I’ve spent the last 10 years working in the government contracting arena where I’ve experienced first hand the quickly evolving world of technology and its impact on end users. To adapt, many of my contracts adopted the Agile Software Development methodology where you’re evaluating and re-evaluating plans, objectives, goals, outreach, and so forth through constant communication and collaboration. I mentioned this software methodology because I think it’s what a lot of historians are doing, too; they’re adapting and adjusting their research to accommodate the evolving needs and expectations of their end users. As Katharine T. Corbett and Howard S. (Dick) Miller say in their article, A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry, “The ways and means of public history are sometimes bound by institutional constraints, at other times dependent on the play of the contingent and unforeseen. The first calls for smart planning, the second for fast footwork.” (1)
It seems to me that historians are shifting their focus away from conventional artifact-driven exhibits towards more innovative, collaborative, and dynamic creative process where museums and historical organizations provide not only the facts, but reflects the local community itself.
The dangers of siloed history.
Historians have a civic duty to help society understand history and strengthen their historical thinking capabilities. In his AHA presidential address of 1931, Everyman His Own Historian, Carl Becker “called for historical practice that shared inquiry and authority with “everyman,” the ordinary citizen historians aspired to serve. Every person used history every day to make sense of the world, whether professional historians helped or not.”(4)
I’d never diminish the idea that historical facts are historical facts and primary sources are primary sources. However, facts are just a starting point when you’re talking about history. In order to really understand the big picture, historians need to work on not underestimating the general public’s insight and input. There’s a lot of texture that the general public can provide to historical facts, painting an even clearer picture of the past. I’ve noticed with local museums that there’s very little outreach for community input or feedback with exhibits, and then once an exhibit’s up, it’s there to stay for years, at least this is the case here in the Shenandoah Valley! So rather than creating an open dialogue with the community with exhibits, museums often close their doors until the exhibit opening and then say, “Here’s the exhibit. Take from it what you will,” which is a disservice to historians, history itself, and definitely the community. As Kuo Wei Tchen says, “The attitude is that knowledge is there for the taking, and it is the audience’s loss if they do not take advantage of it.” (4)
Historians can’t shouldn’t work in a silo. It’s important that public historians engage with the public before and during a project, not just after. At work, when we sign a contract with a government agency saying, “Hey, this is the software application that we’re going to provide to you,” we don’t just disappear for a year to work on it. We communicate regularly on what we’re doing, the progress that we’re making, the challenges that we’re facing, and so forth. I feel like the same concept should apply to creating public history exhibits. Engage with your audience so that you ensure that your content connects the community to its history and that your efforts aren’t in vain.
Ronald Grele explains in “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History?”:
First, those of us who currently work in the field have not clearly defined what it is we do, why we do it, and why it is an alternative to other forms of historical effort. Second, the debates have taken place in a historical vacuum. To link and then frame these issues, we must define what we mean by ‘public’ and how we as historians have related to and continue to relate to that public. If we do so we can begin to gain the needed perspective on public history and to assess its elements and its consequences. (3)
The power of a story & the importance of personal connection.
I particularly enjoyed Module 3’s readings because I think that they get to what I consider the heart of public history: telling a story and making a personal connection. In our digital world, it seems easy to lose touch with the past (and with the present, quite honestly), but history can be a very grounding force, a force that historians can tap into via stories: “As public historians we had focused too much on the history, too little on the public. We had forgotten that popular history always begins and ends with village storytellers.” (4) This ties into one of my favorite blurbs from our readings, which is that historians are keepers of useful myths. (1) As a public historian, if you’re able to reconcile your content with your audience, then you’re likely going to have an exhibit that connects your content with your audience. You understand the relationship between history and stories. You want your audience to feel connected to the historical narrative that you’re telling. That’s not to say that you’re always going to be able to talk directly with your audience, nor that you’re going to be able to capture oral histories – we can’t talk to all of our ancestors! But you can still get a litmus test on what a story means in a community. Popular conceptions. Popular misconceptions. Rumors. Sensitivities.
I appreciate the general openness, inclusivity, and creative research strategy that John Kuo Wei Tchen talks about in Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment, “We want to fashion a learning environment in which personal memory and testimony inform and are informed by historical context and scholarship.” (4)
Can you handle the truth?
A public historian has done their due diligence. They’ve vetted their new exhibit’s content through the local residents, incorporated feedback, addressed concerns, fleshed out the details, and they unveil it to the community for mass consumption only to receive pushback on the narrative being told. One of the harsh realities of doing public history is that not everyone wants to hear the facts: “The stories public historians want to tell are sometimes not the stories the public wants to hear.” (1)
Living in the Shenandoah Valley, we have lots and lots of Civil War history, so I was particularly drawn to the discussion of history vs heritage:
- History narrates the past
- Heritage is a person’s connection to the past
A lot of locals have ancestors who fought in the Civil War, and most weren’t slave owners – they were fighting for Virginia, their home, their heritage. That energy prevails even to this day in the 21st century, which proves challenging for local historians trying to tell the community’s (hi)story by getting a bit raw with the facts obtained using primary and secondary sources. I’ve talked with several seasoned historians from the Shenandoah Valley who have said they’ve been told many times by locals, for instance, “Slavery wasn’t bad in Winchester. Slaves had a good relationship with their masters. It wasn’t bad around here. Why are you still talking about it? It’s the past. Leave it there.”
Where does that leave historians when considering content and audience? Help the public understand their own history and, as I mentioned above, help make them better historians. Help them understand that they, too, play an important role in telling local history.
[I]t is difficult ofttimes to find in public history that sense of mission that we find in local history at its best the goal of which is to help people write, create, and understand their own history. (3)
Sources:
- Corbett, Katharine T. and Howard S. (Dick) Miller. “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry.” The Public Historian 28.1 (2006): 15-38.
- Frisch, Michael. “From A Shared Authority to the Digital Kitchen, and Back.” Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, edited by Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, 126-137. Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2001.
- Grele, Ronald. “Whose Public? Whose History? What is the Goal of Public History?” The Public Historian 3.1 (Winter 1981): 40-48.
- Kuo Wei Tchen, John. “Creating a Dialogic Museum: The Chinatown History Museum Experiment.” In Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine, 285-326. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
