Website Review: The Lower Merion Historical Society

The Lower Merion Historical Society. https://www.lowermerionhistory.org, The Lower Merion Historical Society. November 2009.

The Lower Merion Historical Society aims to promote community involvement in the preservation of local cultural resources. Their website states this is accomplished “by stewardship of local history, education of the community, preservation of historic resources and outreach to promote awareness of the cultural heritage of the Township of Lower Merion.” The Society's website is divided into two sections, one focusing on the society itself, the other on the collections and archives of the Society. As can be noted from the mission of the Society and the content of the site, the main audience is not the scholar or academic, rather the historically interested citizens of Lower Merion.
The site has a significant quantity of useful and relevant resources, particularly for those interested in family and area history. This includes artifact collections, collections of individuals, burial records, atlases, maps, historic photographs and significant Quaker collections. The photographs are digitized, but the rest of the collections are not, so searches of these collections provide identifying information such as call numbers and abstracts, but one must still go to the collections. For being directed at the amateur historian, the navigation of the site and research tools leave much to be desired. Despite sections entitled “How to Research” and “Search Tips”, the search interface is difficult to navigate even for a seasoned researcher, and the explanations are too long and too text driven. More concise and visually friendly directions (something other than blocks of black text on white backgrounds) would aid the user. The site could improve navigation to ensure a user's ability to return to the main page without having to retype the URL. The navigation is also not coherent. The site currently tells no distinct narrative nor promotes any particular interpretation of the area's past. A coherent narrative could introduce a user to the wide array of resources available and encourage involvement and preservation through increase historical engagement.
Despite these issues, the site provides access to intriguing and useful information. This is particularly true of the digitized photographs of mansions and architecture. A signficiant part of the society's site is dedicated to these themes (mansions are a significant part of Lower Merion's history) and its website is useful to research these structures and architects. It allows for quick access to photos and relevant information without having to pay the Society's librarian or make an appointment to pull the folio. This is particularly useful for the user with some interest in one particular place, but not necessarily a hobbyist invested in historical research of old homes.
While the site attempts to engage current issues through their online newsletter, the site lacks current historical civic engagement. There is no mention of big news items such as the recent destruction of an architecturally significant mansion in the area. The fight for this building and its destruction garnered significant press due to the society's involvement and the actions of Lower Merion preservationists, but is not included anywhere on the site. The Society could utilize these current events to bolster their mission of increased awareness of the township's resources. The Society has significant resources and their photography and map collections are impressive. These current events and photographs could be utilized in the design to create a cohesive narrative and entice casual users to do further research and engage history.

Readings, November 23

I think this would have been a superb week to read Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, particularly in relation to Rosenzweig and Cohen's thoughts on Exhibits and Film as made available through digital media (mainly the internet). Yes, access is truly a wonderful thing, but is viewing a online version of a museum exhibition about say, Gilbert Stuart’s 1796 portrait of George Washington (Portrait included) the same experience and does it garner the same 'take away' as going to actually stand in front of the portrait and the supporting artifacts and exhibit? Benjamin would naturally argue no. Rosenzweig and Cohen also agree that the internet is not a replacement for the real thing, but weigh the negatives of that against the positives of increased access. But can a person truly engage the exhibit in the way intended by viewing it online? Can you breech comfort and provoke through the controlled view of a computer screen? Will museum directors and museum design staff become moot players eventually as exhibits cease to be physical and just go online? Will people eventually give up on a museum and just go to their computer to experience an exhibit?

For the most part I appreciated Cohen and Rosenzweig's thoughts and analysis. However, for some sections (particularly those on creating, maintaining and backing up a site) I started to have flash backs to taking the GRE when they explained to you how to use a mouse and the up and down arrows. This, I suppose, does function as an example of how issues of digitization and digital media become out of date by the time you publish them.

Skipping back a paragraph, returning to the future of museums, I found the piece "Museums and Society 2034" fascinating and aggravating all at the same time. The point that struck me the most, possibly because I did all of the digital media reading first, was their discussion of media in the museum. They apparently do not believe museums will fall off the face of the earth, which is good, but they do believe they will become more media/digitally driven. This will be good for a society that is increasingly 'tech-y'. However, they miss the ever popular 'generation gap'. Despite feeling myself to be fairly technically savvy, it is entirely possible that when I am 60, I will be completely inept at using whatever the latest mechanical doohickey (technical, I know) the kids are writing their school work on. How will this translate to museums? If they are increasingly media and digitally driven, what generation's technical knowledge will they be catering to? Will parts of museums become inaccessible to a particular generation or group due to the technical constraints of the exhibit? (Throughout this entire article I waited for the phrase 'flying car' to get thrown around. Alas, it did not happen.)

And to make this completely lacking in any form of segue, a wee discussion of the two smaller articles, that about Haunted Mice and that about Internet as Civic Engagement. I liked both of these pieces, and think that they provide case studies about how the internet can be a really useful tool, for those both supernaturally inclined and community driven.

Readings for November 16

This weeks readings were Angela Landsberg's Prosthetic Memory and Jay Winter's "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the "Memory Boom" in Contemporary Historical Studies".

While at a GHI lecture ("Der DDR: Was Bleibt?") about a month ago, I realized how much easier it is to talk about History and Memory in German than it is English. German has such good words for memory and remembering. Much better than English. The 'memory boom' Jay Winter speaks to did not leave Germans in a frantic search for a term defining the memories of a group for which English tosses around collective memory and public memory at great debate. Groups, cultures and nations have Gedächtnis. People have Erinnerung. Memorials are Denkmäle. The words for groups remembering and the activities there in, such as memorials, are taken from the word 'to think' and not the word 'to remember'. I feel the challenge of learning how to differentiate these terms and their meanings was worth the depth the language can bring to discussing memory and history. As Winter stated, memories have come to be associated with trauma, the nation, its politics and identity. Germany has a traumatic past and particularly traumatic 20th century, encompassing 7 different political regimes, all of which people still (potentially, depending on life span) have living memory. Now that Germany is reunified, discussions of memory have intensified, particularly wondering how reunified Germany will remember its fragmented past (and present; ask any German, political unity does not mean unity in identities), made even more complicated by their role in the European Union.

I spent the entirety of last year reading Pierre Nora, Halbwachs and Aleida Assmann and Rolf Goeble (some among many) in an attempt to come to terms with how Berliners (and their memories) relate to their communist past. I wish I had read Landsberg's text last year while I spent hours wracking my brain trying to define the memories Berlin's have for a particulars buildings, despite having no living memory of them. I ultimately had no great moment of genius and that section got hacked out of my thesis. While her particular presentation reminds me why I stopped taking English Literature courses freshman year of college, Landsberg's concept of Prosthetic Memory really intrigues me. Cultures and people have memories of events and places of which they have no legitimate experience. Do they thus not count? How these said memories are created and how they shape a person's relation to their own past and history in general is illuminating. In the case of Berlin, people have spent millions upon millions of dollars to tear down one building simply to resurrect another, neither of which they have any living memories. But they have prosthetic memories, created from pictures, news stories, romantic ideals of Prussian exceptionalism and sometimes unreasonable accusations of East German cruelty. In Berlin, one history disappeared, and another has become the sanitized party line because of Prosthetic Memories.

So, in lieu of spending your space and time explaining this whole thing, here's the story of what went down in Berlin. It's hard to get a neutral voice, and the government site isn't ideal (they did vote to destroy the one building, and pay to rebuild the new one) but they are less sensational about it. It's also the only one in English.

Schloßplatzdebatte

Readings for November 9

Nancy Raquel Mirabal, “Geographies of Displacement: Latinas/os, Oral History, and the Politics of
Gentrification in San Francisco’s Mission District,” and Eric O’Keefe, “Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East.” As well as the addition, "The End of History: What is Plan B?"

This week's 'theme' so far as we have one, is Community Engagement. How does history engage the communities in which it is experienced. As can be seen from this week's readings, experience and engagement does not necessarily have to be of the history of that particular area.

I'm not entirely sure what to do with the "Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East" article. Besides from the shady quality by which the artifacts were acquired (nothing like not telling your taxpayers where their money is going), I suppose I did not find odd the desire to tell that part of Harrisburg's history. I think it is a provocative shift of scope to frame Harrisburg as the beginning of the journey to the 'frontier'. Even if in the 19th century it was no longer the edge of the wilderness, it is an intriguing make people see that at one point most of the country as 'new' and that past Ohio was considered an adventure (which for many it still may be...but not in a bison, native American sort of way).

However, I did enjoy Mirabal's article. I am a big fan of using individual memories to tell the histories of an area, for without them, histories become silenced. In this case, these individual memories tell the story of an area quickly moving away from the culture that defined it for many years. Are these memories, however, community engagement? Are the oral histories which Mirabal and her cohort collected going to enact social change? Possibly. They certainly seem to hope so, if going by nothing else than the title of the project "La Mision: Voices of Resistance." It would be interesting to see if since the dot com boom has busted, whether the older residences and cultures have returned. Do the previous residents of the Mission area have shared authority, and better yet, are they utlizing it?

On a slightly different note, Cary Carson's article about the death of history museums. He begs public historians to look at the people walking through the door and focus on the quality of museum that those visitors are seeing. He notes that public historians are, in one way or another, history teachers. I feel that many (most?) public historians would agree to that, but as we have discussed previously, are they to be stewards only to the visitors and not to the collections? His Plan B, which is pretty much pandering to the short attention span of Americans (thanks, Sesame Street), leads us on the slippery slope of sanitizing history so that when people visit, they can be immersed without feeling uncomfortable. Immersion history often leads to a linear progress view for most visitors, the 'oh look, they were stupid and we're so advanced' view of history, something which I personally try to discourage to the best of my ability. Not to say that history museums do not need to shift focus to keep the attention of their visitors, but is just 'giving them what they want' really an effective tool to being a historian or a history teacher?

And really, the idea of a history soap opera kind of makes me ill.

Last Sunday on my undergrad's campus, all the freshwomen lined up in the Cloisters and got their Lanterns. This year's class is red. Just like mine, Just like my sisters. (Four year rotation, light blue, red, dark blue, green). Sophomores give the freshmen their lanterns, while the juniors and seniors direct the whole thing. This is the second of of the four main traditions that frame the year.

Bryn Mawr, for better or for worse, is deeply entrenched in its traditions. The lantern is probably one of the most positive traditions, representing your alligences to particular graduating or incoming classes and embodying your "Bryn Mawr Experience". Beginning in 1901, it has had bumps along the way, such as metal and money shortages during WWII meaning no new lanterns for the new students, but is still one of the most exciting evenings of the school year.

Some people say that if you do something more than once at Bryn Mawr, it becomes a tradition. While close to true, this has luckily not held for some of Bryn Mawr's bleaker traditions, some on which the institution was founded.

Springing from our discussion on monday, I got thinking about why it is important to discuss the motivations and situations under which an institution was founded. Seeing all the facebook congratulations to the incoming class of 2013 for their lanterns just got things moving.

Bryn Mawr was founded in 1885, in simple terms, so that women would be able to earn PhDs in the US and not have to go to Europe. The main impetus to that is this woman:


Ms. M Carey Thomas, the first dean, and second president.

And besides looking like she will consume your soul for dinner (which really, I wouldn't put it past her), she was fiercly intellegent, incredibly determined, greatly motivated...and an incredible classist and bigot.

Now, those first three adjectives sum up your typical "Bryn Mawr Woman", and Thomas's tradition lives on. However, because Bryn Mawr keeps the situation of its founding in mind, the last have not become part of a Mawter's daily life. Thomas would scoff at the idea that 80% of students hold a job to help pay for college, that most do not come from wealthy backgrounds, and many are not white. Bryn Mawr is acutely aware of the pretenses under which Thomas molded the institution in its early years, and keeps it in mind while molding the institution today. Bryn Mawr students often take pride in their on-campus jobs, and while diversity continues to be a heated subject, the school takes a proactive approach to separate itself from its founding views.

I am exceptionally happy for the traditions that Bryn Mawr chose to keep throughout these years; they made my college experience more than I could have ever asked for. Bryn Mawr would be tearfully dull and two demensional without its history, and I am very grateful that the college has kept its history, both the lanterns and the bigots, in mind over the last 125 years.

Readings, Nov 2

(I'm a smidgen behind on the readings for this week, thanks to some unfortunate dental work. However, I wanted to have something here to at least add onto when I do finish the readings).

Freedman Tilden's Interpreting Our Heritage has come across my desk at work a number of times, is quoted fairly often in NPS training, and occasionally is critiqued as being outdated.

Interpretation is a peculiar sort of animal. What works one day may very well never work again. What really engaged the group on your walk at 11am may leave the group at 1pm falling asleep standing up, even if the group make up does not appear dramatically different, (although the level of mental engagement of the interpreter may have changed).

Something Tilden throws about in his text is this idea of comfort. Comfort for the audience, comfort with the information, comfort with the interactions of people to the resource, even the comfort of the interpreter. What does comfort mean exactly, though? Making the visitor feel warm and fuzzy? Making sure no one will pass out from heat stroke or acquire frostbite while you walk the rim of the Grand Canyon? Knowing your "stuff"?

Just this morning a colleague and I were discussing how you have to be 'in the mood' to make a walking tour up to the huts a good one. If you, the interpreter, are not mentally and physically comfortable with the walk and all that it entails (your theme, the information, the simple 1/4 mile up to the huts, your boots, your group not walking into the middle of the street, the list goes on and on), it creeps its way into your talk. If your visitor is hot, cold, exhausted or tired of being on vacation, the ability to absorb interpretation, and that lovely provocation Tilden mentions, decreases. Comfort in interpretation is hard to come by, but when it does, Tilden is right, interpretation can be very relaxing and very fulfilling, for both the visitor and the interpreter. However, can you still provoke a visitor to engage this history, both with other historic knowledge as well as the past, and still have them be comfortable? Isn't provocation by definition an uncomfortable thing? Handler and Gable seem to think so, or at least that a visitor cannot be both comfortable and engaged.

Tilden has a lovely definition for interpretation. It is all of one sentence long, but presents a incredibly daunting task to those who "do" interpretation. Striking that balance between information, provocation and revelation is an incredible challenge. Yes there are a myriad of aids to help you, exhibits, films (or as one lovely visitor this morning stated, slide presentations), demonstrations, interactions, etc. They all help. But provoking the visitor to want to take steps towards understanding the scope, motivations, or consequences of any given event or action is so difficult it becomes the exception, not the norm. This, I feel stems from something that Tilden chooses to ignore: the motivation of the visitor to come to a particular place. I respectfully disagree with him, but an individual visitor's reason for coming to a site guides their ability to interact with the interpretation more so than any docent, guide, film or exhibit.

More to come tomorrow.

Readings October 26th.

This weeks readings included Cathy Stanton's The Lowell Experiment and an article on the American Preservation Ethos.

I feel like this week's readings, for the most part, can be summarized in one person:

John Muir.

For those of you who did not watch the Ken Burns series about the National Parks (of which about four hours are dedicated to him), John Muir is, at least in the NPS, considered the first Park Ranger. He was an avid preservationist and was integral in the creation of the first National Parks. He also founded the Sierra Club.

In Stanton's book, she outlines what she feels a public historian is. Leftists, activist, civically engaged, (normally) white, middle class. Muir was all of these. While he put his efforts towards the natural resources and not the culutural resources like Stanton writes about, Muir still fits the bill pretty closely. Muir did not grow up in an affluent household, but did well for himself in life as first an engineer, then a naturalist. He owned a fair amount of land and was well educated.
Muir was instrumental in the founding of Yosemite and other national parks, wanting to preserve them for their beauty, but also for how they could serve and be enjoyed by the general population. He was most certainly an activist, through his writing, influence on politicians, his actions for the parks.

I have heard Muir citized for his 'radical environmentalism', which in most cases was a deep concern for the preservation of land and resources. However, it does tie into our second reading about preservation. Many feel that Muir would have just preserved everything if he had the chance (and considering his great pull with the presidents at the time, it could have happened). It does beg the question however, if people had not pushed so hard for preservation, would we these parks and places? Is the extreme need to preserve a complete negative?

The main difference between Muir and Stanton's version of public historian is that Muir actively engaged his subject. He lived in all of the places that became parks and was constantly surrounded by and engaged with the surroundings he was trying to save or work for. Stanton notes that public historians are often too removed from what they are studying, such as the Lowell rangers not actually living in Lowell. However, it's a comparison better left unmade. Muir walked 1000 miles for the experience of it and camped out in Yosemite with Teddy Roosevelt. His wife sent him back to live in the wilderness because being away from the mountains/trees/etc was bad for his health. Muir made his work into somewhat of a religious experience and while, as Stanton said, people do bleed 'grey and green', I do not know if that quite equals Muir's experience.

Readings for October 18th

For this week we took on Horton and Horton's Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory and Launius's "American Memory, Culture Wars and the Challenge of Presenting Science and Technology in a National Museum".


One theme that both of these texts stresses is that there is not necessarily room, time or desire for new or forgotten interpretations of particular histories, whether that be technology, slavery or the causes of the civil war. The current presentations (historical societies, museums, schooling, what have you) just do not provide space for varying, and potentially undesired, interpretations. However, both also stress that, through continued discourse and education, public historians have the best hope for the incorporation of these new narratives. Public historians and places of public history are where these interpretations will be found and discussed.

Other than that I have a few questions just to think about and which we will possibly end up discussing in class anyway.

If memory is the springboard for history, can history realistically live up to the desire to be factual and accurate (words that came up more than once in these readings)?

As stressed in many of the essays, is education in these areas the answer to promoting more open discourse and further presentation of different or forgotten interpretations? Will education alone do this, or do we need public historians to push these discussions into the general discourse?

Part of any NPS interp training, and I'd assume any other public history training is know your audience. However, the Horton text also stresses know your interpreter. How often in visiting museums, or other places of public history, do people take into account the race, class, background, etc of the interpreter? Or is historical interpretation supposed to be a place where those things are supposed to not matter/be ignored?


I will write further on this, particularly in relation to possibly my favorite book from undergrad. However, the thoughts haven't fully solidified. Give it a few days.

Museum Review: The Mercer Museum

Since this week seems to be a lot of pathetic mishaps on my part for this class (missed the link (is there one?) for the new reading, I think my computer is revolting against the dashboard and not showing updates, my printer ran out of ink,), I'll try to make up for at least the last part by including some more photos from my Mercer Museum trip on here.

So, the short version of the review:
The Mercer Museum is the concrete castle home of Henry Chapman Mercer's collection of pre-industrial (pre 1850) American hand tools and hand crafts. Mercer, a native of Buck County PA, started collecting tools of pre industrial America in 1897, and built the castle for his collection of about 30,000 pieces in 1916. He wanted to force people to look at items not too far removed from the presented and how they told the history of Bucks County and the nation. The set up of the museum forces people to look at common objects in new ways.
The museum today houses about 50,000 items, many with their original labels in their original places within the castle. These items are separated into over 60 different catagories, based on what they were used for. This includes things such as threshing, butter making, music, medicine, local iron making and crime and punishment (which includes a set of gallows). The goals remain in line with Mercer's, and attempt to describe history through these tools, demonstrate how these tools portay Bucks County history, as well as examine Mercer's ideas of how museums should be run in the early 20th Century.
Through detailed placards in the exhibit areas describing whatever task (Fruit Preservation), what it is, how it is done (explaining the apple corers, right), how fruit preservation fits into the history of the Northeast and Bucks County, and how Mercer felt about this, the museum manages to bridge the time gap between the current audience and the tools. This significant distance in time between the tools and the audience is not something mercer had to grapple with so much, but the museum has successfully addressed the problem.
The Mercer Museum is increadibly informative, and succeeds in knowing its audience and making the collections accessible and approachable. Because Mercer, and today's curators, choose to encorporate many intertwining narratives into the museum's exhibits, it provides interpretation and knowledge not necessarily found else where in one place in such a comprehensive manner.

Anyway, it's incredibly hard to appreciate the Mercer Museum without visuals.

Yes, there are items upside down from the ceiling, Mercer's way of forcing people to look at things different, as well as saving space. And yes, those are real paw prints in the cement (from Mercer's dog, Rollo, who plays an integral part in the museum interpretation today)

Readings for October 5th

First, I'd like to say hooray for October! As a big fan of fall, I'm happy to see cool, crisp air taking place of the stifling humidity of PA summers. And I got to pull my Turkish scarves out of summer storage, which is always a big plus. Other exciting things: pumpkin flavored everything (still need to find a good pumpkin beer), halloween and getting to drink hot chocolate without looking like an idiot.

Anyway, onto the main point of this whole shindig, this week's readings!

The whole of this weeks readings (Making Museum's Matter, the AAM's 2008 annual report, and an essay regarding the incorporation of the Cold War into Civil rights museums) all dealt with three main things: Accountability, Ownership, and Value. Weil does a good job laying out the precarious balancing act in which these three things take part in regards to making a functional, worthwhile and purposeful museum in our current world. So I guess the best route for this is to address the three things separately, with a few concluding thoughts thrown in.

Accountability: Weil stresses accountability in a big way. He feels that part of the reason museums aren't thriving as well as they could be is that there is no evaluation system--they have no method of being accountable to each other or too any sort of grading or evaluation, leaving museums to include what they feel like and run in whatever way may appear best for them at the time. The AAM report touches on the movement towards some sort of central guideline for creating such accountability. Renee Romano addresses this problem of accountability if her text. She desires the global narrative of the Cold War to be incorporated into Civil Rights museums--feeling that this narrative is often ignored, forgotten, and an older narrative is presented at the loss of some major insights. She desires museums to be accountable for the information provided and to strive to provide the best available and most encompassing interpretation. A challenge which is made more difficult by the next bit to balance, which is...

Ownership: something that has significant impact on how museums function, run, are funded, get collections, and pretty much exist. Weil notes a particular shift in the functioning of Museums over the last 50 to 100 years. 19th century, the collections were why the museum existed. The museum or whatever donor or university owned the collections, they were available to be preserved in and of themselves for further scholarship and that was that. Ownership was fairly easy to identify and thus the museum and its content was accountable to that entity. Over the last century, who owns museums has become a bigger question. Is it the public? The board of trustees? The government? The grant giver? The corporation funding it? The original owners of the pieces in the collections? The list goes on. A museum is often 'owned' by many of the above, each of which has its own unique agenda, plan and attitude towards the running of the operation. Each of those entities may desire a different interpretation. Museums have to balance having engaged visitors while still pleasing the desires of their benefactors. The AAM's annual report shows this attempt to balance the effects of many tiered ownership, but also demonstrates through its long list of donors, how the balancing act may be tiped to one side or another (ie: those with the money to keep the operation going).

Value: And finally, the value of museums. This goes all the way from the the value of the experience one derives from a visit, to the value of the pieces inside the walls of the galleries and storage, to the walls of the building in which those collections are stored. Weil's quasi thought exercise about how different types of people would react to a "c-day" scenario exhibits the differing attitudes towards the value of museums and their holdings in a very clear way. The AAM's report stresses a desire to instill a feeling in museum visitors in the value of visiting a museum, to increase stewardship and participation. Of the three parts here, the value of a museum is most likely the hardest to concretely define, for it is not something that can be defined quantitatively.

Weil notes that museums sit in their weird world between a for profit business and a not for profit organization. They need to be accountable just like any for profit business, but they need to provide some sort of discernible value/benefit to its patrons, like a non-profit (his favorite in the united way). It is difficult to talk about one bit of this balancing act without engaging the others, since when one shifts, as do the others. However, to avoid blathering on too long, I'd just like to touch back to our Rosenzeig/Thelen reading, and a small bibliographic note from Weil, maybe explaining some of R/T's findings:

Pg 52, footnotes to "From Being about Something, to being for Someone"
35. I am grateful to Camilla Boodle, a London based museum consultant, for her suggestion that visitors may find a museum rewarding without necessarily accepting its authority. Conversation with the author, August 1998.

A French actor, speaking German, playing an indian...

...all to feel attached to history.

While standing at the front desk at work the other day, I witnessed something I had yet to see in my tenure at the park: visitors (not volunteers, not reenactors, not there for an event) dressed in revolutionary clothing to come visit the park. This is apparently a fairly common thing at Gettysburg, as relayed to a friend who worked at the Eisenhower NHS for a summer. The visitors come all decked out in their appropriate clothing, although they are mostly a little 'farby' and I'm sure the 'real' re-enactors look down upon them.
Now, as the girl who gets back into her civvies as fast as possible when done at days up at Muhlenberg, this desire to walk around in slightly ill fitting, seemingly never fully clean clothes for giggles evades me. However, as enlightened by Kim/Jamal, this apparently provides people with some sense of belonging or attachment. While vafo is probably (I hope) more tame than your average ren faire get together, I would imagine the feeling of camaraderie still applies. Wearing a tri-corn hat makes them feel like they are connected to or are participating in the time period or event they are clothed for. I don't think this understanding will ever make me want to go out in public like that without pay, but I at least have a slightly better understanding.

(I diss on living history a lot, but I must admit, I would have much much better posture if someone made me wear stays every day. Back support without suffocation? Count me in)

One issue that arises from this, and living history/reenacting in general, is something not addressed by Kim/Jamal is whether this is making a mockery of history. Are these people searching for authenticity or are they belittling a very serious issue? For rev war/civil reenacting people are almost always portraying soldiers. Is the interest a matter of honoring those that died or suffered for a cause or is it a matter of demeaning something so serious as war and death? Do Rev/Civil war re-enactors feel like they are honoring because the event is so far in the past (and so deep in myth/legend), while WWII re-enactors (oh yes, they exist) are trying to remember the not so distant, bitterly disasterous and still very influential part of the world's history (for which the US, arguably, payed the smallest toll)? Do we only start to reenact things that are pretty and shiny and so deeply entrenched in our nations myths? Is that why Germans insist on re-enacting ridiculous mishmashes of Native Americans (a concept for which German does not have a word), because their main narrative only involves the stories of Winnetou and the books of Karl May?

I don't necessarily have an answer to that. I am inclined to lean towards demeaning. We only seem to reenact the traumatic parts of history that have shiny presents. Is that honoring a memory or belittling those forgotten? I don't have answers to these questions, but they are good things to think about.

(The few times I saw these guys at the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, they had a didgeridoo. As in the Austrialian aboriginal instrument. It was fascinating.)

Readings: September 21 or undergrad stats class finally pays off

I will probably expend my entire posting for this week's readings (as well as possibly a couple other posts in the future) about the Rosenzweig and Thelen reading. The essays/chapters were also informative and sometimes fun, but I found the larger text perhaps the most fascinating and the most thought provoking.

The authors' use the argument that Americans do not care or do not know about history as their jumping off point for their research, a point they disprove. Despite the convincing data presented in support, I think their interpretation of the original concept is slightly off. Rosenzweig quotes an address from the AHA in 1989, regarding the ignorance of americans towards history. I think that the president of the AHA was not stressing so much the idea that Americans are devoid of general historical knowledge or interest thereof, which is what R/T argue, but that they are ignorant of or uninterested in the prescribed historical narrative which any publicly educated American would have been introduced to (An ignorance R/T explain through the disdain/disinterest in history as taught in schools). They demonstrate that people are interested in history, but the respondents do not necessarily exhibit knowledge of that prescribed narrative. This then begs the question of is the currently prescribed narrative something that should continue to be propagated? Does the narrative that is repeated in the school system need to be changed to be more accessible, possibly stressing more interesting/accessible individual and collective histories as apposed to the chronological narrative now presented? What are the goals of continuing this narrative, and what would be the disadvantages to changing it? I would be interested to see if there would be different responses to capital H History (read: the stuff in school) if this survey was given again, given the purposeful changes in school history pedagogy and curriculum over the last 20 or so years.

Thelen and Rosenweig support Becker's claim that everyone is a historian, but construct a more concrete outline than Becker. The answers and data derived from the respondents demonstrate that the public does function within standard historiography frame works that dominate the history profession. For instance, the public worry about bias, sources, trustworthiness, impact and collective vs. individual histories. All things that any academic historian worries themselves with. However, Thelen/Roswenzweig also provide some argument for why professional historians are necessary, but stress that they need to function somewhat within the framework in which the public is working.

and I still did do my readings at work this week, but I brought my camera along, and caught a surprise outside while working/reading at Washington's Headquarters. British Fusiliers come to Vafo once a year. It's a treat for both the visitors and the staff, and makes the day a little more fun. But not for any feelings of existential authenticity.

Readings for September 14th

So this week we tackled the intro to the Lowell Experiment, a speech to the AHA in 1931 and Ian Tyrrell's Historians in Public.

Stanton's text has the potential to be very intriguing. I am very interested if her frame of Lowell's mission and tours provides reasonable support for her arguments regarding the methods of doing public history and Lowell's performance therein. I am concerned that the frame may not be the best fit and may not allow for her argument to fully develop. Or that her theory is good, but Lowell NHS may not be the best place to implement it. One of my current co-workers worked at Lowell during Stanton's research there (Stanton even took a couple of her tours) and I am excited to compare Stanton's analysis to her experience at the park.

Becker and Tyrrel's pieces present a good starting place for our discussion of public history. Becker's argument that history as a discipline will 'disappear' unless academics realize how to integrate the academic into the public is an interesting one. Whether or not he intended it to be so dramatic an idea, or just trying to get historians thinking in a broader way (this was an address as the president of the AHA, after all), I'm not sure. In any case, Becker presented many observations that are central to both academic and public history,such as his discussion of the present interpretation of history being the facts that are currently considered truths, while that which has been discarded are those facts which have been deemed false or incorrect, and the constant fluidity of such defining ideas.

Tyrrell approaches history in public in a similar manner to Becker, in so much as history and its practice being fluid. Tyrrel frames his discussion of history in public and public history (a difference which probably requires a separate post to discuss) in the realm of the academic. He does this for a reason, noting that academics although hidden in the hallowed ivy covered halls, move in the same direction as public desires and pressures and that they are not intrinsically separate worlds with completely separate methods, practices and applications (pg 138). He also touches on the swing of American history from the super specialized to the all encompassing, and follows history's inclusion in the public realm through its trends of highly specialized to broad interpretations and research. He leaves us with the question of where these the public will take academic history (and vice versa) and where the pendulum of historical practice is going next.

If nothing else, this week's readings taught me that I should probably refrain from doing my public history reading while at work. It becomes far too overstimulating (I want to try to apply things I've read and see what works), and sometimes far too cooincidental. While reading Tyrrel's section on the incorporation of history cirriculum in schooling (particularly the arguments that between the world wars the american youth barely knew anything of their own nations history), an american student in university asked me "what is the american revolution?" (and not in the methaphorical sense, either). Such events are prime examples of why history education, both in its academic and public forms, is so very important to have and to investigate.

Introduction!

This blog will function as a sounding board for thoughts, ideas, projects and other such things for the Managing History/Public History course at Temple University (also possible are tangentially related, still appropriate but not official remarks regarding my related employment, depending what tickles my fancy).
My interest in public history stems from my work as a season ranger at Valley Forge National Historical Park, part of the NPS. Even though I am fairly low on the totem pole, I still am actively involved in the production and interpretation of history for the general park visiting public. I work within the Interpretive division meaning providing the visitor with information about what they are seeing in a meaningful and accessible way. Interpreting the park and the history of the American Revolution in an accessible way presents itself as a constant challenge. While the NPS has interpretive guidelines and the individual parks have missions within which to work, each ranger is responsible for developing individual programs tailored to and accessible to a wide range of audiences, knowledge bases and of course, interest levels. This needs to integrate the contemporary AND past academic historiography and interpretations with the goals of the NPS in a way that informs but also slightly challenges the public. I have grappled with this for every program I have written, which often are met with great appreciation and interest, but sometimes faced with the dreaded blank states. Despite being so engaged with practice of public history, I have no concrete definition, guidance or real idea of how what I do on a daily basis got to be what it is. Hopefully through this course work I can find those answers, as well as inform my own work through the varying interpretations, reading, projects and discussions we will engage.

NOTE: The opinions, statements, notes, etc mentioned in this blog regarding the NPS are NOT official NPS/Vafo policy unless noted through citation of the official NPS policy, either through direction to written documents or citation of electronic texts or websites. Discussion of policy will be extremely limited, but it will be objective, academic discussion which relates to my course work or which will positively enhance my academic or professional careers. This blog is written as a member of the public, not in any official capacity as an employee of the NPS.