The history in kidlit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.