An Antidote to "Seeing"? (Part 2)

In my last post, I set to work deconstructing the depression-inducing claims of Tony Bennett’s article “Civic Seeing.” I argued that Tammy Stone-Gordon’s typology of the community exhibit challenges the Fouccoultean notions of control and manipulation that Bennett claims are inherent in the contemporary museum.

By the time I finished writing the last post, I’d almost recovered from my Bennett-borne depression. But not so fast!

As I finished reading Private History in Public, I began to realize that there was a different reason to feel depressed: many of the places in which the public encounters the past are spaces of economic exchange. (My colleague Bayard Miller notes that, in such institutions, "history is business.”) Stone-Gordon makes claims about the “corporate exhibit” in the final three chapters of her book. Her focus on Cracker Barrel is particularly gloom-inducing. Channeling Jerry Herron, she concludes that “corporately produced history-as-marketing often to a sanitized version of the past, a version that is divorced from the problems of the present" (p. 77). No wonder so many people yearn for the Norman Rockwell-ian America of “yore.”

Add to this glut of mythologized, capitalist-driven museums the claims of Whitcomb in Beyond the Mausoleum: Museums and the Media. Tying her work to Bennett, she advances the idea that government-sponsored museum spaces make not only cultural claims, but also economic ones. In other words, government museums -- in placing priority focus on material objects -- invite visitors to embrace capitalism. Thus, even in spaces supposedly liberated from the consumerist impulse, “history as commodity” reigns.

For the average museum-goer, I would assume, these academia-born typologies have little meaning. People obviously know the difference between a Cracker Barrel and the Philadelphia History Museum, but do they parse the ways in which they absorb history (i.e., arguments about the past) in these varied institutions? Are they cognizant of the diverse epistemologies at work in these spaces, the intellectual strategies of curation deployed to “convince” and “educate”?

I ask such questions only because we don’t have a The Presence of the Past that answers questions of public agency in the museum. We do, however, know -- courtesy of Rosenzweig and Thelen -- that the public trusts museums more than they trust any other source of knowledge about the past.

Boy, is that depressing.

"Removing The Artificial Wall": Historians and the Academic/Public "Divide"

In this week's Chronicle of Higher Ed, two history PhDs -- Alexandra M. Lord and Michelle L. McClellan -- encourage students of American history to "remov[e] the artificial wall between academic and public history." Here's a taste of their article:

In our shaky economic climate, academic departments will need to hire historians with multiple skills who can teach a range of courses. History departments will increasingly require faculty members who can explain to parents facing hefty tuition bills how and why majoring in history is a good choice. Departments will want historians who can sell a service-learning project to a dean who is determining budget allocations in a tight fiscal year.

In other words, even in an academic setting, historians need to be able to communicate the importance of history to nonspecialists, to collaborate, and to understand wider institutional goals. Participation in public history builds all of those skills.

Even as the academic job market in history has contracted, Americans remain passionate about the subject. They visit historic sites and museums, watch documentaries, read historic fiction, and investigate their own family or local histories. They visit Ellis Island, hunting for shipping records. They travel to federal historic landmarks such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, seeking insight into how and why a fire there changed history and made their working lives different from that of their great-grandmothers'. They visit a slave cabin at Evergreen Plantation and feel their breath catch as they imagine a life within its narrow confines.

Overcoming the gap between academic and public history would mean that the considerable accomplishments of enthusiastic amateurs—"popular historymakers," in the words of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen—could be contextualized in a more sophisticated and nuanced fashion. While the reward structure of academe currently mitigates against the involvement of academic historians in many public-history activities, much is at stake here. Surely we would all benefit if academics brought their considerable expertise to bear on public discussions about history.

Read the whole article here.

They suggest that "graduate students . . . should be provided opportunities to work on public-history projects, just as they must gain experience teaching and writing monographs." This is great advice, and something that Temple's history program has provided me (and would also provide to grad students not specifically seeking public history specialization).

So what do you think, folks? How can we begin to remove "the artificial wall"?