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When History Goes Public: Recent Experiences in the United StatesAuthor(s): Donald A. RitchieReviewed work(s):Source: Oral History, Vol. 29, No. 1, Pleasure and Danger in the City (Spring, 2001), pp. 92-97Published by: Oral History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40179570 .Accessed: 01/12/2011 14:21

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WHEN HISTORY GOES

PUBLIC: RECENT

EXPERIENCES IN THE

UNITED STATES

PUBLIC HISTORY

by Donald A Ritchie

Both academic and public historians in the US have been seeking to reach mass audiences beyond their professional peers. While academics as 'public intellectuals' comment freely on current political issues, public histo- rians tend to utilize their skills more subtly to shape public consciousness through the presentation of history in museums, historical sites, docu- mentary films, and Web sites. Both endeavours have encountered mount- ing criticism, particularly over the efforts of museums and historic sites to interpret the materials they display. Offering several examples of recent controversies, this paper suggests that historians who deal with oral as well as written sources have benefited from a truly interactive methodology, from which they have learned to listen to conflicting opinions and to incorporate multiple viewpoints into their public presentations.

| ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS: public history; interpretation;

Historians in the United States have descended from the Ivory Tower to involve themselves in public debate, although at times it has resembled a public brawl. Seeking to address broader audi- ences on broader issues, academic historians appear increasingly as commentators in the media, identified along with those from other disciplines under the generic label of 'public intellectuals'. Others, whose careers led to non- teaching positions in government, business, labour unions and other non-academic organisa- tions, have dubbed themselves 'public histori- ans'. Regardless of employment, both groups seek audiences beyond their professional peers. While historians as public intellectuals have been called upon to provide historical interpretation for controversial issues, public historians have tended to avoid taking sides in current politics

and have concentrated instead on presenting the

past in more accessible formats and public venues.

Recently, the public intellectuals came under fire as 'cameo intellectuals', preening before the cameras and commenting on any issue, past, present or future. Critics charge that such media- selected or self-selected historians have ventured far beyond their scholarly expertise, particularly when speculating on the future. Richard Posner, Chief Judge of the Seventh Court of Appeals, recently railed against academic historians' inability 'to contribute helpfully to a govern- mental crisis' during the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton, accusing them of having debased their professional expertise for partisan purposes. Citing 412 historians who signed a petition protesting that the Clinton proceedings

92 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2001

departed radically from what the framers of the Constitution anticipated as grounds for impeach- ment, Judge Posner declared that 'No historian who had bothered to examine the history of impeachment in the United States could have written or signed the statement that I have

quoted*. The public intellectuals, in turn, have lambasted Judge Posner for 'triumphal anti-intel- lectualismV

Noticeably absent from the 412 historians who signed the disputed petition were the names of any public historians. By dint of their positions in the public sphere, which lack tenure and

require non-partisanship, public historians

usually refrain from publicly expressing personal opinions about political issues. They instead utilise their skills more subtly in efforts to shape public consciousness through the presentation of the past in public places. Seeking to return

history to the communities that made it, and to

help average people grow more aware of their own role in the broader scope of history, public historians have sought to attract larger audiences to museums, historical sites, documentary films, and Web sites. These efforts seem to have paid off, for attendance has risen dramatically at museums and historical sites across the United States. Small armies of citizens devote their free time to historical reenactments of battles from the American Revolution and Civil War, and innumerable families are tracing their genealog- ical roots. History's newfound popularity has

generated unexpected opportunities for public historians, but also left them occupying a contested terrain.2

One troublesome form of competition emerged when large corporations began to

perceive history as a profitable business venture, as the Walt Disney Company thought when it

planned a massive historical theme park amidst the Civil War battlefields of Northern Virginia. A few prominent, highly respected historians

joined the project as consultants, reasoning that if Disney was going to build the park, it would need professional advice to produce something worthwhile. Most other historians protested that

Disney parks peddled nostalgia and distorted

history to make visitors feel better about them- selves, have a good time, and spend money. Since this theme park would be located in a Civil War era setting, historians asked pointed questions about how Disney intended to present American

slavery. Facing such thorny issues, and escalating public opposition, Disney beat a strategic retreat from the battlefield and cancelled the theme

park.3 In that vicinity but on the opposite end of the

corporate scale, Colonial Williamsburg had long prided itself on its high standards of historical

authenticity in recreating the original capital of

Virginia. Then competition from nearby amuse- ment parks put a severe dent in revenues and forced Williamsburg to devise new ways of entic- ing people back. In 1994, Williamsburg made national headlines by reenacting a slave auction. This badly misguided effort offended civil rights organisations and triggered organised protests and more negative publicity. Desperately regrouping, Colonial Williamsburg conducted a marketing survey to find out exactly what its visi- tors were actually interested in seeing. The survey revealed that visitors wanted to learn more about the real people of the colonial town, both the famous and the ordinary, and how they had lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Most visitors seemed well aware that slavery had existed in Williamsburg, and had no need of being shocked into discovery of the issue. Visitors did express curiosity about how the free and the enslaved had coexisted. This resulted in Williamsburg's new programme of historical reinterpretation, Becoming Americans, which features narrative storytelling and role playing, arranged around 'days to remember' - real polit- ical, cultural and religious events that took place in the years prior to the American Revolution.

The lesson from the Williamsburg experience was not that historical museums should tell the public only what it wants to hear. Because histo- rians are constantly reinterpreting and revising the past, they will inevitably confront conven- tional wisdom and challenge cherished myths. All historical research is revisionist, involving a reexamination of what we thought we knew in accordance with the latest evidence and interests, to make the past relevant for the present. Never- theless, revisionism caused a storm of contro- versy in the once quiet world of historical museums, most notably at the several museums of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In the not too distant past, Smithsonian exhibits displayed historical objects in dim light with few explanations of what the items were used for, by whom, when or where. The effect was a quasi-religious atmosphere that encour- aged the veneration of relics. In a more educa- tional mode, the modern Smithsonian has turned the lights up brighter to encourage visitors to stop and read lengthy texts accompanying the objects. Rather than a hall jammed with stage- coaches, tractors, or other equipment organised into like groups, the museums have rearranged the artifacts by themes to tell interpretive stories. But whose story, and whose interpretation?

Among the pioneering effort at contextual interpretation was Field to Factory: Afro-Ameri- can Migration, 1915-1940, which opened at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American

History in 1987. The Field to Factory exhibit followed the migration of African Americans

Spring 2001 ORAL HISTORY 93

from the Deep South to northern cities between the First and Second World Wars. Visitors entered the exhibit at a typical sharecropper's cabin, passed through a rural black church and school house, boarded a railway car and emerged on a Philadelphia street, where windows revealed the contents of typical shops and apartments. Painted on the walls at each stop on this virtual journey, were excerpts from interviews with those who had made the actual exodus. Commis- sioned as a temporary exhibit, to last only a year, Field to Factory was so universally well received that it became a permanent display and inspired a redesign of the rest of the museum's exhibits.

By contrast, the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art stirred a storm of controversy when it mounted an exhibit on The West as America. This large, didactic, deliberately confrontational show aimed to confound visitors' expectations and explode romantic notions of life on the Old West frontier. The West as America featured violence, exploitation and injustice, little of which surprised historians who had kept up with western historiography, but astonished those visitors whose opinions had been shaped by the movies and television. Prominent govern- ment officials vented their outrage over what they perceived as a trashing of Western history, a reaction that complicated the Smithsonian's efforts to expand its government funding.6

The uproar over The West as America soon paled by comparison to the explosion that occurred when the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum mounted an exhibit on the Enola Gay, the military plane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Military veterans' organisations protested throughout the media and used their considerable political influence to alter the exhibit and chastise the curators. Arguments from both sides offered starkly different ways of analysing and presenting the same event. Did dropping the bomb end the war with Japan or begin the age of nuclear anxiety? Although the debate paralleled arguments that had long persisted within the historical community, the press now turned it into inflammatory front-page news. The result was an unhappy compromise in which the museum exhibited parts of the plane with the absolute minimum amount of explana- tory text and a prominently placed apology by the Secretary of the Smithsonian. Some visitors reported that they felt profoundly moved by seeing the plane and considering the destruction it caused; but many others found it entirely possi- ble to view the fuselage as an artifact without pondering its role in launching the atomic age.7

The Smithsonian subsequently drafted a policy statement to guide future presentations of potentially controversial historical information, which was first applied when the National Museum of American History opened an aptly titled: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Dialogue on American Sweatshops, 1820- Present. To underwrite the exhibit at a time of shrinking government support, the Smithsonian turned to Calvin Klein, Levi Strauss, Kmart, and the International Ladies Garment Workers union. They also solicited funding from the American Apparel Manufacturers' Association, but the trade association declined to contribute on the grounds that the exhibit focused only on the small percentage of the garment industry that might be described as sweatshops, and because it gave too much credit to the unions for improv- ing working condition. When the exhibit opened, the Washington Post commented that it, 'treads the line between hot-button advocacy and cold, precise historical facts. Outrage, which should be the heartbeat of a show about human exploitation and illegality, is present only in the weighty collection of details'. Essentially, the curators handled the exhibit by offering evidence and letting viewers draw their own conclusions. At the exhibit's entrance, a sign explained that the mission of a history museum is to 'interpret difficult, unpleasant, or controversial episodes, not out of any desire to embarrass, be unpatri- otic, or cause pain, but out of a responsibility to convey a fuller, more inclusive history'.8

An additional problem for venerable old

Artefacts relating to Nannie Helen

Buroughs, educator and civil rights activist, from the exhibition Field to

Factory: Afro- American Migration, 1915-1940, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute, photographed by Richard Strauss.

94 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2001

museums is that they have tended to lag behind their newer competitors in integrating newer technology throughout their exhibits to make them more interactive. Some still depend primar- ily on fixed signs to inform visitors what the museum thinks they ought to know about what they are seeing. By contrast, newcomers like the US Holocaust Museum and the Newseum (dedi- cated to the history of the news media) rely heavily on audio and videotaped narratives and interactive computers as central focuses of their displays. This approach allows them to offer multiple viewpoints in different voices. Interac- tive technology makes it possible for museum goers to 'ask questions' of those who participated in historic events. Interviews have been video- taped and edited so that the interviewee will answer any of the pre-selected questions offered on the screen. Casual observation of these high- tech displays makes it clear that younger visitors are especially attracted to the interactive videos and other computer components. By incorporat- ing multiple voices, these interactive exhibits teach the public that history may be interpreted in different ways. Rather than the authoritative, and sometimes condescending, single voice of the historian/curator lecturing the visitor on what it all means, the melange of voices of partic-

ipants and commentators can argue with each other to recreate the complexity of the issue. The Enola Gay's curators would have spared them- selves much grief by including the voices of both the military veterans and the anti-nuclear activists, as well as scholars in the field, to frame the exhibit as a debate rather than try to settle the issue by themselves.

Public feedback similarly surprised many of the participants in the largest sustained use of both academic and public historians on Ameri- can television. Throughout 1999, C-Span (the Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network, whose primary mission is to broadcast the proceedings in Congress) presented a weekly series of programmes on each of the forty-one Presidents of the United States. A wide variety of historians appeared on camera, often at the home or some other site associated with the particular presi- dent. Viewers were invited to call in to the live programmes with their questions. On the first programme, historian Richard Norton Smith was expounding on the virtues of George Washing- ton in a telecast from Washington's estate on the Potomac River, Mount Vernon, when an African American caller complained:

You guys there are having this love-fest for

Necktie workshop in Division Street Tenement, New Yorkf 1887, photo by Jacob Riis, from the exhibition Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A

Dialogue in American

Sweatshops, 1 820-Present, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institute.

Spring 2001 ORAL HISTORY 95

George Washington. He was a slave owner. I would never visit Mount Vernon.

Brian Lamb, the C-Span executive who was

interviewing Smith on the programme, observed that the call 'changed the dynamics' of the

programme and 'brought a sense of immediacy and urgency to it. This is something people care

deeply about'. During the forty-one weeks of

programming, C-Span received over 17,000 phone calls and e-mails from viewers. The histo- rians who appeared on the programme were

impressed with the public's interest, at the

sophistication of many of their questions, and their eagerness and ability to challenge historical

interpretations.9 In an age of electronic interaction, an ever

larger segment of the American public has grown tired of being passive recipients of information and expects to have its own say. Those historians whose work has been limited entirely to

analysing written documentation may feel uncomfortable with such vocal assertions from the public, but those who have conducted oral

history have usually encountered sources willing to look them in the eye and tell them they were

wrong. Oral historians engage in a truly interac- tive methodology. As interviewers they question and try to steer interviews into desired territory, but they are by no means in control of the ride. Narrators will tell their stories as they remember them, and as they see fit. While some may politely say what they think the interviewer wants to hear, others will stand their ground regardless of what damage they do to the inter- viewer's preconceived thesis. These healthy exchanges often force oral historians to reevalu- ate their assumptions, to reconcile contradictory claims. Whenever oral and written sources

conflict, scholars by nature show a bias in favour of the documents. Careful investigations of the

differences, however, may demonstrate that written records may be incomplete, inaccurate, and even deliberately misleading.

Through interviewing, historians learn to listen. Historians of course are trained to be

skeptical of any source, oral or written, and to seek verification. Sometimes oral sources can direct researchers towards otherwise overlooked written documentation. A public historian hired to write the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Tasty Baking Company, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, conducted interviews that indicated a strong racial component to many of the company's past labour disputes. Yet back issues of the Philadel-

phia Inquirer, the city's leading newspaper, mentioned nothing about them. The puzzled historian continued looking until he came across a small black weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, and found that it had covered the same disputes

that his interviewees discussed. At the time of the labour unrest, the white mainstream press had been oblivious to events and attitudes within the city's African American community.10

The virtues of oral history have made it a mainstay in most public history programmes across the United States. Extensive oral history has been conducted within each of the Smith- sonian's museums, throughout the many parks and historical sites of the National Park Service, within all branches of the military, at all of the

presidential libraries, at the US Senate, the Supreme Court, the National Aeronautics and

Space Administration, the National Library of Medicine, among foreign service officers, and within numerous other government agencies, as well as in state historical societies, local history collections of public libraries, and community projects, as well as in archives operated by busi- ness, labour, religious and civic action organisa- tions. The public historians who conduct and use these collections have found that the use of many voices offers greater balance to historical displays and gives viewers a sense that the presentation contains views similar to their own. Oral history materials have the added attraction of being in the vernacular and often anecdotal, making them all the more accessible to public audiences. By adding humour, pathos, and feeling to the text, the exhibit can better connect with the casual visitor. The diverse voices of oral history inter- viewees further add complexity and depth to a

presentation by demonstrating that not everyone experienced major events in the same manner, or saw things in the same light."

Oral historians in public history programmes have also been quick to embrace the Internet for the universal and cost-effective means it offers for disseminating information that once

languished on dusty shelves, read only by occa- sional researchers. A decade ago, the National Park Service gave financial support to Project Jukebox, a pioneering effort to combine oral

history interview tapes, transcripts and support- ing maps, photographs, videotape, and docu- ments on CD-Rom. In 1992, the first Project Jukebox was installed at a workstation in the

Yukon-Charley National Preserve in Alaska. Those visitors hearty enough to reach that remote location can learn via recorded inter- views on interactive video how the native

peoples fished, hunted, and survived in that

territory. Interviewees may speak in native

languages, but the computer provides English translations. Steadily over the last decade, public history programmes have been posting entire

transcripts of oral history interviews on their Web pages. The Library of Congress offers the interviews that the government conducted with former slaves in the 1930s; while the Ellis Island

96 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2C01

Oral History Project makes available the first- hand recollections of immigrants who passed through that island checkpoint on their journey to America. Rather than having to travel to distant repositories to read these transcripts, anyone interested in the subject can have virtual from their homes and offices anywhere in the world.12

Trends in the United States point toward continued growth in the public's interest in history, which could well lead to further conflicts over historical interpretations. Although they might be tempted to retreat, professional histo- rians cannot afford to abandon the public arena. At least historians no longer need to convince the public that history is valuable and can be interesting - they seem to have figured that out

for themselves. But the profession has a contin- uing role to educate people about meanings of the past, and to make them aware that history is not always pleasantly reassuring. The public ought to know how past injustices explain present problems, and how people historically attempted to solve their problems. Both public intellectuals and public historians have a respon- sibility to provide the community at large with access to a history that is accurate, analytical, and conducted with the highest professional standards. The future of the past lies not just in classrooms and monographs, but in museums, historical sites, the media and on the Internet. In each of those venues, the use of oral history and the concurrent willingness to listen and to learn can offer historians their best advantage.

NOTES I • Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness:

Literary Studies and Political Change, Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1995, pp 1 16-1 19; Richard Posner, An Affair of State: The

Investigation, Impeachment, and Trial of

President Clinton, Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1999, pp 234-236; Ronald

Dworkin, 'Philosophy & Monica Lewinsky,' New York Review of Books, vol 47, 9 March

2000, p 50. 2. New York Times, 28 October 1998.

3* Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Danger of

Putting Our Cultural Destiny in the Hands of

Business,' Chronicle of Higher Education, vol

44, 17 April 1998, A64.

4. James Oliver Horton, 'Presenting Slavery: The Perils of Telling America's Racial Story,' The Public Historian, vol 21 , Fall, 1999, pp 19-38; Cary Carson, 'Colonial

Williamsburg and the Practice of Interpretive

Planning in American History Museums,' and Marie Tyler-McGraw, 'Becoming Americans

Again: Re-envisioning and Revising Thematic

Interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg,' The Public Historian, vol 20, Summer, 1998, pp 1 1-76. 5. Douglas Henry Daniels, review of Field to

Factory, The Public Historian, vol 9, Fall, 1987, pp 68-69. 6. William H Truettner (ed), The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the American Frontier, 1 820- 1 920,

Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. 7. 'History and the Public: What Can We

Handle? A Round Table about History after the Enola Gay Controversy,' Journal of American History, vol 82, December 1995,

pp 1029-1144. 8. Washington Post, 22 April 1998.

9. 'C-Span's Hail to the Chiefs,' Brill's

Content, vol 3, April 2000, pp 107-108. 1 0. Joel R Gardner, Seventy-Five Years of Good Taste: A History of the Tasty Baking Company, 1914-1989, Philadelphia: Tasty Baking Company, 1 990; Gardner

presentation to OHAAAR (Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region) meeting, Philadelphia, 3

May 1991. 11. Donald A Ritchie, 'Oral History in the Federal Government,' Journal of American

History, vol 74, September 1987, pp 587-595. 12* William Schneider and Daniel Grahek,

Project Jukebox: Where Oral History and

Technology Come Together, Anchorage: Center for Information Technology, University of Alaska, 1992; see also Michael O'Malley and Roy Rosenzweig, 'Brave New World or Blind Alley? American History on the World Wide Web,' Journal of American History, vol

84, June, 1997, pp 132-155.

Spring 2001 ORAL HISTORY 97