Imperiled Promise, Contested Future

Spirit of Lincoln Youth Academy

I recently read “How to Remember Reconstruction” by Dr. Gregory P. Downs and Dr. Kate Masur. It examines the National Park Service’s attempts to integrate non-Confederate narratives of Reconstruction into their historical sites. As a late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American historian—with a special interest in the Black experience—this was exciting news to me! The Organization of American Historians’ 2008-2011 landmark survey reinforced that article, and shed light on the long road ahead to preserve American histories and educate the public.

The report states, “[i]f our National Park Service (NPS) was initially conceived as an effort to preserve the country’s most scenic landscapes, that enterprise was and remains inextricably braided with the stewardship of the human stories that it also preserves and protects” (11). With only 182 historians employed by the NPS out of 22,000 employees, I was not shocked by the history “crisis” currently unfolding (15). However, the ways in which history is intergeted (or not) was interesting to read. The emergence of social history and shared authority has been discussed in our classes, but the ways in which the NPS has executed these theoretical frameworks is inspiring (25).

There were five examples pertaining to the Civil War and class relations that I found particularly innovative. First, the way Civil War battlegrounds have been reinterpreted (33, 34). Second, the Shenandoah National Park’s reckoning with its removal of poor Appalachian residents  (41-42). Third, the African Burial Ground’s twitter @AFBurialGrndNPS and the NPS’s social media efforts (43). Fourth, the open-ended histories of slavery, class, and war at the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and Antietam National Battlefield (44). And, finally, collaboration with leaders in the field of Civil War history and the NPS (49-50). While I take issue with open-ended histories that reintroduce white identity politics that have long been dominant in American history (ex. the plight of poor white Southerners fighting the rich planter class’ war), I think all of these examples exemplify how the NPS can be reinvigorated.

However, one-off events and small programs such as these won’t solve the larger structural issues within the NPS. Of all the recommendations the OAH provided throughout the report, I believe these are central to solving the need for “transformational” and “transnational” history: “[e]mphasize connections of parks with the larger histories beyond their boundaries,” and “[w]elcome contested and evolving understandings of American civic heritage” (27, 29). Shying away from controversy, ignoring new historical perspectives, and refusing to link the history of the NPS with the past and present has resulted in a fragmented system. “Part of the problem is that history practice is to often split into numerous separate programs and organizational divisions, and entangled in a thicket of laws, regulations, and policies.” (63). On one hand, this is a symptom of bureaucracy plain and simple. However, this issue is made more difficult by the, “…generalized notion…that history is (or ought to be) the objective recovery of facts rather than an ongoing interpretive activity” (68). In other words, governmental disorganization and academic historians who don’t see a need for public history have made the history initiatives in the NPS stale and fragmentary.

Just as we have detailed the gray area between “history” and “heritage,” this report grapples with the differences between “interpretation,” “preservation,” and “history.” The future of the parks will remain contested because American history remains contested. However, that does not mean we have to confine history to “safe and limited” programming that don’t address big themes (20). By embracing controversy (within reason) and striving to integrate multiple histories, the National Park Service can become a leader for all historical sites in the United States.

SOURCES:

Whisnant, Anne Mitchell, Miller, Marla R., Nash, Gary B. and Thelen, David. Imperiled Promise: The States of History in the National Park Service. Bloomington, Indiana: Organization of American Historians, 2011.

Erasure and Resistance

As a former resident of Chicago, Illinois, I was familiar with the DuSable Museum of African American History founded in 1961. However, Andrea A. Burns’ amazing monograph helped place this important institution in a historical context. Kelland and Lonetree both touched on aspects of minority museums putting up against the national mythos of American history. Burns case studies of the DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago, 1961), the International Afro-American Museum (Detroit, 1965), the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (Washington, D.C., 1967), and the African American Museum (Philadelphia, 1976) zero in on the African-American experience of erasure and resistance in museum settings.

What I found particularly powerful in this monograph is how grassroots activism of Black Americans created and sustained a black museum movement. As Black Power became less of a potent force in the 1970s due to government suppression, the museum movement stepped in to be a voice for social change. While not all subscribed to a radical vision, I agree with Burns that the very act of making this museums was a form of resistance in that era. Educational programing, outreach, and a host of programs promoted a pro-Black narrative in a space which had pushed the Black voice out. Despite inter-neighbor strive, among a host of other mitigating factors, these museums sent a message that public spaces could not longer ignore black faces (Burns, 158).

We now have the National Museum of African American History and Culture as a testament to these activist’s work to center the Black experience. However, I think Burns would agree more work is still a head. As the neighbor museums were pushed into the mainstreams, it decentralized these spaces as place of empowerment and knowledge. While I think it is a good thing we have national symbols, I am happy I now know the history of how this movement began.

SOURCES:

Burns, Andrea A. From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the Public History of the Black Museum Movement. Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013.

The Contested Future

I recently attend the Lewis and Clarke Handshake Festival in Indiana. Much like Azie Mira Dungey’s “Ask a Slave” satirical podcast, I found myself wanting to snark at people defending the Confederacy and ignoring the plight of York, the enslaved exhibitioner who fought for his freedom when Lewis and Clark returned. I say all this to say, as a historian that is directly impacted by the legacy of slavery, and confronts white supremely that impacts the Holocaust narrative as well, tonight’s readings resonated with me.

Both excerpts and the interview with Azie drove home to me the need for historians to decide to remember, and actively confront the lies that surround slavery and persecution. “Slavery is ground zero of race relations,” is a provocative phrase, but one that succinctly summarizes how ignored historical realities distort contemporary politics (Horton and Horton, 3). If we don’t acknowledge the brutality and genocidal rage of “events” like chattel slavery and the Holocaust, we can’t begin to attempt healing.

Memory and history are not the same, just as heritage and history. But, both set up a false dicthomy as how we conceptualize and connect with the past (memory and heritage), directly impact. The creation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in many ways echoed Lonetree’s monograph and Kelland’s assessment of heritage museums being moved into the mainstream. As we begin to move “difficult” history front and center on the national stage, these issues will continue to surface.

Slavery, just like the Holocaust, is considered a “public secret” (Linethal, 5). How can we move past apologia and actually confront the past? I don’t have the answers, but its a question that needs to be asked. If we don’t, we can’t begin to see liberation in the near future.

SOURCES:

Horton, James Oliver Horton and Horton, Lois E., eds. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Linethal, Edward T. Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America’s Holocaust Museum. New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Tyson, Amy M. and Dungey, Azie Mira. “”Ask a Slave” and Interpreting Race on Public History’s Front Line: Interview with Azie Mira Dungey.” The Public Historian vol. 36, no. 1 (February 2014). 36-60.

Who Controls the Narrative?

Fig. 1 Steve Fratoni, Emily Dickinson Homestead, Emily Dickinson Museum.

Today’s readings were important bookends to Lonetree’s monograph Decolonizing Museums. Since the readings focused on narrative and storytelling, I’ll inject my own story into my analysis. During the senior year of my undergraduate career, I took a class on slavery and its relationship to capitalism. One of our primary source repositories was the Federal Writers’ Project Slave Narratives. While we were discussing the pieces, many of the students felt that a portion of the class wasn’t “objective” enough. 

They felt others were derailing the course by integrating feminist discourse and questioning the validity of narratives taken by white Southern federal workers in the 20s and 30s. Our Professor was appreciative of the interdisciplinary dialogue. Nevertheless, the course taught me there’s still a huge divide between academic and public historians, or even cultural historians and other disciplines. So, I was refreshed by Borland and Lowe’s discussions.

Literary house museums and oral history from a feminist perspective didn’t seem like they’d go together. However, both authors hit on similar points, namely: who holds authority and what is history. Historians are usually concerned by the who, what, when, and where. But, when we take a step back and look at other fields, how and why becomes more central to the story. Literacy critics have long accepted Barthes’ death of the author, and the assertion of the poststructuralists/postmodernists that everything is a text. However, that’s a foreign idea outside of the field. If those points were seriously considered, it would up end a lot of the authority issues history has today. Without slipping into relativism, historians might have a better idea of how to connect to the public without coming off as elitist and distant. Just as Lowe experienced with her grandmother, we sometimes retreat into a jargon filled microcosm that speaks over people. We need to find a happy medium.

Currently, I’m serving on the Farmington Historic Home Interpretation’s Committee. Farmington was a slave plantation owned and operated by the prominent Speed family for many years. The problem of narrative is keenly felt here as a historic home that’s often bungled integrating enslaved narratives, while also working with limited material from that community. Talking in a classroom was one thing, but trying to reconstruct and convey to a general audience the story of slavery that’s not overly romantic or tragic is hard work. Who controls the narrative when the narrator is dead and the historian is working with scraps of contradictory information?

Much of the angst, I think, historians feel is their desire to get at the facts. We have to learn to give ourselves grace and ask questions, because we don’t know all the answers. History is chiefly a story, and that’s a dangerous idea to historians who believe their work in anchored in Truth (Lowe, 44). However, if we embrace the act of deconstructing “truth,” and see our subjects as experts of their lived experience, our work can be liberating (Lowe, 46).

SOURCES:

Borland, Katherine. “That’s Not What I Said: Interpretive Conflict in Oral Narrative Research.” In Women’s Words: the Feminist Practice of Oral History. Edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai. New York, New York. Routledge, 1991. 63-75.

Lowe, Hilary Iris. “Dwelling in Possibility: Revisiting Narrative in the Historic House Museum.” The Public Historian, vol. 37, no. 2 (May 2015). 42-60.

What the Water Tells Me

I had the privilege of attending the 86th Highlander Homecoming Celebration in New Market, Tennesse! As the public history assistant (2018-2019), I’m tasked with creating a digital timeline of Highlander. I went camping, viewing the beautiful Smoky Mountains, swatting plenty of bugs along the way. I also heard the sound of fiddles tumbling down the hillside. During the weekend, I attended many workshops and conversations: archiving movement history, Palestinian liberation through photography, food justice with Jim Embry and April of Fresh Stop Market, and the tail-end of Black Joy. I connected with some folks from the wonderful Community of Living Traditions.

One of the events I enjoyed the most was the play What the Water Tells Me. Described “as a collaborative theatre piece,” it combined “hip-hop, puppetry, and dance” to “explore the waves that course through our veins, create the beats that move us, transmit the media that shapes us, and fill the rivers that can lead us back home.” What the Water Tells Me followed “…two children’s journeys to adulthood, as they navigate the changes that occur in their hometown and within themselves when a large utility company comes to town and threatens the waters that raised them.”

I can’t wait to return!

CREDITS

Photography by Robert Eric Shoemaker

“We Are Still Here”

Fig. 1 Votan Henriquez, Various Street Murals, 2016, east side of the Minneapolis Native American Museum.

Decolonizing Museums by Amy Lonetree was an eye-opening read. It synthesized many of the readings we’ve had so far and added to my understanding of the museum’s transition from “temple” to “forum.”

Recently, I talked about archival power through the archival appraisal process (see Myth of the Benevolent Archive). Interpretation is another way cultural institutions assert power over communities. Interpretation is the root of power in historical sites and museums. As a historian and exhibit developer, Lonetree spent many years interpreting Native Americans in museum settings.

Summarizing art historian Janet Berlo, Lonetree writes “…exhibitions convey as much about the collectors themselves as the cultures they propose to represent” (26). Throughout the book, Lonetree analyzes the interplay of assimilation and annihilation that decimated Native American communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At the same time, the modern image of Native Americans in museums was solidified. Anthropology became an academic discipline. Fueled by the notion of Native Americans as “vanishing people” and a “dying race,” anthropologist raided their material culture and cemeteries.

Emphasis has been placed on postmodernism’s affect on changing the depiction of Native Americans in museums. Human rights is proposed as the driving force behind the repatriation of stolen and sold objects and remains. However, Lonetree pushes back on these claims. She contends that the self-determination and cultural sovereignty movement of the 1960s and 1970s had an enormous impact as well (see The Activist Historian for more on the Red Power Movement).

Lonetree tracks three important developments that have contributed to the “decolonization of museums:” the rise of shared inquiry and shared authority (see Everyone Their Own Historian), an increase in tribal museums, and an increase in tribally owned and operated museums.

Chapter two focuses on the Mille Macs Indian Museum and Trading Post—a collaboration between the Minnesota Historical Society and the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe in Wisconson—and their status as a “hybrid tribal museum.” Chapter three argues that the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian is still a tool of the nation-state. Finally, chapter three examines the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture & Lifeways as a “decolonized museum.” Lonetree has professional connections with all of these museums. She tracks their origins—tribal and financial—and exhibits over the years. Lonetree also incorporates first-person accounts, native languages, and snippets from the museums, giving the book an intimate feel.

Each museum faced unique challenges including, but not limited to: prolonged closure, confusion between being an educational or economic enterprise, concepts vs. objects, interpretation, and community engagement. Though their problems and solutions were myriad, all of three museums had to grabble with one prevailing issue. How do you address settler colonialism in a museum setting,

Lonetree contends that “decolonizing museums” is rooted in adequately addressing colonialism in the first place. To shift towards an “Indigenous paradigm,” and “Indian Museology,” museums must center Native American voices first and foremost, and foster an environment of truth-telling and healing. Language has power. So naming the United States as a genocidal colonial actor is the first step forward.

Lonetree uses the term historical unresolved grief, which reminds me of the concept of transgenerational trauma. Native American museums like the ones in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 don’t address genocide and forced migration in a way that can lead to healing, in Lonetree’s view.

Marginalized communities have been resilient in the face of oppression. But, Lonetree reminds us that empowerment and nation-building can’t begin without healing. Speaking truth to power is one of the many ways Native Americans have survived and learned to thrive. Put another way, to start the process of decolonization, we have to address the horrors of colonization. Some scholars and tribes consider this a “victimhood” mentality. Lonetree says it’s the opposite and I agree. I hope Lonetree’s examination of “a decolonizing museum practice” extends to more museum spaces. When we transform museums from the ground up, they become transformative spaces that assert that Native Americans where always here, are still here, and have a future on their ancestral lands.

SOURCES:

Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

The Frazier History Museum

I’m excited to announce I’ll be the Library Intern at The Frazier History Museum for Fall 2018! I want to thank Heather Funk and the Frazier Museum community for the opportunity. I’m leaning towards a Masters in Library and Information Science at the University of Kentucky, so I know the knowledge I’ll gain here will be invaluable.

DUTIES:

• Assist in collecting, preserving, cataloging, and making available books and other documents in the Frazier History Museum’s Education collection.
• Develop book-based activities for onsite/offsite events that relate to current or upcoming exhibits and programming.
• Collaborate in the establishment of an outreach program between the Frazier History Museum and Louisville Free Public Library system.

Myth of the Benevolent Archive

Fig. 1 Titus Kaphar, Behind the Myth of Benevolence, 2014, oil on canvas, 59 x 34 x 6 in., Jack Shainman Gallery.

This week’s readings hit home in ways I can’t spell out at the moment. As a historian at the intersection of blackness and womanhood, and interested in an MLIS, I can’t help but agree with Kellee E. Warren when she states, “Primary source material on Africans of the diaspora were often neglected and destroyed” (778). Our histories are never valued, which is what drew me into the field in the first place. But, I never stopped to question where I’m drawing my knowledge from and how it shapes the narrative.

Questioning archival authority and archivists’ power to shape historical memory is a pretty radical thought. Who thinks of the neighborhood librarian or university archivist as an agent of oppression? However, the archival appraisal process is nothing short of oppressive. Beginning in antiquity within the government, the archive represents to the public capital t Truth. And, when that truth denies researches access to crucial information or simply doesn’t contain anything on the marginalized, it is distorted. Not two weeks ago the archivist at the University of Louisville spoke on how things like blank checks are thrown away yet diaries and quilts are now coveted when they were once overlooked.

As Ramirez notes, “Oppositional narratives provide alternative perspectives to the course of history and its archives” (120). Oral history or storytelling is integral to heritage. Yet, counternarratives are hard to find in archives today. It took historians, swept up in the global social movements of the 60s and 70s to begin “reading against the grain.” Despite this step forward, more questions than answers to the problem arise.

How do we begin to privilege knowledge that has been ignored? Why do we rationalize oppressive forces and hyper-security in public archives? Why do we perpetuate the myth of benevolent archives without the power to shape and discriminate?

SOURCES:

Warren, Kellee E. “We Need These Bodies, but Not Their Knowledge: Black Women in the Archival Science Professions and Their Connection to the Archives of Enslaved Black Women in the French Antilles.” Library Trends, vol. 64, no. 4 (Spring 2016). 776-794.

Robertson, Craig. “Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport.” In Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton, 68-85. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

Ramírez, Horacio N. Roque. “A Living Archive of Desire: Teresita La Campesina and the Embodiment of Queer Nation Community Histories.” In Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette Burton, 111-135. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

 

Everyone Their Own Historian

Fig. 1 Unknown, Portrait of Zachary Taylor, circa 1843-1845, daguerreotype, Heritage Auction Galleries.

What is the difference between heritage and history? The answer impacts the way we teach capital H history in the United States. Corbett and Miller’s, and the Robbins’ articles are a fascinating look into public history at work. They show the importance of confrontation, mediation, and collaboration when examining contested public space.

In the 1960s and 1970s—responding to the political and social upheaval—new social history challenged a cohesive historical narrative of the past. Clio’s Foot Soldiers (2018) touched on the conservative pushback in the 1980s and 1990s. This dichotomy was on full display in these articles.

The Artesian Park Project in Corpus Christi, TX (2012), and St. Louis, Missouri exhibits reveal the divide between history and heritage. The dominant cultural narratives of what America is—fed by nostalgia for an imagined past—is at odds with the heritage and struggles of the marginalized. But, both articles show us ways to circumvent this, if only to a degree.

By sharing authority over historical narrative, Corbett and Miller created exhibits that wove together history and heritage across gender, racial and class lines. By integrating the diverse narratives of Artesian Park, the Robbins challenged a white-washed past.

Shared inquiry can take on many forms including, but not limited too: oral history projects, community-based archaeological digs, and cooperative museum exhibits. Borrowing from the Robbins, I gathered that the job of the public historian is to understand a “multi-layered past” to build a “polyvocal future.” To do so, we must remember that everyone is a historian in their own right, and our job is to balance their lived experience (heritage) with the facts.

SOURCES:

Corbett, Katharine T., and Miller, Howard S. (Dick). “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry.” The Public Historian vol. 28, no. 1 (Winter 2006). 15-38.

Robbins, Christine Reiser, and Robbins, Mark W. “Engaging the Contested Memory of the Public Square: Community Collaboration, Archaeology, and Oral History at Corpus Christi’s Artesian Park.” The Public Historian vol. 36, no. 2 (May 2014). 26-50.

The Activist Historian

Fig. 1 Artemisia Gentileschi, Clio, Muse of History (The Fame), 1632, oil on canvas, 50.2 x 38.2 in., Palazzo Blu.

In my short time at the John Felice Rome Center, I remember sitting in my Environmental Science class absolutely stunned by the connection between art and science. Our teacher, an Italian female chemist, gave out an assignment that lead me to the work of Artemisia Gentileschi. Once reduced to an exceptional female painter who was raped—an incident that was reflected in some of her paintings—feminist in the 70s being to question the absence of women in the art canon. While male art historians and critics had mentioned her mastery, it was feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists,” that helped propel Gentileschi into the spotlight. Just as Gentileschi is now regarded as walking in the footsteps of Caravaggio do to “activist historians,” Lara Kelland’s Clio’s Foot Soldiers (2018) helps us conceptualize the ways in which marginalized groups became “citizen historians.” More importantly, in its conclusion, it questions the lack of intersectionality in movements for equality that still plagues us today.

The terms “collective memory,” “activist historian,” and “usable history” really stuck out to me while reading this monograph. Identity is impossible without a concept of the past, but I never considered how marginalized groups construct identity through history. Grassroots activism’s impact on historical knowledge, rather than their passive entry into the annals, was particularly enlightening. Too often, as Kelland points out, I feel as though major shifts in history are taught from the ivory tower, and intellectual elites down. In Clio’s Foot Soldiers (2018), this view is shifted on its head, placing grassroots movements trying to raise historical consciousness front in center. While Kelland acknowledges many of these movements were small-scale projects, run by independent and unprofessional individuals, I think the greater message is still powerful. Giants like the Smithsonian didn’t see the Civil Rights movement and decide to display a Black exhibit. No, years of protest, education, and politicization pushed them in that direction.

Women, people of color, sexual minorities, the indigenous, and everyone in-between are often reduced to their suffering and pushed outside the mainstream. Artemisia Gentileschi, while not mentioned in the monograph, is a perfect example of grassroots second-wave feminism’s ability to shape historical knowledge. Clio’s Foot Soldiers (2018) reminds us that if we don’t speak for ourselves, the powers that be can erase or reduce our collective struggle for equality.

SOURCES:

Kelland, Lara Leigh. Clio’s Foot Soldiers: Twentieth-Century U.S. Social Movements and Collective Memory. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.