A New Public History Class

I look forward to a new group of students ready to tackle Public History and think about making history relevant to a larger citizenry, whether in the US or globally. As I am getting ready to teach this class I have been reading about the new museum opening in Dakar, Senegal - The Museum of Black Civilizations.  It is an incredible facility built with a 48 million dollar infusion from China. The museum is particularly suited to Senegal since its first President, Leopold Senghor, founded the movement of Black scholarship and civilization called "Negritude" in the 1960s. At his instigation the World Black Festival of Arts was held in 1966.  With the opening of the museum Senegal is demanding that France and other colonial countries return stolen art objects. It seems that museums, monuments and other sites of memory have become significant in current social justice movements. Does Public History support or resist the prescribed narratives about the past? What role can or should historians play in these debates over memory?

NYC Museums over Spring Break

Spending the week of spring break in New York City was great for visiting Museums and thinking about what some of the best endowed and most creative are doing on the cutting edge of museum practice. This is the first of a couple of posts about the museums that I saw.

The Tenement Museum is a great example of new museum style. The museum has taken an old tenement house on the lower east side of Manhattan at 97 Orchard Place to tell the story of immigration to the United States. The tenements started to be built in the 1860s when the demand for low cost, high density housing went up.  The neighborhood was first called “Little Germany” when the tenements were new and housed more bourgeois Germans coming as political refugees with some wealth to invest. They created the third largest German settlement in the world in NYC. When they began moving out Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe came, followed in the twentieth century by Italians. There is no “museum” as we would think of the term with displays but a number of tours of up to fifteen people that take you into parts of the restored tenement apartments or stores and into the neighborhood on walking tours. Not all of the building is restored so you still see the ruins of how the building looked when they bought it to being the restoration.   

http://www.tenement.org/

Here are some things I found useful and exciting about the museum:

1.      The educators were knowledgeable and committed. The two tours we had were led by people who had been there 5 years and 20 years. The young woman who did the neighborhood tour with us had an undergraduate liberal arts degree and said she works part time as an educator and part time in curation. The staff is given a lot of continuing education by experts and develops their own knowledge base. She said that this is a place one could build a career, not just as temporary stop. You increasingly get more responsibility as you prove yourself in the organization.

2.      The museum had a clear social activism stance toward their work. The guide who took us through the apartments said, ‘we at the museum are concerned that immigrants coming into NYC today may not have the same chance to begin their stay in America in this neighborhood because the price of land and housing is going up so dramatically.’ They are working not only for historic preservation in the neighborhood but in advocacy for the current immigrants who live there – currently mostly Chinese, Asian and Latino. New tours are looking at the issues of current immigrant communities and both tours said that American is enriched and depends on this constant infusion of new ideas and fresh inspiration – that we would be the poorer without immigrants. One guide said that getting a job here is competitive and that a degree in public history would help but is not required. One thing they look for in hiring is a variety of different experiences and perspectives that the staff bring to the museum – a commitment to social activism being high on that list.

3.      Each of the guides worked to connect the past with the present. On the neighborhood tour we heard stories about the great depression and how people survived, the informal economy of the pushcart business (outlawed by the mayor in the 1930s), the Jewish socialist newspaper (Forward, in Yiddish) that was founded in this neighborhood by intellectuals who worked in the cigar factories. This was the largest garment industry in the US at the time and produced something like 75% of men’s readymade clothing.  The tenements were finally closed when government regulations made it impossible to keep them open.  So of course there were connections to sweatshops, public policy, social activism etc. People in the tour were encouraged to make these connections and the tours were dialogic. They did not engage in nostalgia about an idealized past but rather using the past to think about the present.

4.      Each of the tours was built around a single theme. The neighborhood tour started out by the guide saying, ‘I am going to show you how immigrants adapted to American life in this neighborhood and how America was adapted to and changed by the immigrants.’ The tour of the tenement apartments began with, ‘I am going to show you through the stories of two families why American needs immigrants and how it is built by and made stronger by a constant flow of new people.’

5.      The tours were structured around personal stories of individuals and families.  In the tenement building we did a tour called “Hard Times” that highlighted the perseverance and ingenuity of immigrants facing adversity. We were in two reconstructed apartments of an early German Jewish family and a later Italian Catholic family. We learned the names of the people who lived there, heard their stories, were shown documents and photos of their lives and heard about their currently living descendants who helped put together the stories. So the tenements became places with named people who had connections to real people who are alive today – one who died in the 9/11 disaster.  Each guide carried around laminated copies of documents.

The National Museum of the American Indian with collections in Washington DC and NYC is also very well done and demonstrates some of the best practices in museum exhibits. The museum is based on a private collection of George Heye beginning at the end of the 19^th century. The museum is down near Wall Street and the financial district so an interesting walk too. It is housed in the old custom's building  which is quite grand on its own.

http://nmai.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/newyork/

Here are some of the things that I noticed at this museum:

1.      The story behind the collection of the artifacts was included in the exhibit. Rather than presenting the objects out of context they exhibits told how Heye got a hold of them. In one case he bought the Northwest Coast objects for a very low price because the potlatch was outlawed by the federal government and the goods confiscated when they held an illegal potlatch. The government then sold the goods at an auction. By doing this one connects what was collected with a very particular time frame and historical context of the collector rather than seeing them as timeless pieces.

2.      The Great Lakes exhibit mixed contemporary native artists and traditional artifacts. A special temporary exhibit in the museum was organized each room around a theme in which older artifacts were displayed together with recent Native artist renderings of the same theme. For example on of the themes was the spirit world – the sky thunderbirds and the water panthers. One could see the same symbolic world playing out in contemporary paintings as well as buckskin pouches. 

3.      Where possible the creators/owners of the objects were named and their stories told.  Amidst all of the displays there were always a few objects highlighted by telling the personal story of the people behind them, often with photos or oral history. Like the tenement museum this made lives of real people much more apparent.  In addition many of the objects had explanations of their use and meaning by named native people. This helped us to appreciate the objects beyond their function and see them in a larger symbolic world and cultural context.

4.      The exhibit featured the ways that native and anglo culture interacted. This allowed them to tell the stories of oppression of Native cultures but also to show the new hybrid forms that emerged from trade goods and the tourist trade.  The exhibit avoided the depiction of a reified and idealized native culture that did not change over time, but rather showed the dynamic ways that people adapted in spite of domination and destruction.

5.      A limited number of objects were on display in fairly sparse arrangements. Each exhibit case featured a focal point in a story or object so that your attention was not so scattered. There were clear explanations of  the context of each region and set of objects. Each section included interactive video screens and video clips of interviews that explained the artifacts. By displaying fewer objects you could concentrate more on each one and the overall effect was beautiful.

From House to Neighborhood History

As the house histories begin to come in they allow us to begin comparing the information that we have been finding. What can we now begin to say or question about the larger neighborhood?

Do the house histories allow us to begin establishing a chronology of the neighborhood? 

1.      When was the neighborhood established?

2.      What happened during the depression? Other early dates with impact?

3.      When did people start to rent out single family apartments?

4.      When were the houses broken into apartments?

5.      Who are the landlords? What stake did they have in the neighborhood?

6.      When did the apartments start to be owned by companies?

7.      When did the wealthy people start to leave the neighborhood?

8.      How did people’s jobs change over time? Where do they work?

9.      When did Latinos start coming to the neighborhood?

10.  What is the ethnic composition of the neighborhood?  Change over time?

11.  Why do houses deteriorate? What are the factors that lead to that?

12.  What is the history of homelessness in the neighborhood?

13.  What is the history of crime and violence in the neighborhood?

14.  What businesses, churches, libraries, other public spaces are in the neighborhood? Change over time?

15.  Are there any famous people in the neighborhood? Who?Famous buildings - Carnegie Library

16.  Why should anyone care about this history of this neighborhood? Who is it interesting to? Are there larger histories that it intersects with?

17.  Have any of the houses been restored? By whom?

18.  Is there anyone who has a long history in the neighborhood that could be interviewed? Who are those people? How would we find out? What would we ask them?

19.  Are there any stereotypes of this neighborhood in Goshen? In the schools?

20.  Are there any new trends in the neighborhood? Signs of gentrification? Work of LaCasa?

Digital Libraries

It seems like the digital world is one place where academic historians and public historians are finally coming together. I am running into digital projects more and more in both my teaching and research. Over the past three years or more I have been working to construct my own digital library to make my research in the Mara Region of Tanzania accessible to people there. It is going to be migrated but at least for now here is the link: Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library 
This has been a entailed a huge learning curve for me and is still far from complete. At least it gives me some idea of the amount of work from all kinds of experts that goes into creating a site like this. But digital technology does open up the possibility of repatriating cultural material back to the region where it came from in a way that was not even imaginable when I did this work in 1995-6.

I am now teaching a class called The History of Ethnic Conflict in which I am finding a wide range of digital sources very helpful. We are studying the Israel/Palestine conflict through a book about Palestinian memory of 1948. It is amazing how many digital archives have grown up around this memory work:

•al-Nakba: the Palestinian “Catastrophe”

•Nakba Archive

•#Nakba Survivor

•Israeli Occupation Archive

•1948 Lest we Forget

•Nakba Film Works

•Jewish Voice for Peace 

•Palestinian Village Histories, R. Davis

–Archive for Birzeit University

•Berzeit University Palestine Archive

–Destroyed Palestinian villages

•The Palestinian Poster Project Archive 

I especially like this last one - an amazing collection of posters, both Palestinian and Israeli.

It is amazing where this field has gone in the last decade and it seems like both Public and Academic Historians should get on the bandwagon or be left in the dust! 

 

What makes a good museum?

We have been looking at and reading about museums and thinking about what makes a good exhibit? What elements should we find in an exhibit. We had some good conversation in Bristol about the exhibits that are there now along with the director's critique. Here are some of the ideas that I walked away with:
1. Exhibits should bring the past and present together and lead to action
2. Exhibits should include the full diversity of the community in its exhibits.
3. Visitors should be able to relate their own experiences to what they see in the exhibit.
4. Exhibits should be about the particular local history and not just a generalized American past.
5. Visitors should be able to learn something new about their community not just reaffirm their assumptions
6. Exhibits should tell as story not just display stuff, the stuff should be interpreted and explained.
7. The interpretation should leave space for the visitor to decide what they think but also guide them
8. Exhibits should not be crowded and cluttered but leave space for the larger effect
9. Signs should be big enough to read and photos big enough to look at carefully.
10. Exhibits should be engaging, participatory, experiential and interactive, especially for children.
What else? What is on your top ten list? 

Then being introduced to Simone's Museum 2.0 Blog pulls some of these things together. In particular students noted the blogs on:
1. Participatory Design in Museums
2. Designing Participatory Questions
3. White Privilege in the Museum 
 So what would a participatory museum look like? How do we work at incorporating a wide range of community stories beyond those of white privilege? How do we get people involved when they come to the museum? What do they walk away with?

This is a conversation I hope we continue to have throughout the semester and especially with the final projects.

Professionalization

As I read the articles on Archives, Administration and Records Management I was thinking about the issue of professionalization. Is it a good thing for the field to be professionalized? Does that push out the amateurs? Should there be a place for amateurs? Why did the historical profession in the academic organizations abdicate their responsibility for advocating for professionalization of public history? Is that another example of "shooting yourself in the foot"? If it is important that the people who direct or museums, archives, historical sites etc are historians, and not just technicians, then we should advocate for this? What does training in history do for these administrators and records managers that could not be done by someone trained in public administration or management?

Telling Stories

Like others of you in your blogs I was struck with the reading today: "Historians tell stories." I see each of you busily trying to figure out the "traces" that have been left behind about your house. The house history project asks you to find out a lot of minutia but the hope is that at the end some stories will emerge. And then even beyond that our collective house histories will start to suggest a number of stories about the neighborhood! So what stories can we tell about the neighborhood? Without a storyline all of the facts we are uncovering have no meaning. I can see interesting things emerging.  Look at Rafael's blog - he found out that the house used to be a "tin shop" so what does that say about businesses in the neighborhood and how that has shifted over time. Rachel also talked about the furniture shop. Rafael also uncovered some scrapes with the law - could you actually figure out how much police action has taken place in the neighborhood over time and find a story in that? What about the "cultural landscapes" around your houses? What else is in the neighborhood near to your house? Nearby History asks us to sharpen our perceptions - can we learn to "see" and "listen" through these odd traces of the past in the landscape and in the archives?

I am excited to go to the museum today and meet our partners for this project! Among the documents that the book points out as potential sources be sure to learn what the newspaper sources are for Goshen and whether they are indexed or not!!! What kind of government documents might be helpful to you? Most of the "ephemera" that the Elkhart County Historical Museum has collected is in the vertical files so be sure to see what they have there. They have a much more complete set of city directories than does the Goshen Public Library and these are really fun to look at because you can look at all the houses in the block and make some comparisons of your house to others (p. 78). And of course the plat maps are always interesting, I wonder if there are any for these city blocks? Many of you have already tried you hand at the Sandborn maps - don't give up too soon. The census will probably be one of our best sources for thinking about the neighborhood as a whole entity and looking at change over time. Who wants to dig into that for the final project?

It is fun to be part of a class where, even as a professor, I don't know what the outcome will be of our research! Happy hunting.