies almost every other problem of our national life.”[1] For Roosevelt, the “environment” or “nature” did not exist separately from American society. He understood that human history and natural history are inextricably linked.

~ Will Walker

[1] H. Paul Jeffers, The Bully Pulpit: A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Company, 1998), 30. See also, Douglas Brinkley, Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 691-692.

* Many thanks to editor Cathy Stanton for some excellent wordsmithing on this piece.

Witnessing "history"?

2011-07-22T08:01:00.001-07:00

3...2...1... We have lift off! Space shuttle Atlantis blasted off for her final voyage on July 8, marking the end of NASA’s 30-year old shuttle program, and I was there. Honestly, it is bigger on TV. But television doesn’t adequately capture the physical sensation of participation.

The feeling of excitement was palpable, beginning when we checked into the hotel. There was the child clutching his planet-covered pillow, the students wearing their Georgia Tech Aerospace Engineering tee shirts, the news crew with their giant cameras, and us (my parents, sister, brother-in-law, five-year-old nephew, and a good friend from college). Only a few hours later, the wake up call came and bleary eyed we rendezvoused in the elevator just before 3:00 a.m. to head to the Kennedy Space Center. There was traffic. There were lines for security. There were lines for admission. Then we were there.

Clutching our tickets for the 4:45 a.m. breakfast with an astronaut, it began to sink in. We were taking part in a historic event...or at least that’s how the news kept billing it. As someone who was there, I’m not sure that would be the adjective I’d use.

Let’s back up for some perspective. I am part of the shuttle generation. The first shuttle launched in 1981 when I was five--right when permanent memories start forming (that's me, age seven, in the middle of the photo at the left, at NASA in Houston). I clearly remember the Challenger explosion, or more accurately, Mr. Baker (the elementary school principal) running through the halls yelling for the teachers to turn off the televisions. We were all ready to watch the first teacher in space, but suddenly it was silent and we were all sent home to have our parents explain what we had just witnessed.

I briefly toyed with the idea of rocket science when considering colleges, but space had become a bit pedestrian. It was no longer news to watch a shuttle launch. With the exception of identifying Orion in the night sky, I didn’t think much about space, but I also didn’t realize how much the shuttle program was still a part of me. I was in graduate school when Columbia was lost during reentry. Pairing Challenger and Columbia seemed like a no-brainer for a history of science and technology lesson. Most of the students couldn’t care less. They were not children of the shuttle program.

When President Bush canceled the shuttle program and President Obama cut NASA’s budget, I didn’t think too much about the implications of space exploration. But when NASA announced the end of the shuttle launches, I knew it was my last chance to participate in shuttle festivities, and I knew I wanted to be there.

And so I found myself waiting for hours, surrounded by thousands of other space enthusiasts, anticipating the end of an era. It feels strange, as a historian, to be marking an historic event in the present. My fellow shuttle watchers didn’t share the sentiment. They had nothing but hope and excitement and a feeling of privilege (and maybe a bit of luck) to take part in the event.

Most of the day had the atmosphere of an oddly subdued party. Even the most amateur meteorologist could look at the clouds in the sky and see there was a good chance the launch would be canceled, so we all just milled about, looking at exhibits at the visitor complex, silently hoping that everything would be all right, and following the live feed from NASA.

Former astronauts were on the stage sharing their experiences as the crew went through their final checklist. As it got closer to launch time, Ground Control began giving thanks to all of the men and women who had made the 30 years of the shuttle program possible. Misty-eyed patriots cheered at each remembrance. The crowd gave a collective shout of joy at T minus five minutes, T minus three minutes, T minus one minute. Then, at T minus 31 seconds, someone ordered a hold. I don’t think anyone in the crowd took a breath. We just waited. It had to go up. It just had to. Countdown resumed, and the crowd started chanting. Five...four...three...two...one...and then...nothing.

We were all at the visitors center complex, which is eight miles from the launch pad with a line of trees blocking the horizon. We knew it would take a few seconds before we would see the shuttle, but I don’t think anyone thought those seconds would be so interminable. Then someone shouted, and the crowd surged forward, and you could see the trail of fire through the sky. The shuttle popped into the clouds, reemerged moments later, and was then lost to the clouds for good. A successful launch.

Hours of waiting for seconds of viewing. Is this what it looks like to see history as it unfolds? I’m a bit of a skeptic. Despite the fact that I now own the official launch program, have bought a lanyard for my grand finale launch ticket (shown at left), and mailed some commemorative covers to my Postal Museum friends, I’m left unconvinced by the historic nature of the event.

Don’t get me wrong. It was fabulous, and a memory I will hold dearly. But is it history? Regardless of what the souvenir merchandise available in the gift shop claims, I don’t think we will know for several decades. I believe that determining the historic-ness of this final shuttle launch depends on the future. Is this the moment America hands over manned space flight to Russia? Is this the beginning of an even stronger international collaboration with the space station? Is this the necessary cut needed to jump forward to deeper space exploration and potential travel to Mars? Or does this launch mark a turning point where American society looks internally towards its own planet rather than dreaming of space?

What are the responsibilities of public historians or historians of science and technology or the media or simply space enthusiasts to mark an event and call it history? What material culture should we save, what memories should we document, what stories should we perpetuate?

~ Allison Marsh

Classified past

2011-06-07T17:50:00.000-07:00

The summer TV season is just around the corner, and I can’t wait. It’s a guilty pleasure that I don’t usually brag about to my academic colleagues, but I adore summer TV. Summer television, like beach reading, is supposed to be entertaining – romance and intrigue without the burden of a challenging plotline. For me, last summer’s dark horse winner on the television turned out to be USA’s Covert Affairs. I admit up front that the plot is ridiculous: I know that curators at the Smithsonian (the main character’s cover story) do not fly back and forth to the British Museum regularly, and I am skeptical that all the women at the CIA come to work dressed in cocktail attire, but the show hooked me in Episode 2 when the Agency had to grab a machine from the CIA Museum in order to decode information being transmitted through an old Cold War radio transmission station.

Ridiculous, right? Well, somewhere in Hollywood there is a historian with a sense of humor who is getting the facts (mostly) right. The CIA does have a museum, although I bet it is a stretch to believe that current intelligence officers are using its collections today for active assignments, right?

Actually, it is not a stretch at all. According to Museum officials, the Agency workforce does consult with the museum periodically on technical lessons learned from operational applications of some of the historical items held in the collection. Any current intelligence officer worth his or her salt knows the importance of learning from the past. What better place to do so than in the museum!

Ever since I learned about the CIA Museum, I’ve been intrigued. The museum is not open to the public (you need to be pre-screened to gain admittance to Langley, and even then you are under strict escort), yet it has a very high visitation level from CIA employees and dignitaries. Besides the problem of access, much of the museum’s collection is classified, which can complicate the exhibit design process. Who knew you needed government clearance to be a collections manager?

But the intrepid team at the CIA Museum is determined to reach the public. They are currently in the process of redesigning their website. They have partnered with other institutions and would like to develop traveling exhibits. They are working to draft a collections plan that conforms to American Association of Museum standards (too bad AAM doesn’t have a deaccessioning policy for classified objects). And of course, they are reaching out to couch potatoes like myself through popular television programs. Technically, that last bit isn’t true. It is the CIA’s Office of Public Affairs that liaises with the media. The CIA Museum does not unilaterally reach out to tv producers.

I love it when museums show up on TV (Bones, Warehouse 13, White Collar), but I wonder if museum professionals should be a bit more proactive in describing what we actually do. We all have such great jobs, and all of our cultural institutions have fabulous objects with wonderful, made for Hollywood stories. We just need to get our own story out. I propose that the National Council on Public History develop an “Ask the Public Historian” call center with a direct line to Hollywood so that we can do a bit of professional activism. Plus my mom would love it if I could win an Emmy.

The new season of Covert Affairs begins tonight.

~ Allison Marsh

The history in kidlit

2011-06-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, I spent most of my time in the nineteenth century. It all started with the "Little House" books. My grandmother read them to me, and they became the very first chapter books that I could read all by myself. From there, it was just a hop, skip and jump to Little Women, All-of-a-Kind Family, A Little Princess, and Anne of Green Gables.

Yet, there were so many things in those books that I just didn't understand. What was consumption and cholera? Why were puffed sleeves such a big deal? What did the food taste like? Why was Sara Crewe in India? What’s this Great War they keep talking about? There's one key thing that all of these books have in common: they are either semi-autobiographical or they were written as contemporary and, over time, have become historical fiction. Either way, they're an important source in learning about history--a source that most historians have ignored. To me, they should be considered in much the way memoirs or oral history are considered--perhaps not true in every detail, but more true than not.

By the time I got to college, I was convinced that I was going to be an English major and become a writer. Then, I got an internship at the Dallas Historical Society, going through their archives and writing educational curriculum. It took me almost another year to admit that I was really a historian, which surprised me at the time. Perhaps it shouldn't have--I had already spent most of my childhood in the past.

As I began to dive into the study of history, I began to make all sorts of random connections between the history I was studying and the books I had loved as a child. I kept returning to one book in particular, Rilla of Ingleside by L. M. Montgomery. Set during World War I and published in 1921, it’s one of the few novels about the home front. Recently, a new edition of this classic was published in Canada. Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie have put together a wonderful edition, complete with introduction, timeline, glossary of events, and some World War I poetry. It beautifully sets the story in its historical context. When I first read this book, I had so many questions about World War I, and it took years to find the answers. But now, all of those answers are in one beautiful package!

If I had to pick just one book to explain my whole thesis about kidlit history--that there is some history that is found in children's literature and can't be found anywhere else--this book would be the one I would pick. Primary sources on the emotions and daily lives of the women that watched and waited are hard to find. We tend to document the extraordinary. Though these women were living in extraordinary times, I don't think they realized how much their lives were changing.

Montgomery knew she was telling the story of the masses of Canadian women that worked at home and waited. She wrote "In my latest story, 'Rilla of Ingleside,' I have tried, as far as in me lies, to depict the fine and splendid way in which the girls of Canada reacted to the Great War--their bravery, patience and self-sacrifice. The book is theirs in a sense in which none of my other books have been: for my other books were written for anyone who might like to read them: but 'Rilla' was written for the girls of the great young land I love, whose destiny it will be their duty and privilege to shape and share." In their introduction, Lefebvre and McKenzie write "Rilla of Ingleside thus pictures, as no other war novel of its time does, a uniquely Canadian perspective about the women and families who battled to keep the home fires burning throughout this tumultuous era." Montgomery was a historian, even though her books are always shelved with children’s literature.

In my current job as a museum educator, I'm pulling children's literature in whenever and wherever I can. Using books that kids or adults are familiar with is a wonderful way to make connections with history. And in talking with colleagues, I know I’m not the only one that can trace a love of history back to literature first discovered as a child. In the last couple of years, I’ve started paying more attention to the threads of history woven through these books, and it’s been a fascinating journey. If you’re interested in coming along, please join me on my blog.

~ Melissa Prycer

Guest blogger Melissa Prycer has a MA in Public History. She is currently the Director of Education at Dallas Heritage Village. This piece was cross-published with the National Council on Public History's June 2011 newsletter.

Human Rights Lessons: The Letelier-Moffitt Monument and an International Terrorist Attack

2011-05-24T06:04:00.000-07:00

On September 21, 1976, former and now deceased Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet brought international terrorism to the U.S. capital. As part of a plot to eliminate opponents of the military regime which took power in a bloody U.S.-backed coup on September 11, 1973, Pinochet’s crosshairs targeted Orlando Letelier, Chile’s one-time ambassador to the US under President Salvador Allende from 1970-1973. Working in exile after the coup at the Institute for Policy Studies, Letelier, with recently married colleagues Ronni and Michael Moffitt, shared a car ride to work that fateful September day in DC. When the automobile made its routine route to Sheridan Circle via Massachusetts Ave., it exploded. Mr. Moffitt was thrown from the car, but Letelier and Mrs. Moffitt were less fortunate, and were pronounced dead within an hour of the attack.

More than 30 years later, I sat on the sidewalk next to the explosion site to sketch the modest monument memorializing the tragic event. A few people passed me, staring, perhaps wondering (or perhaps knowing) what the monument marked. I, meanwhile, wondered how it came to be--who was responsible for memorializing, in 1981, this place of tragedy and terror. I later learned that the creation of the memorial was connected to the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award, which was established in the immediate aftermath of the attack. After the annual conferment of this important award, ceremony attendees would assemble in homage at Sheridan Circle. Peter Kornbluh, now a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and then a GWU graduate student who helped spearhead the award and memorial initiatives, recently explained that after the first few awards ceremonies there was a need among the victims’ families and friends for something at the site much more concrete: an approximately three-foot high monument with a granite base, crowned by a bronze plaque with the profiles of Letelier and Moffitt that matched the commemorative coin handed out with the award. The inscription reads “Justice, Peace, Dignity,” followed by the victims’ names, birthdates, and Sept. 21, 1976.

It is curious though that although peace has since returned to Chile, justice and dignity are still watchwords for many victims—and their allies—of Pinochet’s terror. In fact, in Chile, many of these actors and the organizations they have formed turn to memorialization to achieve a justice and dignity that has been far from forthcoming despite two official truth commissions (Rettig, 1991 and Valech, 2004), modest economic reparations, and a few nominal convictions of Pinochet’s perpetrators. A 2007 conference report, Memorialization and Democracy: State Policy and Civic Action, suggests memorialization is second in import only to economic reparations for victims of state sponsored violence. As such, Chile in the post-dictatorship era has seen almost unparalleled activity in memorialization and commemoration events, with many, if not all, formulated under the language of human rights.

But back in the US human rights language isn’t normally associated with memorial making—though, importantly, the Letelier-Moffitt monument is. It was fascinating for me to learn of the relationship between the Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award and accompanying monument. This is undoubtedly an indicator of the vibrant human rights movement which was ignited on exactly the same day Pinochet took power in Chile in 1973. As Edward Cleary writes in the opening pages of Mobilizing for Human Rights in Latin America (2007), “The watershed event in the contemporary human rights period for most observers of Latin America from the United States and Europe was the bloody coup that occurred on the ‘other September 11th.’” Thus, while Pinochet flexed his power, so too did the families and friends of Letelier and Moffitt. By establishing a human rights award in conjunction with a human rights memorial, these activists responded with powerful practical and symbolic tools to reproach Pinochet’s crimes against humanity, insisting on the political meanings of this sacralized ground. In fact, in a delayed way, the memorialization efforts in DC in 1981 can be considered a precursor to the many human rights memorials that stand today in Chile. And this is of no small significance because, according to the “Memorialization and Democracy” report, Chile “has made exciting progress in reconstructing the memory of gross human rights abuses” and “serves as an example for other countries.”

Yet like Chile today and DC yesterday, marking sites of tragedy and terror is hardly a seamless process. In DC, Kornbluh and company met opposition from the political right, including conservative pundits who labeled the monument “communist.” Moreover, between its construction and inauguration, the monument was defaced with red paint on more than a couple of occasions by, it is suspected, Pinochet’s embassy officials. This forced Kornbluh, after many hours cleaning and much elbow grease, to buy a tarp and chain to protect the monument. As for Chile, memorializing sites of tragedy and terror, of detention and torture, comes with an impossibly long list of complications that include, but are not limited to, state stonewalling, schisms among human rights organizations, and site specific contingencies. Yet, a closer reading of these complications reveals more than the controversies that they provoke: an engagement by civil society to confront directly—and publicly!—the atrocities of the past. In Chile, alone, there are close to 150 permanent human rights memorials, with 12 of those deemed National Historic Monuments.

Today the Letelier-Moffitt monument no longer generates the controversy it once did; nor, do I suspect, does it receive more than modest attention beyond the insiders who know the story of Orlander Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. Kornbluh, though, would like to see an addendum added (next) to the monument that specifically cites the terrorist attack to better inform those passerbies wondering what it marks. Because as much as it memorializes Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, so too does it begin to shed light on the influence of an international human rights movement sparked by Chile’s military coup--and, of course, how this movement has turned towards memorializing sites of tragedy, torture, and terror in an effort to achieve justice and dignity.

~ Zachary McKiernan

Image credits: Peter Kornbluh (monument), Zachary McKiernan (sketch)

Diggin' the census

2011-05-04T04:29:00.000-07:00

From the early 1900s on, the interest in genealogy has been fairly widespread in Norway. Lately though, there has been an explosive increase in interest. This can be contributed to two main factors. One is the series “Who do you think you are?” (Norwegian version). The other factor is the release of the digitized version of the 1910 census, now available online.

Researching family history might be easier for Norwegians than for Americans. Unique to Norway is the amount of resources available to genealogists. There is a plethora of sources easily accessible online. Genealogy is also very popular in neighboring Sweden and Denmark, but the genealogist’s situation there is different. Swedes have to pay for material Norwegians can access online for free. The Danish situation is quite similar to the Norwegian, but they lack our unique and extremely useful tool, the bygdebok, which will be addressed later. In other European countries (for example, Germany) there are few sources online. Parish records, for instance, can only be obtained through archives, and for a fee.

The National Archives of Norway are responsible for digitizing sources and making them available for researchers and the general public. The work of digitization and transcription is however divided between the different regional state archives and universities. Available online, and free of charge are: the censuses of 1801, 1865, 1875 (not completed), 1900 and 1910. Most parish registers are scanned and available online, and the work is still in progress. The parish registers contain births, christenings, confirmations (confirmation was mandatory before getting married), marriages, and burials (millions of pages). Also available are sources like probate records and real estate records, at least 14 million pages. In addition to work done by the state archives and universities, a lot of material is scanned and transcribed by genealogists and local history societies. This gives the Norwegian hobby genealogist access to an enormous amount of information online.

But how to proceed? All the public records can be accessed through the Digital archive’s homepage (i.e. the National Archives of Norway in collaboration with the universities). The Digital archive’s homepage contains several links that can be helpful to the new genealogist. There are links to a Forum for contact with the Digital Archives, the Users Forum, and “Ask the National Archives”. There’s also a link to an online course (interactive and free) in gothic handwriting. The reason for learning to read gothic handwriting is that only the censuses are transcribed; the other sources are scanned documents, i.e. primary sources.

But all the easily accessible resources online don’t fully explain why genealogy is so popular in Norway. There are two other important factors to consider: Knowing with certainty where your great grandparents come from (as most Norwegians do), does make it easier to start tracing the family history. Not knowing when your great grandparents were born, only where, the common tool to use would be the bygdebok (literally village book).

The bygdebok is a genre unique to Norway, and in my view of great importance to the popularity of genealogy in Norway. This kind of local history has been addressed by some of Norway’s finest historians, and has been seen as a legitimate pursuit among historians. In Denmark, by contrast, local history has been regarded with a certain amount of skepticism, has had little prestige in the past, and was by some seen as contributing to separatism, and therefore not encouraged. The Norwegian bygdebok can be described as a form of total history. In these bygdebøker the local history is recorded, usually starting with a description of the archeological finds in the area. As a rule the names of owners and families living on each farm hundreds of years back are provided. It would be fair to say that these books cover most of Norway. Some of the bygdebøker are available online, otherwise the ones you need can be sent to your local library free of charge. The bygdebøker are widely used by genealogists, although in the genealogist community it’s expected that every genealogist also checks the primary sources. If not, she can risk getting the nickname “bygdebokavskriver” (avskriver = copier).

The general interest in genealogy has led to international actors with different agendas popping up online. If you need to boost your genealogical pride, you can hitch your ahnentafel to GENI (a collaborative genealogy platform) as I did on a winter night. According to GENI I’m related to many significant Norwegian profiles, all the way back to the legendary king Nor who established Norway. However, the ancestors you find on GENI must be taken with more than a grain of salt, though it must be said that there are several capable moderators continually cleaning up the lineages. As for now, I take pride in the surprising (and well documented) discovery of an ancestry of well respected boat builders and well educated men and women living in a small valley in Vestlandet (the western part of Norway) stretching back hundreds of years. Finding these previously unknown ancestors has made me curious for more information. Several of the boat builders kept a “diary”, records of incidents in the family, and of the boats they built and sold. This book is published (three books bound into one), and two days ago I got it in the mail. It was interesting reading, and reading it has only spurred me on...

There are ongoing projects, many collaborative efforts between professionals and amateurs, to make even more material available to the public. In the future I expect the databases will get more user-friendly and better coordinated with each other. There’s a certain urgency about identifying the pictures in the museum’s databases before it’s too late, and also for people to share old photographs they possess with the public. There is in all the projects mentioned here an underlying thought of a common inheritance--an inheritance we work together to preserve, which is for everyone to use and enjoy.

Bottom line, in Norway genealogy can easily become an obsession, and for most people the hobby has challenges enough for more than a lifetime.

~ Anett Ytre-Eide

Guest blogger Anett Ytre-Eide earned a Master of Philosophy in Culture and Ideas Studies from the University of Oslo in autumn 2010. She is interested in living history, phenomenology and "thinking with her feet", and is a new genealogy enthusiast. The conductor of the military band in the c. late 1890s photo above is her second great grandfather Samuel.

If Ken Burns made car ads

2011-04-10T17:25:00.000-07:00

Car ads are like little zeitgeist-meters. They’re amazingly responsive to all kinds of social anxieties, which they instantly repackage in ways that allow us to continue feeling good about driving. Feeling nationally or personally emasculated? Concerned about the transition into being a soccer mom? Worried about climate change? Fear not. You can buy a minivan and still be hot; owning a Nissan Leaf will cause you to be hugged by grateful polar bears. All is well in the world of the car ad.

Which is why Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” ad, which debuted in a two-minute version during the 2011 Super Bowl and has been running in a shorter format since then, is so striking. It brings the anxiety right into the frame of the commercial, using image, music, and association to evoke the long pain of deindustrialization and the resulting gutting-out of cities and economies. The full-length spot, which has topped ten million views on YouTube, features Detroit-based rapper Eminem driving through the city in a gleaming new Chrysler 200 (née Sebring) while a raspy male voice discusses the city’s ups and downs over footage of monuments, factories, athletes, homes. The opening riff of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself," a nervous insistent strumming, permeates the piece, giving it much of its edgy feel. Eminem winds up at the stunningly restored Fox Theater, where the guitar riff merges with a vocal crescendo from a black gospel choir on the stage, dropping to a reverent hush behind his somber delivery of the line, “We’re the Motor City, and this is what we do.”

I have no particular trouble finding things to critique about this ad, because, well, that’s what I do. There’s a subtle “othering” of Detroit’s industrial and postindustrial working people, in the “Imported from Detroit” tagline and in the images of past struggles—Diego Rivera’s famous Detroit murals, the gigantic iron fist of the memorial sculpture to Detroit boxing great Joe Louis—and present production of goods (the unseen workers behind the gleaming Chrysler 200) and services (the doorman who nods to Eminem as the car rolls past an upscale hotel). Despite the invocation of working-class heroisms and skills, the emphasis here is on luxury and the relationships that sustain it. The doorman’s brief nod seems to reinforce Rachel Sherman’s argument that these service-economy laborers become complicit in creating and sustaining the very hierarchies that limit their own options (see Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels, University of California Press, 2007). This othering of the working class is subtly racialized, particularly in in the appearance of the gospel choir, which, as Douglas Harrison notes, is a kind of convenient shorthand in American pop culture for moral strength and resilient human spirit, appearing to transcend race while drawing on histories of racial struggle. The ad also plays with the romance of ruins, but very fleetingly, in a early brief shot of an empty building façade that is immediately superceded by more heroic and positive images. It hints at the struggle-and-recovery story even while it draws on the aesthetic fascination of decay and decline (the contemplation of which has become almost an industry in itself around Detroit).

So there’s lots to question here. But what I really find myself thinking when I watch this ad is, “Damn, these guys are good.” Never mind that it’s difficult to tell what’s an “American” or “imported” car at this point; never mind that the real challenge for places like Detroit is to try to discover what they might become apart from the gigantic industries that dominated them in the 20th century. The ad works on the level of myth, implicitly tying together the histories of labor and racial struggle, industrialization and deindustrialization, Detroit and America, TARP and Toyota, in a way that asserts persistence and resilience on every level. Oh, and it’s selling a car, too. The fact that the car seems like an after-thought only makes the ad more effective. This is the “tragedy with a happy ending” that William Dean Howells famously said Americans prefer when they go to the theater. It invokes loss, but in a way that feels shared and thus ultimately unifying. It is, in short, a Ken Burns film.

If Ken Burns made car ads, he would work for Portland, Oregon-based Wieden + Kennedy. W+K is fully capable of making jauntier car ads; their popular “Hate Something, Change Something” campaign for Honda, aimed at improving the image of the diesel engine in the U.K., was chirpy and upbeat (and wouldn’t it be nice if someone would undertake a similar makeover for diesels in the U.S.?). But they’re also not afraid of sentiment, and they’ve learned a thing or two from Burns about evocative music and how to enlist the gravitas of difficult histories without allowing them to provoke too many questions that might disrupt that bittersweet sense of shared struggle. (Their recent ad for Royal Enfield motorcycles is really a hymn to the city of Chennai, arguably the Detroit of India. Watch it and tell me you don’t find yourself thinking of Burns’s Civil War series.)

Ken Burns moves historical materials into the realm of the mythic, and W+K is moving that powerful combo into the realm of advertising. It’s daunting to think about how to counter that technique. A few comments on the YouTube ad do take a critical tack, but the overwhelming response is emotive and supportive. The ad creates a kind of virtual vernacular memorial space for the slow disaster that is Detroit; people are asserting solidarity and pride in a way that seems directed at the city’s working class but that is really being stimulated on behalf of capital, not labor. What would a counter-myth for a post-industrial, less car-dependent society look like? When we find one, we may do well to take a leaf out of W+K’s book when we're ready to sell the public on it.

~ Cathy Stanton

Historical diaries find a new platform in Twitter

2011-03-22T07:24:00.000-07:00

Many unlikely and whimsical projects flourish on Twitter, the popular microblogging service just celebrating its fifth birthday. Big Ben strikes the hour (“bong bong bong”), encounters with near-earth objects are automatically updated (the most recent one missed the Earth by about three million kilometers), a parody account for a politician becomes a compelling scifi short story and the Field Museum’s T-Rex, Sue, turns out to have a wicked sense of humor.

Twitter’s constraints—140 characters per post, period—and affordances—those 140 characters can be filled with anything, communication can be synchronous or asynchronous, anyone can follow a twitter account—have boosted its popularity to around 190 million users. They also give us an opportunity to reflect on its resonances with the past. There is a strong community on Twitter of historians, cultural heritage professionals and genealogists—as well as historical characters tweeting for themselves.

Many have pointed out the connections between the terseness of Twitter and that of the telegrams, and the “telegraphic” language both require because of space constraints (luckily we don’t pay by the character on Twitter). But another familiar connection is with diaries. The factual, semi-public diary entries of line-a-day diarists of the 19th and early 20th centuries are short and pithy enough to make excellent tweets (pdf). Like the tweets of our friends, we follow them for frequent, short updates, enough to get a sense of the rhythms of their lives, what on the web we call “ambient intimacy.” Not every individual tweet will be a masterpiece, emotionally compelling or even interesting. But they help us understand the person who tweets them. The updates of historical diarists enable, not the immersion we desire from living history museums, but the ability to take a brief drink from a river that flowed long ago, and to dip in again whenever we like.

The historical diary is a thriving genre of Twitter performance. There are around a dozen historical diaries currently being tweeted, daily or sporadically. Some are produced by historical organizations and some by descendants of the diarists. There are famous diarists (yes, even Samuel Pepys is on Twitter) and everyday people. In 2009, for instance, the Massachusetts Historical Society started tweeting a diary of John Quincy Adams’ trip to Russia in 1809. He talks about travel, who visited, what he read. And @genny_spencer is the diary of a teenage girl in rural Illinois, tweeted by her descendants. Her great-nephew David Griner posted about the project: “Looking at the terse journal, my sister quipped, ‘This is the Twitter of the 1930s.’ We...immediately began planning the Twitter account...”

For tweeted historical diaries, what started as an imagined resonance between past and future communication technology—the observation that short diary entries feel like Twitter—becomes a real daily connection with people from the past. By reanimating and historical actors, we make this connection between historic communication platforms and Twitter real, and we also make this connection between us and historical characters real. Emotional connections make it real. And that’s a key insight for public history practice in less than 140 characters.

~ Suzanne Fischer

Hen House History: No Harm, No Fowl

2011-03-07T16:53:00.000-08:00

I am obsessed with a chicken coop.

On a long and poorly charted road trip this past summer, I wandered into Lake Solano Park campground, located on the quiet banks of Putah Creek just off California Highway 128. The campground is on land originally populated by Patwin Indians, then homesteaded in 1875 by Daniel Tucker who managed a cattle and sheep operation and quarried limestone from local hills for area building foundations. Teeming with wild peacocks (legend holds they were brought in to manage the rattlesnakes), the campground proper was established by the Bureau of Reclamation (“B of Rec” in local-speak) in 1973 and is currently managed by Solano County Parks.

Two sturdy bird houses stand in the large and open campground, near the public showers, one on each side of the narrow road. Open on three sides but fully enclosed in wire—presumably to keep the objects in and the humans out—one coop held the expected collection of birds. For a quarter dropped into a gumball machine, both the tiny Silkies and uncaged visitors were briefly entertained by a handful of cracked corn. Just across the campground road is a second coop (a “hen house” in local-speak). Contents: a miniature museum. Thus began my obsession with this surprising and out-of-the-way staging of local history.

I spoke with Duane Davis, just-retired from Solano County Parks after 35 years of service as Ranger Supervisor, and exchanged emails with his wife, Leslie. Both were graciously helpful and patient with my many questions and emails. The structures alone have an interesting story as told by Mr. Davis.

“The present day Hen House evolved from a smaller enclosure. A nearby neighbor learned of the park theme and donated a few birds along with historical farm equipment from the local area and barn wood for other displays. The campers and their children liked the addition. The first birds were attacked by a bobcat one night and witnessed by the nearby camp host. Attempts were made to strengthen the enclosure and roof the pen. More birds were donated (Chickens and Doves) by the same source and Guinea Hens by myself. Various campers donated money, food and wire. That summer a horde of large rats got under the wire and were found dining on unhatched hen eggs. A concerned camping family made a large money donation. I copied the enclosures design after one at the Sacramento Zoo. Volunteers, Sheriff inmates, and park staff built what you see today, I think in 2000 or 2001.”

“Sheriff’s inmates”? Now this is getting interesting.

Lacking a larger county agenda, the Hen House was a labor of love by proud, local people. Haphazard and humble, it appears almost accidental. The barn wood used for the structure and featured objects within the structure came from the “old Hubert ranch,” though being a stranger in their country, I could not appreciate the significance of the Huberts. The tiny display housed a limited and dusty collection of objects, unlabeled and without contextualization. A small sign provided a frustratingly meager amount of information.

I am an admitted museum snob. I like things tidy, well-organized, with lots of in–depth information and well–placed wall boards. Hen House had none of these. So what was it about this display that spoke to me—that stopped me in my tracks? Is this a new and unique development in public history? No. Is this a critical component of public history? Yes. Because of its very simplicity, this casual accumulation of objects invited curious engagement. What was this stuff behind the wire and where did it come from? How was it used and by whom? What were the complexities and humanity of those lives? How did time move forward for the people but not for the objects left behind? Can the intimate history of person:possession ever be recovered?

Absent formality or sophisticated scholarship, these homespun efforts may provoke sniffs from professionals. The Hen House museum obviously lacked the staffing and skills of trained curators and historians found at “real” museums. But the formality of access to these museums--location, hours, admission fees, rigorous professionalism--engenders a preemptive contract with visitors to engage the exhibit in a certain way. Historical museums, just like the news, or a textbook, or even People magazine--any venue in which information is delivered--necessarily stage knowledge in a factual and linear way, privileging particular information above other information (theme and scope management), providing the visitor with carefully crafted intelligence understood by the majority of the audience to be sum total fact.

Michel Foucault, in his 1980 essay, "Power/Knowledge," speaks of the State creating and manifesting power by controlling the production of and access to knowledge. While formal museums and informal historical displays are not in gladiator–like combat with each other, the point can be made that local (capillary) knowledge legitimately augments knowledge as a whole and can challenge State–crafted margins of truth. Despite its informality, the low-history of the Hen House importantly redraws these margins of “proper” and “sanctioned” knowledge, touching people in ways that formality cannot.

The Hen House created an opportunity in which I was forced to craft my own set of critical questions that I may not have done at an exhibit where information is carefully constructed for efficient visitor consumption. The failure of the Hen House to explicitly speak to the hidden meanings and history of its objects was, in part, its success.

~ Anne Coogan-Gehr

More heritage, hon? Community history and gentrification in Baltimore

2011-02-12T13:42:00.000-08:00

The process of gentrification is often linked with public history in varying ways. Urban planners and developers, for example, market neighborhoods through reference to their historic character, which can include anything from events that occurred in the far-distant past to interesting architecture. Yet, gentrification is often seen at odds with the goals of public history. Architecturally “uninteresting” buildings may be leveled, destroying the vernacular past, while a focus on a vague history can overshadow more contentious, complicated stories. Perhaps most troubling for public historians is the fact that gentrification is usually accompanied by demographic changes that often result in the loss of longstanding communities.

This process is clearly visible in the Hampden neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland. Once a predominantly white working-class area, in the last two decades it has undergone a significant population and cultural shift. Today, as in many gentrified places, it would be easier to take a bikram yoga class than to buy a hammer on the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare.

At the forefront of Hampden’s gentrification is the Café Hon restaurant, opened by Denise Whiting in 1992. The Café markets itself with the image of the Baltimore “Hon,” a 1950s-era white working-class woman from Baltimore best known for her over-the-top style and warm personality. In 1994, Whiting started a street festival, HonFest, to promote her restaurant under the cover of celebrating working women. The festival’s main event is the crowning of Baltimore’s Best Hon in a contest in which mainly professional women dress up in exaggerated versions of mid 20th century working-class style and speak in the local dialect called “Bawlmer.” According to the Baltimore Sun, Hon Fest may be the city’s most popular neighborhood festival, drawing approximately 50,000 people to the two-day event, suggesting the Hon’s significant place in constructing a tourist-friendly image for Hampden.

Popular as it is, HonFest mainly pays lip service to the history of working-class women in the neighborhood. Displaying many of the most egregious aspects of gentrification, especially the desire to control public space for the comfort of tourists and upscale professionals rather than residents, HonFest has also caused controversy. The use of heritage discourse at HonFest and the Hon’s connection with economic and demographic change in the community, suggested that public historians might have something to add to the debate. Dr. Denise Meringolo, who directs the public history program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and I discussed the possibility of using the Hon and Hampden as a community case study for a graduate class. This seemed an ideal opportunity for public history students who are learning the tools of historical research and how to work with diverse partners to produce historical representations that balance their needs with the historian’s professional authority, while also making visible the history of working-class women in the area. With funding from UMBC’s social entrepreneurship program, “Community-Based History: Hampden’s Hon Fest”, was offered for master’s students in public history. The class goal was to create a plan for an exhibit on working-class women’s history in Hampden to debut at HonFest, hopefully historicizing the Hon while raising questions about the transformation of Hampden.

Students began by immersing themselves in Hampden’s history. Luckily an earlier generation of public historians created the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project in the late 70s. This series of oral history interviews of elderly Baltimoreans included a number for Hampden, giving students a starting point for understanding the neighborhood in the 20th century, which we supplemented with scholarly and popular histories of the area. Repeated throughout the interviews and the histories was the idea of Hampden as separate from “the rest of Baltimore” due to geography (it’s bordered by a park and Johns Hopkins University) and culture, as it was settled by Southern and Appalachian whites and has remained predominantly white even as Baltimore’s population has become majority African American, a significant factor in the neighborhood’s gentrification. Students, after taking a walking tour of Hampden and speaking with neighborhood representatives, felt that HonFest was a symptom of a larger issue over who “owns” the neighborhood. Perceived differences between newcomers and longtime residents (often expressed through cultural capital) were impeding possibilities for community engagement with the area’s history. HonFest is clearly a lightning rod for this issue. Residents dislike the festival, but don’t engage with the larger issues of demographic change, neighborhood history and controlling development that undergird it.

In a display of laudable initiative, students shifted the class project. Rather than historicizing the Hon, the class wanted to help build bridges among residents of Hampden and between Hampden and neighboring communities. A proposed bicycle path in the Baltimore Heritage Area also winds through Hampden, passing factories and worker housing. Literally and symbolically, this path represented an opportunity for connection. Given their time and resources, the class decided to design wayside markers that would connect contemporary Hampden to its working-class history.

By semester’s end, the class had created draft markers with the theme “Hampden has always been connected to the city of Baltimore.” This seemingly simple notion helps refute Hampden’s supposed isolation and has been incorporated more directly into the panels through the tagline “at home in Hampden,” which addresses gentrification by focusing on living in the neighborhood, rather than just visiting for HonFest or to shop on the increasingly upscale main thoroughfare. Using historic photos and quotes from the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project, the markers focus on topics ranging from work in the textile mills that created the neighborhood to the role of community institutions like churches. By using subtle language, the panels gently approach issues of gentrification. With no community entity behind the project, this tactic was chosen to insure that the markers would not repel the varying factions in the neighborhood who would need to be wooed, a balancing act familiar to many public historians.

At the time of this writing, the students have presented the panels to the community council (the lack of a historical society has been a further stumbling block) and are hoping to have a meeting with the Merchants Association soon. The class was advised by a city council member that it was cost prohibitive to put the markers in public areas, as that would require paying annual fees. Instead, she suggested finding local businesses willing to have the markers on their buildings, effectively privatizing this public historical project. The community representatives’ reactions have been positive. However, as in many gentrifying neighborhoods, some of the most active people are the relative newcomers. It has proven much more difficult to “get” the input of longtime residents, many of whom feel disconnected from the area.

As the students were working on this project, Hampden erupted in controversy over ownership of “hon” and its relationship to the heritage of the neighborhood and Baltimore more widely. Denise Whiting let it be known that she holds several trademarks for the word “hon,” which, she claims are essential to protect her business interests. However, many others have recoiled at what they see as an attempt to control what is properly understood as part of Baltimore’s heritage. Protests have been held outside the Café, a Facebook page called “No One Owns HON, hon” has 3,109 fans (more than the Café itself), and a local man vows to test the trademark’s validity by selling coffee mugs with the word on it, giving these students’ project a currency unexpected at the start. While confronting HonFest directly may have been more a explicit strategy, their decision will hopefully open a space for discussion of issues around gentrification as well as the practical question of who public historians can work with to tell this complicated and contentious story.

~ Mary Rizzo

NOTE: The image above, supplied by the author, shows Heidi, Rita, and Nichole dressed as Hons for HonFest.

"Beautiful Girls That Live Like Fish!"

2011-01-13T17:29:00.000-08:00

In this post, Vintage Roadside’s first for “Off the Wall”, we’d like to introduce ourselves by touching on our motivation for launching our preservation-themed business followed by a brief review of a symposium we presented this past summer on Aquarama, a wonderful 1960s mermaid attraction once found on Lake of the Ozarks in Osage Beach, Missouri.

From one perspective, Vintage Roadside is a t-shirt company featuring original advertising graphics and history of mom and pop businesses operating from the 1930s through the 1960s.

From another perspective, Vintage Roadside may also be considered non-traditional (or, what we call when we’re feeling feisty, “guerilla”) historians working to communicate the stories and history behind mom and pop places travelers could have visited on a road trip undertaken anytime from America’s boom in road construction and automobile travel to the decade following the introduction of the Interstate System.

Over the past five years, the questions we’re most frequently asked relate to why we think roadside culture of the 1930s – 1960s is important. Is it the kitsch factor? Is it nostalgia for a sentimentalized past? Do we secretly long for ducktail haircuts and pedal pushers?

The best way we can answer those questions is to talk about our experience road tripping through small towns across the country. Drawn by our nature to roadside architecture, we often stopped at historical societies, museums, and local businesses to ask questions about an abandoned motel or a dilapidated neon sign advertising the best hamburgers in town.

Although we met many kindred spirits who shared a love of roadside architecture and knew the places we were referring to, we had a difficult time uncovering specifics about who ran the business, when it operated, or why it closed.

We also talked with a number of people who enjoyed roadside remnants in their community, but did not immediately connect defunct roadside attractions or bowling alleys with “historic preservation.”

From our perspective, we saw the defunct mom and pops as much more than failed businesses. For us, the history of mom and pops was the gateway to relating a community’s past with its present.

In addition to providing interesting family and community history, the story behind each mom and pop also had the potential to touch on a fascinating variety of subjects including the evolution of motor courts and motels in America, the changing nature of travel and entertainment post-WWII, the neon and sign painting industry in the 1950s, the cultural impact of technological innovations such as air conditioning and television, even the flamboyant individuality of roadside entrepreneurs before the prevalence of corporate chains.

Our feeling that the histories of defunct roadside mom and pops were not particularly valued as a subject of preservation while their records, buildings, and stories seemed to be disappearing prompted us to found Vintage Roadside.

In our own way, we view our t-shirts, packaged with their brief history hang tags and extended histories available on our website, as a way to support and contribute to the ranks of those working to document roadside America of the 1930s – 1960s.

We often hear from our customers that they enjoy wearing our t-shirts because they have the potential to start a conversation – whether it be about the place featured on the t-shirt or a favorite memory of a mom and pop back in the day. Two particular questions also seem to come up time and again: where have all the mom and pops gone and what, if anything, should be done to preserve those that are still around?

In addition to acting as conversation starters, we see our t-shirts as a fun way to talk about the relevance of historic preservation to the recent past and, through the support of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, are able to offer those customers who’d like to learn a little more about the preservation movement a free one-year membership to the NTHP.

This past August, we expanded our role as t-shirt toting roadside historians by presenting a symposium based on Aquarama, a 1960s mermaid attraction on Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks.

The venue for our first presentation of “Beautiful Girls That Live Like Fish!” might be considered fairly non-traditional in the public history field: Tiki Oasis, a fantastic four-day tiki convention in San Diego, CA.

As our PowerPoint presentation started with lowered lights, we invited the audience to travel back in time with us to 1964 and imagine themselves sitting front row at Aquarama’s underwater show. To help set the mood, we played the opening sequence of Aquarama’s original voice-over narration and music obtained from Marc Johl, the son of Aquarama’s founders.

The opening soundtrack was followed by a history of the Johl family and Aquarama illustrated through vintage 8 mm film clips, photographs of beautifully preserved costumes used in Aquarama routines from 1964 – 1968, vintage advertising ephemera, and invaluable first person interviews with Marc Johl and past Aquarama employees.

We also we brought in Marina the Fire Eating Mermaid, a professional aquatic performer and friend, for a lively Q & A about aquatic entertainment, then and now.

Although the Q & A had the potential to veer into a discussion of pop culture and kitsch, we were pleased that the questions asked by our wonderful audience were both thoughtful and fun and indicated that we were successful in communicating our goals for the presentation – to celebrate the history of a unique roadside mom and pop while opening up a larger discussion about the changing experience of automobile travel over the past 50 years and the impact of the Interstate system and corporate chains on independently owned mom and pops.

Questions brought up during the Q & A also touched on broader questions relating to historic preservation such as who decides what is to be preserved, whether historic preservation is inherently anti-development, and the value of preserving roadside history – exactly the discussion that we hoped to spark with the founding of Vintage Roadside.

On a technical note, we thought the addition of a soundtrack to the 30–60 second film clips spaced throughout the presentation would have created more of an impact on the audience. We’ll be making this improvement for future presentations.

Through our use of archival materials, corroborated oral history, and passion for the subject, we’d like to think that our symposium about a nearly forgotten 1960s mermaid attraction both entertained and engaged people in a broader discussion of the value of preserving roadside culture and place history while helping to push the boundaries of what might be considered as public history display.

~ Kelly Burg and Jeff Kunkle

History museums in a wiki world

2011-01-05T19:12:00.000-08:00

This January Wikipedia will be celebrating its ten year anniversary, and it’s safe to say that in the past decade the editable encyclopedia has challenged the academic and cultural sectors in a number of ways. A recent post on Off the Wall has already discussed the shifting role that Wikipedia plays in academia, specifically noting its potential for historiography. For a while now I have been interested in digital history, having studied history and social studies education at the home of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. But it wasn’t until I shifted my focus to museum studies and collections management that I fell into the world of Wikipedia. I haven’t looked back.

In the fall of 2009, Jennifer Geigel Mikulay, assistant professor at IUPUI, and Richard McCoy, associate conservator of objects at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, integrated an experimental Wikipedia project into the museum studies course “Collections Care and Management.” Inspired by the nationwide “Save Outdoor Sculpture!” project of the 1990’s, Mikulay and McCoy hoped to remedy the lack of coverage of public art within Wikipedia by bringing the SOS! database into the 21st century. Wikipedia Saves Public Art, now called WikiProject Public Art (that's its logo above), began by documenting the artworks on the IUPUI campus. Within the semester, students researched and wrote forty-two public art articles and the IUPUI Public Art Collection was organized and documented for the first time in its history. The resources of the project have continued to be used to document other public art collections in cities, college campuses, and public spaces such as the Indiana State House.

What I find to be most encouraging about WikiProject Public Art is the model it provides for sharing information about objects that are otherwise ignored, forgotten, or misunderstood. Now Wikipedia can be combined with the technology of smart phones to find and share information from anywhere at any time. For example, a visitor on the campus of IUPUI can pull up Google Earth and see a slew of “W” icons denoting Wikipedia articles about the artworks surrounding them. You can stand in front of John Torreano’s Mega-Gem and, in spite of its lack of label, learn about the artwork, its provenance, and the artist, all by accessing the Wikipedia article on your smart phone.

Museum exhibits are beginning to utilize this technology by implementing it in a number of ways such as in-gallery computers or iPads, QR codes,and simple labels prompting visitors to search for Wikipedia articles on their phone. The Brooklyn Museum’s Seductive Subversion exhibit is a recent example of Wikipedia and iPad integration. Staff updated and created Wikipedia articles on women artists in the Pop Art movement which visitors can now access oniPads in the gallery. Historical institutions have yet to tap into Wikipedia’s potential for on-site interpretation. Likewise, historians are only beginning to see Wikipedia as a viable community for sharing research. As the late Roy Rosenzweig, the founder of the Center for History and New Media, has said, "If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyclopedia for the twenty-first century, historians probably have a professional obligation to make it as good as possible." The Wikimedia Foundation is currently funding an effort to train Campus Ambassadors who will assist professors in integrating Wikipedia into their curriculums. The first focus has been on United States Public Policy, which will help alleviate the backlog of updates that these particular articles require. While this is a start, museums and cultural institutions can certainly help fill the gap in the broader scope of historical topics in Wikipedia.

Other than the perks of interactive technology experiences, there are other implications for the integration of Wikipedia in historical exhibit spaces. Access to Wikipedia articles can help alleviate the museum educator and curator’s struggle over the depth of content to include on labels, providing a variety of levels of information for a range of audiences. Likewise, Wikipedia is a means for sharing the abundance of research that goes into preparing exhibits, much of which never reaches the public. This research can be taken out of the filing cabinets and shared with a much wider audience. By contributing new information to Wikipedia articles, cultural institutions are not only providing new content through in-exhibit technology, but are also increasing the accessibility to their collections with a global audience on the most widely used online encyclopedia. More practically speaking, at a time when museum budgets are continuing to tighten, Wikipedia is a valuable free resource, the only cost being the time it takes to update articles.

The process of contributing to Wikipedia articles will remain an important concern for museum staff. As a freely editable encyclopedia, Wikipedia is only as good as its contributors. For Wikipedia, cultural institutions are a largely untappedsource of expertise in the field. I’m now interested in ways that museum staff can efficiently share their expertise and collections information on Wikipedia. GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) is a global initiative that is considering ways to streamline the collaboration between Wikipedia and the cultural sector. Some pilot projects have included individual Wikipedian-in-Residence programs, such as the British Museum’s project in May-June 2010 (shown above), and E-Volunteer programs like the one recently launched at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

It is my hope that museums, schools, and other cultural institutions will take a fresh look at Wikipedia as a tool for furthering their missions. By contributing to Wikipedia and integrating it into exhibit spaces, museums can combine technology and accessibility for a wide range of audiences. Each museum has unique information to share and should be considering ways that Wikipedia can be used to make it more accessible to their audiences, both in and out of exhibit spaces. There’s little doubt in my mind that Wikipedia will become increasingly relevant within cultural institutions as a tool for expanding accessibility to broader audiences.

~ Lori Byrd Phillips

Guest reviewer Lori Byrd Phillips is a museum studies graduate student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), a project leader for Wikipedia Saves Public Art, and the current Wikipedian-in-Residence at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis

Longfellow’s Children?: Reading Common-place’s Poetic Research Column

2010-11-18T15:04:00.000-08:00

The editors of the online journal Common-place perhaps had Whitman’s line from the 1855 preface of Leaves of Grass: “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” in mind when they decided recently to inaugurate a column that features contemporary poetry based on historical research. “Poetic Research” is a reminder that history is not the sole province of professional historians and that some of the best history has been written by poets.

To introduce readers to the column, the site offers this statement:

Something is going on in the world of contemporary poetry--history is flooding in. Poets are pursuing history and its dilemmas head-on; they are using primary source material to flesh out social, political, and lyric imaginaries; they are ransacking the tools of historiography to provision all manner of aesthetic expeditions. Within the last ten years or so, such creative inclinations have quietly evolved into a major, and pervasive, mode of literary production. History lovers, take note: these poets’ research work is thorough and driven, their archive instincts are free-range, even feral, and their use of historical source runs from the beautiful to the bizarre.

Why are so many twenty-first-century poets weaving American history into their process and product? What are the effects of this literary-historical groundswell? The answers are forthcoming, issue by issue, here in Common-place. Each edition of this new column will present the work of a poet whose creative process is deeply engaged with historical research. We will read their poems. And the poets will also give us something new, something the literary world hasn't asked for yet, a Statement of Poetic Research—poets’ own descriptions of history’s influences on their art, how they approach (and are altered by) research, and the new ways they hope their work brings history to readers.

Despite (or perhaps because of) the statement’s boldness, I sense a bit of defensiveness here. As if poets may be self-conscious about treading on historians’ turf and therefore need simultaneously to flaunt their “feral” spirit while asserting that their research processes are both “thorough” and “driven.” But is such a show necessary? Is it not our modern, professionalized conception of the historical discipline that has created a distinction between poetry and history? Are we not part of a common pursuit: gaining a deeper understanding of how and why human beings have thought and acted in certain ways in particular times and places? Perhaps contemporary poets feel it necessary to apologize for the sins of their forebears: Homer, Virgil, Tennyson, and Longfellow, to name a few. Many critics, past and present, argue that their history was not accurate—they distorted the truth or just got basic facts wrong. Different from their predecessors, today’s historical poets, this statement suggests, are capable of balancing good research with “beautiful,” and even “bizarre” creativity.

As a public historian I have a different perspective on this issue than some of my stodgier colleagues might. In graduate school, I worked at the Paul Revere House in Boston, a historic site that would not exist without a poem. Longfellow’s 1860 poem “Paul Revere’s Ride” was the text that made a middling Boston silversmith of modest significance to the revolutionary cause into a household name and a staple of historical curricula. Whenever I began a talk with “Listen my children and you shall hear,” young and old visitors alike could invariably add: “Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,” and they could always recite the line: “One if by land, and two if by sea.” From there, it was easy to get them engaged in the story of Revere’s ride and its significance to the outbreak of the American Revolution. Although I confess to having corrected the historical inaccuracies of the poem many times, Longfellow was, I hoped, the gateway to a deeper understanding of a key moment in American history.

As an interpreter, I was painfully aware of the stark contrast between Longfellow’s lyricism and my academic explanations of past events. Poetry, it seemed, was a much more effective means of communicating a history that people both remembered and enjoyed. In some ways, it was perhaps also truer, in the sense that it conveyed the spirit of the Revolution and the contingency of the moment better than historians’ descriptions of the same events. So, do the poems on Common-place’s “Poetic Research” page match up to their distinguished forebears? Readers will have to judge for themselves. The first two installments--Robert Strong’s account of the making of the Eliot Bible, “Bright Advent,” and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s musings on the “The Age of Phillis” (Wheatley, that is)--offer dramaturgical explorations of cross-cultural encounters. We hear, for example, John Sassamon and John Eliot’s musings on the challenges of translation and conversion, Susanna Wheatley’s advice to her slave, and Phillis’s longing for her African mother. For this reader, hearing from, rather than about, these historical actors was refreshing and illuminating. With precious few historical sources to narrate the history of Native-English interaction in seventeenth-century New England or slavery in eighteenth-century Boston, having poets’ imaginative reconstructions of the thoughts and dialogues of Eliot, Sassamon, and the Wheatleys (owner and slave) opens new avenues for discussing and thinking about the past.

Whether readers enjoy these particular poems as much as I did, I think they will agree that Common-place’s decision to include poetry alongside its excellent essays and book reviews was inspired. Other history journals would do well to emulate their model. Like a good issue of The New Yorker, prose and poetry complement one another, making for a challenging, but ultimately more stimulating, reading experience.

~ Will Walker

Chile's complicated commemoration of 1973

2010-10-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

This September Chile celebrated its 200th birthday. And not unlike other nations that have marked this monumental milestone, the Southern Cone country rolled out the proverbial red carpet to celebrate the event. Throughout the long, thin country festive festivities flourished: fiestas patrias, national dances and dishes, declarations and speeches.

In addition to the bicentennial celebrations, Chile also put together a laundry list of public works projects to polish the occasion: Santiago’s 690 kilometer intra/intercity bike path, the river-walk park Gran Parque Mapocho, Gabriela Mistral Cultural Center, and the renovation of the nation’s National Stadium, among many others.

This September also marked the 37th anniversary of the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected government of Marxist president Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973. But for the commemorators remembering ‘la via chilena al socialismo’ (the Chilean path to socialism) and Allende’s Popular Unity government, mixing the bicentennial euphoria with the memories of a socialist dream crushed by the harsh realities of dictatorship brought about a bitter-sweet taste.

Perhaps this was no more apparent than at the September 11th memorial act hosted by the human rights organization Agrupación Metropolitana de ex Presas y Presos Políticos at the National Stadium. As many may or may not know, the National Stadium was converted into a concentration camp for 58 days following the bloody U.S.-backed coup. There, countless thousands of Chileans and hundreds of foreigners passed through the portals and into hell: tension, torture, terror; detention, disappearance, death.

I had followed an invitation by the Agrupación’s president and director, Ms. Wally Kunstmann, to participate in the inauguration ceremony not of the newly remodeled stadium (something reserved for the following day) but of a small section of stadium seating that had been left untouched during the bicentennial renovation. Assigned “special protection” status in 2003 when the stadium was declared a National Historic Monument (thanks in large part to the Agrupación’s initiative), the wooden bleachers and entranceway just beneath, known as “Escotilla 8,” were saved in memory of the stadium’s one-time prisoners.

The handbills distributed at the evening event by aging members and younger allies of the Agrupación informed me and hundreds more that “For the first time, the National Stadium opens its doors on this emblematic date to pay tribute to President Allende, to the comrades that were detained in this site of prison and torture” and that the stadium’s “stands after 37 years recover their dignity.”

Today’s visitor to the stadium will at once notice the marked difference between Escotilla 8 and the newly polished stadium dressed in state-of-the-art seating and a world-class track and field. Escotilla 8’s splintered row-benches and uneven concrete stand in stark contrast to the clean, straight lines of the stadium’s new multi-million dollar improvements. The disparity between the historically saved section of seats and the stadium’s upgraded aesthetics is at once drastic, and impossible to ignore, generating an emotive, if not eerie, sensation for the unsuspecting visitor.

Memorializing the figurative and physical starting point of seventeen years of state-sponsored terror has proved a daunting task. Even with the 2003 National Historic Monument designation, constructing mediations at the site has resulted in a laundry list of problems: competing memorialization projects, state and political stonewalling, and schisms between human rights organizations. It is ironic then that the bicentennial renovation contributed to revealing the stadium’s not-so-secret secret. By revamping the sporting complex, so too was the stadium’s scar exposed.

The inauguration of Escotilla 8 proved to be historically important for human rights actors and activists commemorating a complicated past. The large banner I helped hang with Agrupación members above Escotilla 8 read “Contra la Tortura y la Impunidad” (Against Torture and Impunity), an assertion that seems especially urgent given September 12th’s official bicentennial inauguration of the newly renovated National Stadium. This event was presided over by recently elected right-wing president Sebastian Piñera (whose party faithful make no bones about their pro-Pinochet sympathies) in an effort to move the country forward to an uncomplicated future. In Chile, then, the official mantra appears to be: in with the new and out with the old—leaving human rights commemorators with the difficult task of “reconstructing memory” in the face of impunity.

But I have a feeling that the future, like the present and past, will indeed be complicated. In many ways Escotilla 8 and its nod to 1973 stand out as a bitter black-eye, not only in the newly polished National Stadium but also in the sea of Chile’s bicentennial sweetness—and, of course, in the annals of human rights and history.

~ Zachary McKiernan

Guest blogger Zachary McKiernan is a graduate study in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Mourning or marketing? The strange afterlife of the Montréal Expos

2010-10-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

In 1967, Montréal hosted a world’s fair, Expo ’67. It was Canada’s centenary, and Expo is often looked back at as the moment when both Montréal and Canada came of age and entered onto the world stage. For Montréal, it was a victory, the first Canadian city with an international reputation, and it went on to hold the 1976 Summer Olympics. That didn’t end so well, with the city left under a mountain of debt. The Olympic Stadium, an architectural disaster, took 30 years to pay off. Colloquially, Montrealers refer to it as the Big Owe.

But all of that was in the future in 1969, when the Montréal Expos took to the field for the first time at Jarry Park in the city’s north end. The team’s name, of course, recalled 1967, commemorating and immortalising Montréal’s summer of love with the whole world. The Expos were Canada’s first baseball team (the Toronto Blue Jays followed in 1977). Montréal had a long history with the sport, dating back to the 19th century. It was also in Montréal, on 18 April 1946, that Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier, playing for the Montréal Royals, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top minor league affiliate.

Nevertheless, an entire new vocabulary had to be created to translate the game into French with the birth of the Expos. Much of the credit for this goes to original Expos broadcaster Jacques Doucet. For instance, in French, the field is le terrain, and le lanceur stands on le monticule before throwing to his receveur, unless le frappeur gets in the way and smacks un coup sûr. Montrealers flocked to Jarry Park to watch Nos Amours. In 1976, after the Olympics, the Expos moved to the Big O (the more acceptable nickname for Olympic Stadium).

For their first decade, the Expos lost. A lot. But then, in 1979, in the new stadium, they won 95 games and embarked on a 15-year run as a perennial contender. They made the playoffs in the strike-shortened 1981 season, only to heartbreakingly lose to the LA Dodgers. The irony here is that it was the 1981 strike that got the Expos to the playoffs. The next time there was a strike, in 1994, things didn’t go so well for Montréal and its Expos. When the strike began, the Expos were 74-40, the best team in baseball and comfortably in first place in the National League East. But that was as far as it went: the rest of the season and the entire post-season were cancelled. The Expos lost their chance at immortality and a World Series victory.

The 1994 strike was also the beginning of the end for the Expos. In the aftermath, the owners began a firesale of all their best players, including the Canadian Larry Walker. And the Expos slid into mediocrity, or worse. Ownership was unstable. Plans for a new stadium down the street from the Montréal Canadiens’ new home fell through (the site is now covered with soulless condos). Montrealers fell out of love with the Expos. Crowds dwindled. 8,000 fans in a stadium that seats 50,000 is more than depressing. Ultimately, the team was owned by Major League Baseball (MLB), which farmed the team off to Puerto Rico for some “home” games, and then, in 2005, moved the team to Washington, itself a failed MLB city.

After the Expos left town, Montrealers quickly forgot them, and re-focussed all their passions on the Canadiens, the most successful hockey team of all time. But, in the past few years, the strangest thing has happened. Expos paraphernalia is all over the city. Expos caps, t-shirts, jerseys, toques, hoodies, warm-up jackets (just like the one manager Buck Rodgers wore in 1986). Expos caps come in the traditional “beanie” style, in bleu, blanc, rouge, as well as the more traditional blue version they wore from the early 90s. For the fashion conscious, the cap also comes in purple, black, brown, green, yellow, orange, and even camouflage.

An unscientific study of four sports paraphernalia stores in downtown Montréal this week reveals that Expos’ gear cannot stay on the shelves. It’s easier to find new iPhone than a black Expos cap in this city. I myself own three Expos caps, the beanie, the blue, and a brown one. (In my defence, the beanie and the blue actually date to when the Expos still existed.)

This leaves me wondering how much of this trend is Montrealers mourning the loss of Nos Amours and how much of it is clever marketing? The Expos gear today is part of MLB’s “Cooperstown Collection,” recalling the heritage of the sport. And certainly, vintage sports logos and gear are all the rage. Jerseys and caps of defunct teams are sported by everyone from rappers on MTV to my students. Similarly, disused logos of teams that are still around are just as popular. Thus, one could be excused for forgetting that the New York Titans have been the Jets since the early 1960s. Or that the Hartford Whalers moved to Carolina to become the Hurricanes in 1996. Long-standing clubs like the Chicago Bears and Boston Bruins market their old jerseys as “vintage.” The NFL even mandates certain games as heritage matches, and the teams wear vintage uniforms.

So is the plethora of Expos gear a reflection of this trend? Are we being duped by MLB once again here in Montréal? I know I for one feel slightly queasy in buying Expos gear, or even admiring it. On one hand, it recalls my youth, a time when the Expos were contenders, and it recalls fond memories of games at the Big O, or on the radio or TV, in French or English. And baseball, if nothing else, is a sport that is marketed based on its history, its place in (North) American life. More than that, the mystique of the game also translates north (as well as south) of the border. We have our own fields of dreams here.

And this, ultimately, is the problem when marketing meets nostalgia. Nostalgia isn’t simply some kitschy view of the past, it is a real, tangible emotion. It plays heavily on our hearts, as we recall our pasts. The advertising industry has clearly figured this out. It appeals to our nostalgia in trying to sell everything to us, from cars to beer to food. And, ultimately, the Expos are just another part of this. Certainly, Expos nostalgia is a real, tangible emotion in Montréal, but we are also just the intended targets of a slick marketing campaign. And ultimately, what makes me queasiest is the fact that not only did MLB kill my baseball team, I am now shelling out my money to the very same corporation for a new Expos cap.

~ Matthew Barlow

History on the menu

2010-09-30T14:45:00.000-07:00

I spent the first part of this summer in North Yorkshire leading the University of South Carolina’s England Field School. In the early evening while we gathered in the TV room waiting for dinner to be prepared, I valiantly argued that East Enders was the best thing on the BBC – a downright cultural phenomenon that they should appreciate. The students decidedly disagreed. They favored Great British Menu, a reality cooking show where regional chefs competed, course by course, with the ultimate winner cooking for Prince Charles and 100 guests.

Although sulking a bit about the students’ choice, I slowly got hooked on GBM. What intrigued me about the show was its sponsorship by the National Trust, a charitable organization founded in 1895to preserve “places of historic interest for the benefit of the nation.” The competing chefs were each assigned to a National Trust property, and they had to draw inspiration for their food from the gardens and surrounding area.

This move into sponsoring a reality cooking show actually fits nicely with the National Trust’s ongoing campaign to support a local foods movement. NT has developed a food policy that guides the procurement of food sold at the restaurants and tearooms at NT properties. Capitalizing on the beautiful gardens at many of the NT estates, they market the working gardens that provide tasty snacks for visitors.

Indeed, the description in the NT guidebook of the restaurant and garden at Clumber Park was so intriguing, that my friend and I decided to visit one Saturday. The day was perfect. With beautiful sunny weather, we strolled through the gardens, visited the small exhibit rooms, and enjoyed a three-course lunch in the courtyard restaurant.

The meal was delicious – and I urge US parks and museums to consider hosting “real” restaurants instead of mass-produced institutional fare. But everywhere I turned, the message “Eat Local” was hammered home to the point it became the dominant topic of conversation.

Granted, my companion and I are not average visitors. As museum professionals with rather strong backgrounds in foodways, we always visit such sites with a critical eye. Sometimes those critiques come at oblique angles.

For example, Clumber Park has a great exhibit on WWII and the home front. Clumber Park happened to be a huge munitions store as well as the testing ground for war machinery. I applaud NT for creating an exhibit that goes beyond the typical country home or garden variety. How does this connect with Great British Menu? The connection comes with the juxtaposition of the exhibit on the WWII decontamination facilities next door to the tearoom. Did any other guests look at the munitions map of the estate and question the quality of the water supply? I’d be much more reassured about the National Trust’s campaign against bottled water if I were guaranteed that the local water source was not contaminated with lead.

I’m not against historic sites as being places of advocacy, nor am I against the local foods movement (did I mention how good the restaurant was!), but I encourage curators to continue to back up their positions with honest scholarship. It is great advertising to claim the walled garden provides the food for the restaurant, but one look at the chalkboard of what’s in season proves that the property is not self-sufficient.

Do an exhibit on the challenges of the local food movement--both the current trend and its historical base. How self-sufficient were these grand homes? How many acres of farmland were necessary to supply an aristocratic meal? Or a corollary question: what did the diet look like seasonally? I suspect that if visitors had to choose between a historically accurate meal and one sourced today, there would be no competition.
Challenge visitors to think about the lasting effects of war. Do the decontamination facilities and buried munitions pose any health problems with regard to the water supply or the food grown on the estate? If so, explain how National Trust has mitigated the contamination. If not, explain the science so people aren’t worried about what might be buried in their own backyards.

It would only take a few more text panels or a 30 second plug on Great British Menu, to turn a public relations campaign into a learning opportunity.

~ Allison Marsh

An Artifact of the Road Not Taken

2010-09-22T06:54:00.000-07:00

The National Museum of American History is home to all sorts of presidential artifacts. From Warren Harding’s silk pajamas to the gavel used in Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial to the ornate inkstand Abraham Lincoln dipped his pen into when signing the Emancipation Proclamation, the material culture of the American presidency is preserved, exhibited and interpreted. Last year, the museum added to its collection one of the solar panels that had graced the White House roof during the Carter administration. In doing so, it joined the Carter Library and Museum in Atlanta, which also houses one of the president’s panels.

When Carter first had the solar panels installed on the roof of the White House staff eating area in 1979, they represented “Solar America,” just one strategy among many to educate Americans about the energy crisis and to instigate a national effort to reduce dependence on fossil fuel through a combination of individual changes and national legislation. From wearing a cardigan sweater during a speech on energy policy to exhorting the virtues of self-sacrifice, Carter wanted to underscore the fact that change often begins at home. Putting in the solar panels on the White House was his way of demonstrating this.

It was also an object lesson on the choices available to the nation. Carter declared, “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people-harnessing the power of the sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil.”

The 32 solar panels came down off the White House roof in 1986. In 1991, their new home became the cafeteria roof at Maine’s Unity College, which exercised its commitment to sustainability by putting up twelve of the panels, where they were in operation until 2005; after that point they remained on the roof but were not operational. In 2007, Swiss artists Christina Hemauer and Roman Keller, with cooperation from Jimmy Carter, made a documentary about the panels, entitled, appropriately enough, “The Road Not Taken.” They took two panels from a storage facility at Unity and traveled and delivered them, in a van powered by biodiesel, to the Museum of American History and the Carter Library, examining the history of Carter’s energy efforts along the way. The Museum of American History added its panel to the White House collection, while the Carter museum made its acquisition part of a permanent display on the former president’s energy initiatives.

While 2002 saw 167 solar energy panels installed on White House grounds, courtesy of the National Park Service, no American president has made a personal commitment to using renewable energy sources at the White House since the Carter Administration. Last week, environmentalist, educator and writer Bill McKibben and three Unity College students sought to change that. They delivered one of Unity’s solar panels to the White House with a request that Obama install it as a symbolic resolution to address climate change and address energy issues despite the Senate filibuster of the energy bill.

McKibben and his crew wanted to bring home the fact that President can make a difference by doing small things. As McKibben pointed out in a recent article, “That’s what we kept telling reporters as they turned out along the route: if the Obamas will put solar panels back on the White House roof, or on the lawn, or anywhere else where people can see them, it will help get the message across--the same way that seed sales climbed 30% across the country in the year after Michelle planted her garden.”

Disappointed by their lukewarm reception and the White House’s refusal to accept the solar panel, McKibben and the Unity students nonetheless acknowledged another lesson from history as they carted the panel away. Yes, Obama entered the White House with a message that was remarkably similar to Carter’s speeches of the ‘70s--emphasizing national unity, sacrifice and a spirit of creativity coupled with responsibility as our best bet for licking the nation’s problems. Americans responded to Carter by electing Reagan. With seven weeks until a midterm election that sees a surprising number of candidates declaring that there is no such thing as climate change, they did not want to give the pundits and adversaries of President Obama any more ammunition.

Me, I think Obama should erect that solar panel, call it living history, and be proud of it.

~ Margo Shea

Should everything have a history button?

2010-09-15T02:54:00.000-07:00

On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography: This particular book—or rather, set of books—is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages.

It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.

This is historiography. This is what culture actually looks like: a process of argument, of dissenting and accreting opinion, of gradual and not always correct codification.

James Bridle's printed and bound Wikipedia article the Iraq War, with edits, is a fantastic visualization of how Wikipedia works when covering a contentious and ongoing topic. "For the first time in history, we’re building a system that, perhaps only for a brief time but certainly for the moment, is capable of recording every single one of those infinitely valuable pieces of information," Bridle enthuses. "Everything should have a history button."

I have mixed feelings. Whatever the opinions of academics like myself, the cultural importance of Wikipedia is only growing. I think it is fair to say that it has become the first stop for basic factual information for most people in our culture--college undergraduates, journalists, professionals in all kinds of fields, and (rumor has it) even a few history professors. There is no use fighting it anymore. At the same time I suspect the genesis of Wikipedia articles is fairly mysterious to most users. Brindle's row of bound volumes illustrates the mutability of Wikipedia. It is shifting sand.

What Brindle doesn't do is offer any analysis of the forces that went into the 12,000 edits of the Iraq War article. It would be interesting to see someone mine the data. Are there spikes in the editing activity, and do they coincide with breaking events? Can the users be divided into categories or factions, and how do the factions seek to control the narrative? What has the role of the moderators been in shaping the article? This article points to some interesting possibilities for such research. As one of the commenters over at MetaFilter wrote, "I guess that's the difference between 'making an art project' and 'writing a book.'"

Bridle's talk which accompanied the project is available online, as are the slides. His blog, booktwo.org, featuring "literature, technology and book futurism" is wonderfully thoughtful and interesting.

~ Larry Cebula
Cross-posted from Northwest History

Voices from the Grave

2010-09-02T02:54:00.000-07:00

Quite by accident while researching freeware backup solutions, I stumbled upon a web site that did not back up my systems, but instead tried to convince me to back up my “vital digital property.” Legacy Locker, which has been around since Spring 2009, sells services to protect families in the unfortunate but inevitable event(s) of “loss, death, or disability.” Basically, for a small fee of $30 per year, they will store passwords to your online accounts. (I immediately think of my super important Facebook page and the millions stored in my off–grid PayPal bank account.)

The brainchild of Jeremy Toeman, Legacy Locker begs your serious consideration as an online service filling a legitimate, contemporary need. "I have young children that can't read yet,” Toeman enthusiastically reveals. More importantly, “One day my blog will have meaning to them in the same way you find an old photo of your grandfather and wonder what the story was.” With measured testimonials from news organizations (Wall Street Journal and Yahoo! News), Legacy Locker postures for position in a market already saturated with personal e-solutions for [fill-in-the-blank].

The visuals of the Legacy Locker landing site are tidy but pedestrian, a formulaic web delivery to help the target audience feel comfortable with the untidy topic of death. The page has a carefully structured layout and calming baby blue palette. Prominently featured is a white, middle class, heteronormative family, back dropped by a pseudo-Craftsman suburban split level. (What world am I living in? Not this world!)

Legacy Locker exemplifies the kind of niche entrepreneurial opportunities modern digital culture has created for hobby archivists. Capitalizing on the momentum of personal digital archiving, these often trivial markets target consumers interested in creating a personal narrative of themselves: children and anniversaries, accomplishments, careers, memories and memorials, lots and lots of pictures, and...passwords.

At what point does archiving of digital minutiae, the minutiae of the minutiae, become a ridiculous exercise in self-absorption? MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (and OMG, Tweet-a-Watt) are among the better known venues. The fascinating sociological cult of self is exhibited by a near frantic mania to preserve our own legacies, an eagerness to establish social relevancy via real time scripting of our story, the preemptive writing of tomorrow’s history.

Archival functions are a system of preservation. Within historiography, digital archiving of objects and documents has the broad mission of ensuring preservation of materials for access by current and future generations. Archivists, like everyone else, have particularities of standpoint—education, generation, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, politics, geography—which shape perspectives concerning appraisal and retention. These inherent biases complicate the measurement of value, those objects important enough to be documented. There is obvious and significant difference between the professional and hobby archivist, and value-of-self creates opportunities for passionate, explorative discourse.

“On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” Nietzsche’s canonical essay, speaks to the unanswerable questions of historical ownership and relevancy: "The fact that life does need the service of history must be as clearly grasped as that an excess of history hurts it... History is necessary to the living man in three ways: In relation to his action and struggle, his conservatism and reverence, his suffering and his desire for deliverance." Nietzsche discusses at length the painful fear of irrelevancy humans impose upon themselves: "The fiercest battle is fought round the demand for greatness to be eternal... For they wish but one thing: to live at any cost". Perhaps, through archiving the self, we hope to “balance the ledger of life,” and through calculated e-conservation efforts we will successfully establish eternal personal mandate. We will have succeeded in defining our historical selves and will have attempted to preserve (our)selves for others who we hope encounter our dutiful archival efforts.

Technology is growing at an exponentially fantastic speed. The archive grows in unison. But do my loved ones really need a web service to help them cope with my LinkedIn account when I “pass?” At the risk of exposing myself as trapped in the same tar pit as my ancestors, I seriously think they do not. My survivors can find the crayon drawings from first grade in a box in the garage, clearly labeled. The legal papers are filed with the attorney, copies in the desk. Passwords? For the time being, I’ll continue to use a freeware password application. The super secret code to that is on the Post-It under the keyboard. See you on the other side. We’ll look at pictures of our grandfathers.

~ Anne Gehr

Cleopatra's Allure

2010-08-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

“Cleopatra, the Search for the Last Queen of Egypt,” which premiered at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute in June, is probably the most widely hyped exhibition I’ve seen in a long time. Philly has adopted the exhibit as its own, promoting it on the Amtrak line to DC, and on every Philadelphia tourism website I’ve seen, even so far as to create a “Cleopatra VIP Hotel Package” available at 11 area hotels.

The Franklin Institute, known for its kid-friendly focus on scientific process and the history of innovation, seemed like an unlikely site to jump on the Egyptology bandwagon, but I was certainly intrigued and excited by the prospect of an immersive day of learning and entertainment, from a “Mummies” IMAX movie to lunch at “Cleo’s Portico,” to, of course, the exhibit itself. But could it possibly live up to all the hype?

Cleo is splashy, no question, but there’s genuine science, history and museological practice behind all the glamour. The 4-minute introductory video for the exhibition is reminiscent of a promo ad for a new HBO miniseries, but it clearly lays out the exhibition’s central question: who was Cleopatra, really, and how can we learn more?

Cleverly divided into sections based on key places in Cleopatra VII’s life and associated archeological expeditions by Dr. Zahi Hawass (searching for Cleo and Marc Antony’s Tomb) and Franck Goddio (the underwater archeologist excavating ancient Alexandria and its surrounding environs), the exhibit uses theatrical lighting and a first-person narrated audio tour detailing Cleo’s life in the best tradition of historical fiction. The exhibit is anchored by some truly amazing artifacts, including a piece of papyrus, signed by the queen herself with the emphatic phrase “make it happen.”

At the same time, the exhibit plays a lot with visitors’ notions of authenticity. Yes, identified artifacts are from the right time and place to be associated with Cleopatra, but were they truly encountered by her? For example, a stone statue of a Ptolomaic queen is identified as an artifact that could have represented Cleopatra. Cleopatra’s enigmatic nature seems to hold the whole exhibit together, maintaining the attraction of the mysterious unknown. Since all images of Cleo were ordered to be destroyed by Octavius and his Roman cohorts, Egyptologists are quick to claim that no one knows exactly what she looked like. Herself a Greek in the line of Ptolemy, who adopted Egyptian culture and espoused a hybrid religion, Cleopatra knew a thing or two about image control. She portrayed herself in the style of Isis in a statue or on a coin as a generic Roman queen. Over the years, she has been portrayed as an unrepentant temptress and, more recently, as a smart political leader, but always in a thoroughly gendered fashion, wielding uniquely female power.

The exhibit waxes so enthusiastic about Cleopatra’s lasting allure that I had to test it for myself. Do people really care that much about Cleopatra, or is this a product of Philadelphia’s, National Geographic’s and a couple of archaeologists’ wishful thinking? Despite its claims within the exhibit to the contrary, the exhibition website does not open many avenues of exploration into Cleo’s legacy. National Geographic’s Cleopatra home page provides mostly passive video links that continue to claim Cleo’s importance without a whole lot of contemporary backup. (Even the interactive Cleopatra game is behind a download and cost barrier...) So, I tried a different tactic. A google image search for Cleopatra yields 1,910,000 hits ranging from Elizabeth Taylor to Halloween costumes to computer games. Perhaps most fascinating to me was a Daily News article detailing the controversy over Angelina Jolie’s selection to play Cleopatra in an upcoming Scott Rudin film. Paired with a detailed computer model of the ancient queen whom no historian would claim can be fully physically described, Jolie is criticized for being too white. I suppose that a place in the contemporary debate over race, power and image is quite enough to prove relevance.

So in the end, what role does this blockbuster traveling exhibition play in the public history endeavor to spread critical, engaged historical scholarship to a wider audience? Exhibits like this act as gateways, bringing people into institutions which likely have less splashy but no less provocative exhibition gems hidden away in their anterior wings (although the Franklin’s mainstay science exhibits never seem to be lacking for foot traffic). More importantly, exhibits like these offer opportunities for partnerships between far-flung universities, collecting institutions, consultant historians and exhibition designers who can work together with the promise of their product reaching diverse audiences, hungry for “something new” in their favorite museums. Collaboration is a public history buzz word for a reason. When more people work together, topics broaden (pop culture meets artifact connoissureship meets environmental history) and that ever-elusive relevance is achieved.

NOTE: The photo, taken by a member of my family, is of me in the “Cleopatra shop” in the Franklin Institute on 7/10/10.

~ Adina Langer

The Curated Boutique

2010-08-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

As an avid reader of fashion magazines and blogs, I’ve noticed a curious trend over the past few years. Upscale boutiques are described as “curated,” selling “discerning” and “careful” collections of items. Are they just borrowing the language of museums or is something else at work when the worlds of retail and curation collide?

While I’d scribble a critical comment in the margins of any student paper that began this way, the Oxford English Dictionary defines curate (v) as both “to act as curator of (a museum, exhibits, etc.)” and “to look after and preserve.” This scanty definition raises two key issues. To “look after and preserve” suggests that there are certain objects that have been accorded value, either individually or, more likely, culturally, while the first half of the definition invokes a person whose job it is to preserve such objects (in a museum, for example), and also to arrange them, as in an exhibit. Such arranging suggests something further, which is that the arranged objects will have more meaning because of the process of exhibition and the knowledge of the curator.

Both of these aspects are clearly at work in a curated boutique, such as Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a store that sells the work, especially jewelry, clothing and home accessories, of a group of Philadelphia area artists. Its name, of course, is that of a famous essay by Walter Benjamin on the impact of mass production on the meaning of objects. Art in the Age is not coy about their retail philosophy:

“Rather than exist at a distance in the white cube of the gallery space, we weave our offerings into the collective surface of myriad personal contexts. In this troubling epoch of industrial commodification, standardization of reproduction, and fomentation of a society of shallow spectacle, Art In The Age issues a challenge and rally cry. We fight fire with fire, subsuming the onslaught of watered down facsimiles and inaccessible displays with thought-provoking products of real cultural capital.”

Curation, in this instance, is a counterpoint to a retail environment defined by dollar stores and Targets, where items are produced and sold in huge quantities as cheaply as possible. Art in the Age displays its wares as if in a museum, with lighting, for example, to emphasize its unique qualities. They are usually accompanied by information about provenance: Where is it from? Who made it? What is it made of? Older techniques and materials, symbols of a bygone age of hand or small batch production, are highlighted. While the art gallery is the most obvious reference point, the history museum and archive, as storehouses of forgotten and potentially fascinating trifles, is playfully hinted at too. Indeed, any distance between the museum and the store is collapsed in a set of stationery with Civil War images from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

However, unlike the gallery or museum, the shopper is encouraged to touch, wear or imbibe (at least in the case of the liquors made by the store) the objects. Rather than hold the distanced but appreciative viewer as an ideal, the curated boutique creates a shopper who is knowledgeable but emotionally invested. The most important overlap between the curated boutique and the gallery or museum is in their role in the lives of the people who frequent them. Visiting a gallery or museum is a performance of cultural capital. Invested with the power to confer significance on objects, the museum becomes a space where knowledge about taste is transmitted. Similarly, the objects in the curated boutique require knowledge to “get.” The curator in each instance is the guide--or to use a term of Pierre Bourdieu’s, the “cultural intermediary”--whose touch inscribes an aura on the newly fetishized objects of the age of mechanical reproduction.

~ Mary Rizzo

(All photographs by Whitney Strub)

Eat, Shop, Learn

2010-08-09T16:43:00.000-07:00

An effective model to present community history?

In El Paso, you can find delicious Mexican food on every major street, but Mercado Mayapan offers more than a tasty, affordable meal. Recently, while enjoying a plate of enchiladas Zacatecanas, I started thinking about Mercado Mayapan through the lens of this “Off the Wall” blog. Mercado Mayapan is an offshoot of La Mujer Obrera, an organization that provides vocational training and other services to Mexican immigrant women. Mercado Mayapan is self-described as a “social purpose business.” Aside from providing work experience and training, Mercado Mayapan seeks to celebrate Mexican culture and heritage. The complex includes four sections: a market specializing in Mexican food staples like fresh tortillas and pan dulce (sweet bread); a commerce area with stalls selling artisanal, fair trade products from Latin America; a museum and cultural area; and a food court that serves traditional foods from Mexico. Mercado Mayapan also offers cultural programming each month that range from showcasing foods from different Mexican states to music and dancing. These dynamic activities make Mercado Mayapan an intriguing choice to address intersections in history, culture, and politics outside a traditional museum setting.

The mercado’s bright streamers, artwork, and soft folk music encourage visitors to spend time in the comfortable atmosphere. The mercado's open floor plan allows visitors to move easily through each section; ideally, somebody who goes for lunch can walk off their meal in the commerce area and museum—eat, shop, and learn under one roof. Most programming draws on Mexican culture, yet the Museo Mayachen focuses on history from a US-Mexico border perspective. The museo currently has two exhibits documenting the experiences of garment and migrant workers and Chicano activism in El Paso. The museo declares itself the “first community museum in El Paso.” That effort is visible in the large amount of photographs and objects donated by individuals. The photos and objects are placed prominently in the exhibits and are accompanied by short, bilingual text panels. The informative text panels provide a starting point for these topics that are underrepresented in El Paso history. However, there are no hands-on educational activities, options for visitors to leave their comments or personal experiences, or guidance in finding other sources to learn more about these topics. This absence makes the exhibits one dimensional rather than interactive and limits how much the public might take away from this experience.

For an organization with limited resources and an expansive vision, Mercado Mayapan is a notable achievement in empowering low-income women, relating history from a bottom-up perspective, and celebrating the border’s Mexican heritage. La Mujer Obrera has traditionally worked without assistance from other community organizations in El Paso for fear of their vision being co-opted. I wonder how much collaboration with local history organizations, museums, or universities might enhance the museo’s exhibits without straying from their commitment to community involvement. Without this kind of input, the museo may be unable to move past conventional exhibitry, leaving it lagging behind the commerce area, food court, and marketplace. So far, eating and shopping are the most interactive and compelling activities at Mercado Mayapan. The potential exists for learning, as embodied in Museo Mayachen, to become a fully developed aspect of the mercado as well.

~ Vanessa Macias

Don't touch that dial!

2010-08-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

Public historians sometimes see our our academic counterparts as tradition-bound and reluctant to engage the general public or to embrace new technologies. So it's worth taking note of a terrific radio program hosted by three academic historians: BackStory - With the American History Guys. The show bills itself as a "public radio program that brings historical perspective to the events happening around us today." Historians Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf, and Brian Balogh "tear a topic from the headlines and plumb its historical depths." The shows are topical and typically include not only the hosts but guest historians with special expertise in the topic at hand, other guests with something to say about the topic, historic sound clips, and short interviews.

A recent episode, Independence Daze: A History of July Fourth, illustrates the approach. Guests include Pauline Maier, who draws on her book American Scripture to talk about the creation and changing meanings of the Declaration of Independence; a history of fireworks and the Fourth provided by James Heintze, author of The Fourth of July Encyclopedia; and David Blight narrating a reenactment of Frederick Douglass' famous address "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro." Other guests include public officials in charge of Fourth of July celebrations, fireworks vendors, and listeners calling in. Along the way the hosts discuss popular support for the American Revolution, the political uses of the holiday in the 19th century and in the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder,and how a secular holiday has acquired religious overtones in the 20th century. The program is a thorough and entertaining survey of the history of this iconic American holiday.

Other recent show topics include Scales of Justice: A History of Supreme Court Nomination, Climate Control: A History of Heating & Cooling, and Coming Home: A History of War Veterans.

As impressive as the show itself is the associated website. Each episode has a page that includes not only downloadable MP3 files but audio excerpts of show highlights, really extensive links to further readings, and a discussion board where listeners add their own perspectives on the topic. And of course you can subscribe to podcasts of the show via iTunes or through various RSS readers. The website is a wonderful resource for teachers--every episode could easily become a lesson plan with primary documents, short and accessible secondary readings, and audio.

Not every episode or every part of each episode works equally well. The jokey interchanges between the host sometimes feel forced, some guests are more scintillating than others, and speaking extemporaneously the hosts sometimes indulge in generalities or even get some minor point wrong. As an example of the latter, one of the hosts on the Fourth of July episode repeats the old myth that John Adams described Americans as divided over the revolution with a third in favor, a third against, and a third neutral. This is a myth that I frequently repeated myself until J. L. Bell set me right.

Quibbles aside, BackStory is a terrific public history project from three leading American historians, building on strong institutional support from the Virginia Institute for the Humanities, the University of Virginia; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the University of Richmond; the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and others. Backstory is model of what academic historians can do when they go public!

~ Larry Cebula

You give me fever?

2010-07-25T19:36:00.000-07:00

I would like to consider a selection of contemporary artists who utilize archives and history in their work as a method of reconstituting the meaning of history, past, place, identity, exhibitry and authorship. Since there are many interesting artists working with history and archives I will concentrate on a couple and continue with more in my future reviews.

I had the opportunity to see the exhibition “Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art” in the spring of 2008 at the International Center of Photography in New York City. A piece from the “Archive Fever” show titled Intervista (1998) by Anri Sala is a twenty-five minute documentary video which takes place in Tirana, Albania, several years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Returning home from his art studies in Paris, Sala finds a reel of processed 16mm film while helping his parents move into a new house. He takes the film back to Paris and restores it.

The footage is situated in communist Albania and shows his mother, Valdet, at about the age of thirty meeting Albanian communist leader Enver Hoxa and delivering a speech followed by an interview for the Communist Youth Alliance. Sala is unable to understand what his mother is saying in the interview because the audio reel is missing. With Valdet having very little memory of the interview, Sala must search for other sources of information to uncover the mysteriously missing audio. Sala questions the film interviewer and several political officials that were present at Valdet’s interview, but he is still unable to get any worthwhile information. In a final attempt, Sala takes the film reel to a school for the deaf and a team of people agree to work with him on deciphering his mother’s words by reading her lips. The film continues with the newly translated audio subtitled over the original footage and interspersed with conversations of Sala and his mom in the present day watching the restored film.

The film exists in the present while also living as a historical document of communist Albania and revealing his mother’s forgotten past. She goes through stages of denial, embarrassment and eventual acceptance of the historical footage, which implicates her as a youth party member saying the predictable slogans of the Communist Albanian era.

Another piece in the “Archive Fever” exhibition by artist Lamia Joreige titled Objects of War (2000-2006) consists of various video testimonials from Lebanese citizens living in Lebanon during the fifteen year Lebanese War. Joreige has each of the interviewers choose a personal object that reminds them of the war and then describe their memories associated with the object and of that time.

Both the object and the testimonial of the individual act as evidence. The collection of videos seemingly attempts to paint a picture of a collective experience of those living through the Lebanese War. However, while each account is true to the individual recounting it, the intention of the archive is not to provide a statement of truth. Rather, its purpose is to show a diversity of discourses and testaments of what happened during the war. This highlights the question of how accurate history can be with devastating events such as war when personal experiences can be so wide ranging.

The title of the ICP exhibition “Archive Fever” was appropriated from a paper delivered by French philosopher Jacques Derrida at a conference at the Freud House in London in 1994. In the paper Derrida traces the etymology of the word “archive” to its Greek origin, “arkhe,” to illustrate the power structure of the archive. Here, documents are collected and sorted into an ideal system and put into a repository, which are presided over by an authority. The documents are seemingly publicly accessible yet sheltered away. Those entrusted to watch over the documents yield the power to interpret them as they please.

The “fever” of the archive Derrida refers to is not so much an obsession with using the archive as it is with presiding over it and looking for an absolute beginning. The search is infinitesimal and Derrida relates the repetition in archiving to the Freudian death drive. He states that archive fever (mal d’archive) is a desire to return to the origin, the most archaic place that preceded our birth. In a sense, looking for a way to obsessively memorialize or restage something/oneself is a means of moving toward an earlier stage of life. Derrida theorizes that this tendency of archive fever would also cross over into computer information technology, especially email.

The relationship between the title of the exhibition and Derrida’s theoretical paper suggests parallels with artists attempting to undermine the authoritative power of the archive and make information democratically accessible to the public. With grand hopes of emancipating a forgotten past, the pieces are still trapped within the art institution that houses them, another kind of archivist. The pieces might also be considered to invoke nostalgia and an aestheticizing of the past (and illustrate archive fever itself?). Regardless, I think that the attempts to produce an alternate archive, as shown with Intervista and Objects of War, make poetic and powerful attempts to shake up and redefine history.

Intervista and Objects of War are examples of alternative historical displays that I believe are contemporary and engaging compared to many historical site-seeing exhibits that I have seen in my travels. While art exhibits like “Archive Fever” may not be taken totally seriously as places to learn about history, I think that we are seeing increasingly blurred lines within historical exhibits. Many exhibits are taking the form of becoming more interactive, creating immersive environments, and using art and performance to engage their audiences. Historical exhibits have often used art such as sculptures to mark a place of importance and provide a monument to memorialize an event. This kind of exhibitry seems slightly outmoded to me and I think there will be an increasing trend toward more interactive installations and video based exhibits.

- Melissa Boyajian

Dulwich OnView: Not Dull

2010-07-19T17:39:00.000-07:00

Is it possible that something interesting might come from a place called Dulwich? One suspects that the people who reside in this area of South London try extra hard at dinner parties to appear lively and witty given the name of their place of residence. It’s a bit like hailing from the town of Hicksville on Long Island. Hicksville at least has Billy Joel--he grew up there. What does Dulwich have? Apparently, Dulwich has . . . a Picture Gallery. Actually, they have England’s oldest public art gallery (it was founded in 1811). And, judging from Dulwich OnView, the community’s website that is dedicated to “celebrating people and culture in and around Dulwich,” they have a healthy measure of civic pride and quite a few interesting things to say.

Winner of the 2010 Museums and the Web “small” award, Dulwich OnView is a combination fan site, visitors’ guide, local historical journal, and community bulletin board. Organized and maintained by a dedicated group of volunteers “who love Dulwich Picture Gallery and the local community,” the site provides news and reviews on arts events, local history, food and drink, health and fitness, and, of course, the Picture Gallery. Subjects of recent posts include a brief explication of a seventeenth-century painting, an ab workout in “Kevin’s Fitness Tips,” background information on the winner of an art competition, and an interview with Robin Hardy, director of the 1973 cult classic The Wicker Man. In this last piece, Humanities and Media student Daniel Pateman, who enjoys red wine and David Bowie according to his bio, not only provides a transcript of his interview with Hardy but also describes the local cinema’s “Wickerman Sing-Along”--an event that sounds almost too strange to be true.

Living in a town that (un-ironically) bills itself as “America’s most perfect village,” I can certainly understand civic pride. Like Dulwich, my town (Cooperstown, New York) is best known for a museum--actually, we have three--and residents are justifiably proud of the amount of “culture” in their small upstate New York hamlet. We do not have a Cooperstown OnView, however, and reviewing Dulwich’s website made me wonder if this was, in fact, just what we needed. We certainly don’t need any more self-promotion. Such a website, however, might actually serve a more useful function than bolstering local pride and attracting tourists. Even in a place with only 2,000 year-round residents, communication can be a problem. When I moved here two years ago, I often complained that I had no idea what was going on around town. There seemed to be an insiders’ network that knew about things like the Pumpkin, Garlic, Apple, and Harvest Festivals. Reading local newspapers helped, and the Chamber of Commerce’s website was occasionally useful, but in general I found out about local goings-on, if at all, through word-of-mouth. By my second year, I could at least guess when and where most things were going to happen, but I still occasionally felt clueless.

Then something happened that, in my estimation, transformed the nature of communication in my small town. Many of the local institutions started to appear on Facebook, and suddenly I knew exactly when the next exhibit opening was happening. I knew when the baby lambs had arrived at The Farmers’ Museum. I knew when the farmers’ market was opening. I knew when and where the creative writing workshop would be. I was an insider. Facebook, more than almost anything else, had made me feel a part of my community. As a late adopter and self-ascribed Facebook skeptic, it was hard for me to admit it, but I liked how social media had changed my life.

Connecting this train of thought back to Dulwich OnView raises two questions for me: first, I wonder if Dulwich OnView bestows the same kind of insider status on Dulwich’s denizens that local institutions’ Facebook pages did for me, and, second, with the advent of Facebook (and Twitter, Foursquare, etc.) and the proliferation of personal blogging sites (Wordpress, Blogspot) has such a website become unnecessary? Anyone can volunteer to contribute to the site, so it feels inclusive--although the posting of articles does not appear to be instantaneous and there is definitely an editorial process in place. Judging by the range of contributors, they have not had trouble recruiting. The stories that volunteers write are decidedly local and are likely of interest mostly to people who live in and around Dulwich. In that sense, then, the site performs the same function as a Facebook page. However, it is superior to Facebook in that it has its own appealing design and allows for more in-depth content. Dulwich OnView reflects the place in a way that the boilerplate design of Facebook cannot. On the other hand, Dulwich OnView lacks the dialogue that one typically sees on social media sites--even though it does have a comment function.

The key difference between institutional Facebook pages and Dulwich OnView, however, is that the website is volunteer-run. It is, as DOV author Ingrid [no last name given] writes, “community driven, not museum driven.” Ingrid, who has worked in the education department of the Picture Gallery for fourteen years, argues moreover that the website is “more about [Dulwich Picture Gallery] within the community than [Dulwich Picture Gallery] itself.” Ultimately, the website is like a community newspaper, just cooler and without the annoying editorials from disgruntled townsfolk.

~ Will Walker

Imaging and Imagining Ourselves There: Flickr’s “Looking into the Past”

2010-07-12T02:40:00.000-07:00

Most of us are familiar with Flickr, an online open source platform for sharing, tagging and talking about user-generated digital photos. Around 5,000 images get uploaded every minute, lending credence to the notion that many of us are operating in a techno-blur of obsessive documentation and display of our lives, our people, our surroundings.

Just like everyday life, these images blend the profound with the trivial, the ubiquitous with the obscure. Go to Flickr and you will have the opportunity to peruse photos organized into a dizzying array of categories, some as seemingly inane as “Empty Chairs” or “air conditioners,” or for all the Wallace and Gromit fans out there, “cheese.” But Flickr also encourages communities of photographers who share an interest in things like “urban decay in the U.S. South” to meet up in cyberspace. It amplifies and draws attention to things like Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, an urban regeneration initiative on Detroit’s east side that recycles discarded stuff to create a vibrant, creative space out of the dilapidation and decay of abandoned urban spaces.

So, is Flickr just a catch-all of contemporary imagery? An everyman’s archive that makes curators thankful that, in the past, it was a lot more difficult to document and preserve images and the results are a little more, umm, discerning? For people interested in preserving, exhibiting and connecting with the past from a public and democratic perspective, the site offers some interesting lessons even as it archives and displays photos that resonate with history.

In a recent article in the International Journal of Heritage Studies, Cristina Garduño Freeman makes the compelling argument that photosharing on Flickr reflects a new kind of “intangible heritage;” more than public archives of images, the photo galleries and the conversations that come out of them augur a new sort of public space. She writes, “Part of what makes participating on Flickr meaningful is the social interactions and negotiations that occur through the exchange and sharing of photographs.” (Cristina Garduño Freeman, “Photosharing on Flickr: intangible heritage and emergent publics” IJHS Volume 16, No. 4-5, July-September 2010, pp352-368.)

If you think about it from that perspective, Flickr makes it possible to create and sustain conversations through images about the personal, social and public meaning of places that matter to us. Lots of people are doing this through the “Looking into the Past” group, created by Flickr user Jason Powell over two years ago. Photographers all over the world are taking historic images and overlaying them onto contemporary spaces. Streetscapes, buildings, family gatherings in the backyard--to name just a few subjects--are undergoing visual transformations that mash up the past and the present. The results are visually arresting and really fun to look at. While many of the images are manipulated using scanners or photo-editing software, others are old-school versions in which the photographer simply holds the historic image in a way that positions it as an overlay of the present scene. Either way, each image is a ticket to time-travel, a disconcerting glimpse of past meeting present.

There is a lot of play here between people and places, an oddly compelling photographic effort to mess with time. Some of the images (like this one of the Historic Ebey House on Whidby Island, Island County, WA) situate contemporary subjects within a historic image, while others place people from the past within contemporary settings. Here, tea drinkers in Kew Gardens circa 1920 are seated within today’s park.

So, what’s so exciting about DIY montage? The project is intriguing for several reasons. For those making the photos, it encourages close observation, invites an awareness of the relationships between past and present, and allows one to dwell for a moment or two in that space that is neither here nor there, not quite now, not exactly then. “Looking into the Past” engages a sense of place and a sense of time that is unique, that draws on our senses and that captivates our imagination. The photographer and those who look at the images catch a fleeting glimpse of our place in time as one that is simultaneously ephemeral and lasting.

The conversations and discussions that emerge are compelling. It is interesting to see the sharing of technical expertise about how to make these photos in the discussion pages of the “Looking into the Past” pool. From advice as simple as “Don't go out on a windy day. It is IMPOSSIBLE to hold up a print if it's windy,” to specific and detailed suggestions on photo-editing strategies, the best of the Web 2.0 knowledge commons is at work. People share ideas, insights and tricks. They also compliment each other and make one another visible in the process. The discussions are not all technical. Here and there, people who live in the same vicinity talk about the state of urban preservation or the uncanny lack of change in a particular place. Photographers who return to the scene of a train crash or protest spur conversations about those historic events.

Finally, for those of us who are interested in how people interact with the past in the course of their everyday lives, this project is a kind of twenty-first century coda to Thelen and Rosenzweig’s The Presence of the Past. It lets us see and understand how the past matters to the thousands of people posting images in the “Looking into the Past” gallery. The results are similar – lots of personal and family images, hundreds of storefronts, well-traveled routes in one’s hometown, sites of personal and private meaning. There are a few politicized images, like a 4-image composite of a street scene in Vancouver where police charged a demonstration of unemployed people, but most of the images are scenic, architectural, or deeply personal. In case we were wondering, as global citizens, we care an awful lot about the past, but most of us reserve enthusiasm for “our” past.

More than anything, “Looking into the Past” makes me want to dig out my camera and scour historic images and then seek out their contemporary counterparts in space. It makes me want to play with time and place, and to imagine different histories in the process. Pretty exciting!

~ Margo Shea

Ed. note: The image at the top of this post is of Eden Place, Birmingham, England.

More faux pirates than you can shake a saber at

2010-07-05T17:30:00.000-07:00

A week ago I put on my boots and my puffy white shirt and sailed up to the NorCal Pirate Festival, a pirate-themed event at the docks on Mare Island in Vallejo California. There were vendors selling piratey wares, musicians playing sea shanties, games of all kinds, and more pirates than I’d ever seen! Perhaps more pirates than the world has ever seen: the festival unofficially broken the Guinness record for the largest pirate gathering in history.

Amidst all the revelry, I spied a tent with some well-dressed looking folks who didn’t look like pirates to me. Curious, I struck up a conversation with a man who introduced himself as William Fairfax - not a pirate! He explained that I was in the Bahamas and I’d stumbled upon the Governor’s House at Nassau harbor on the island of New Providence, a British colony. The year was 1781. He introduced me to the honorable Governor Woodes Rogers who told me the story behind their camp.

According to the Governor, in the 1780s Nassau looked not unlike our 2010 Festival: a haven for all manner of pirates. These were the real pirates of the Caribbean. Many of them had once been legal privateers, and some upheld a code to only plunder ships with foreign flags, but nevertheless they were thieves and British merchants were losing most of their ships’ cargos to pirates. Something had to be done.

And that was where Governor Rogers’ plan came in. An ex-privateer himself, Rogers won the favor of pirate governor Benjamin Hornigold and together the two led a pirate recovery program.

It was refreshing to see the other side of the law represented at the Pirate Festival and I told Governor Rogers this. He nodded and said that he’d wanted to “even things out a bit” and this was his way of adding an educational dimension to the festivities. He lamented the lack of historical accuracy in popular pirate movies featuring sea monsters and zombies. “History is more interesting and fantastical than fantasy,” he said. “It’s some pretty strange stuff.”

At this point, Rogers asked me if I would like to renounce my piracy and sign a pardon. I figured that it sounded better than being hanged and he even said I could keep my booty, so it seemed like a pretty good deal. The governor signed and stamped my pardon and I was no longer pirate. A good thing too because Mr. Fairfax informed me that another lady pirate, Anne Bonny, was due to be “given a fair trial and hanged” that very day.

~ Margaret Middleton

History "Off the Wall"

2010-06-30T04:47:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the National Council on Public History's new exhibit review blog! Our goal here is to think about history exhibitry "off the wall"--that is, to move beyond existing definitions of what a history exhibit is by finding and reflecting on some of the emerging places and ways that historical display is appearing in our wired, mobile, global, re-localizing, over-heating, contentious and creative world.

We have a talented cadre of reviewers who will offer their thoughts on anything and everything that might come under the heading of "history exhibitry" and an experienced cohort of "conversants" who'll be responding to the reviews and helping to move our collective conversation along. We hope readers will weigh in, too!

In our first two reviews, Kevin Bartoy reflects on the art and performance of activist history, and Adina Langer muses about digital "museums of everything." Join us for what promises to be a provocative unfolding conversation about where 21st century public history is headed!

Glimpsing new possibilities

2010-06-30T04:18:00.000-07:00

This short clip of actor Tim Robbins reading the words of historian and gay activist Martin Duberman on the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion is taken from a collection of videos from the "Voices of a People's History" project, a performance-oriented offshoot of Howard Zinn's iconic work "A People's History of the United States" (Zinn, who died earlier this year, is seen in this clip introducing Robbins' reading). The clip, and the project, prompt a lot of thoughts for me about authorial voices and the power of performance in conveying history.

Although I have been influenced by many historians of the classical canon, I cannot say that these institutionally sanctioned historians have changed how I think about the past, the present, and the future. I have more often found inspiration at the edges of academia or even outside of the academy altogether. There are two historians who have affected me deeply. Only one of these individuals is considered a historian (even though the academy ridiculed him with the "epithet" of "activist"). These two individuals are Howard Zinn and Eduardo Galeano.

Both of these men used the words of past individuals. Yet, they used these words and these lives not as an act of appropriation, but instead, as an act of sharing. They documented words and lives in order that they would continue on in the memories of the present and influence the actions of the future. In doing so, Zinn and Galeano created something greater than history, something that defied institutional boundaries and artificial labels. They forged a new mode of expression grounded in history but influenced by journalism, poetry, storytelling, and art. For Galeano, the magical realism that embodies the soul of Latin America provided the inspiration for a vision of the continuum of history. For Zinn, in his later life, the performing arts provided a similar canvas upon which to produce history as art.

I firmly believe that the works of these individuals equals or supersedes any of the works of the historical canon. In a world that is driven by insanity, as ours seems to be at present, the only sane action is to strive for and then embrace that most pejorative epithet provided by the status quo, "activist." We have to approach history as an exercise in sharing not as appropriation. We have to find new ways to meld history, art, and activism. But, most of all, we need to touch the lives of others with the lives of others in such a way that the others become us.

I know that we have a long way to go, but when I see the work that is being accomplished by Voices of a People's History, I feel secure in a belief that we are making great strides. Bringing the voices of the past to the present is history. This is the connectivity with the past that promises us the possibility to inspire and to forge a better tomorrow. We need more histories. We need more art. We need more activism. But, most of all, we need more possibility.

~ Kevin Bartoy

Culture 24: Worth emulating?

2010-06-30T04:10:00.001-07:00

The UK's portal to museums, archives, heritage sites and art venues is this year's Museums and the Web recipient of the Archimuse "Longest Lived" award. First launched in 1999, the site is a true grand-dame in internet years, but with a 2009 makeover and an enthusiastic embrace of RSS, Twitter and open-crawling, Culture 24 is certainly "up" with the times. On its surface, this website appears to be essentially journalistic. Each landing page features an image-and-article layout reminiscent of a local news source. The site's genius lies in its iterative subject taxonomy and use of tags to allow visitors to *explore *its content from every possible angle. (See the sitemap for a full taxonomy.) To provide an example, Culture 24's home page offers a subject menu including "Places to Go," "Art," "History and Heritage," "Science and Nature," "Spliced," "Teachers," and "Sector Info," Clicking on "History and Heritage" reveals a new menu which includes, "Archeaology," "War and Conflict," Transport," "Work and Daily Life," "Literature and Music," "Historic Buildings," "Time," and for a limited time only, "World Cup 2010." Social historian that I am, I'm moved to click on "Work and Daily Life." My choices don't stop here! Now I'm offered, "Industrial Heritage," "Rural Heritage," "Childhood and Education," "Family History," "Royalty," "Faith and Belief," and "Race and Ethnicity." Only at this level can I dig down no further. But even then, if I'm not moved to click on the content offered here, I can click on "Spliced" and see everything categorized by "Objects," "Words," "Sounds," "Pictures" and "Online."

As a veteran of vociferous (and sometimes cantankerous) discussions about subject headings and object classifications and subclassification, I know how tough it can be to settle on a taxonomy that works, enabling a true "Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum" approach to content, which is perfectly appropriate for a web portal. I only wonder whether something like this could be tried with success in the US. Are we too diverse regionally and culturally for this approach to accessing culture? I would argue to the contrary. A project like this to link together resources from the 50 states would be a boon for domestic vacationers and international travelers alike.

As a historian, I offer one persistent critique of Culture 24. It seems to lack an archive of its content and it sadly does not appear in the Internet Archive. A site like this could be a rich resource for British cultural historians, and yet, its embrace of the "here and now" culture of the internet essentially limits its utility to scholars in the future. Aside from maintaining a geographically-mapped database of cultural institutions, update-able by individual institutional representatives, this site does not embrace its own record, preferring to update itself endlessly in a cycle of process-nullifying renewal.

~ Adina Langer

COMING SOON...

2010-05-30T16:19:00.001-07:00

NCPH's new review blog will be up and running soon - stay tuned!