3/28 Reading: Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice / Historians as Consultants and Advisors

     As this semester starts to draw to a close, my class was assigned Thomas Cauvin's Public History: A Textbook of Practice in preparation for our presentations about the Hungerford property in Eatonville.

    My assigned chapter was Chapter 12: Civic Engagement and Social Justice. The point of this chapter is to demonstrate show how public history can be used in social justice efforts. This chapter can be divided into two major sections. The first half goes through the many minority groups left out by standard history, and how they have been represented in recent years. While some groups have begun to receive strong representation like Native Americans, most minority groups have struggled to receive full attention. While Native American museums are able to find strong connections with the tribes they represent, most groups struggle to come to a consensus on how their groups are represented. Other groups like the LGBT community struggle to even get the attention of historians. The second half of the chapter focuses on how these efforts can allow for a reconciliation with the past. By bringing more attention to the mistreated groups of the past, historians allow people today to learn about and make amends for the faults of the past. While making amends can take many forms, reconciliation begins by simply presenting and preserving the history of these groups.

    For the Hungerford presentation, I decided to look into the idea of a Community Land Trust for the Hungerford property. Eatonville has a history of land trusts dating back to the city’s initial founding back in 1887. While the land trust does not exist today, the idea of bringing it back for the Hungerford property is not a bad one. A land trust serves several functions. First, it serves as a way to keep housing affordable for lower income people. This is done by selling only the improvements to the land rather than the property as a whole. The improvements, say a house for example, can also only be sold for a set percent higher than the initial purchase. This allows people to get a return on investment and sell to another low-income individual. The second function of a land trust is to allow the community to keep investors and speculators away from the community. Lastly, the land trust gives the community control over what can be built on the property. Land trusts are typically governed by three groups. Those who live on the land, those who service those who live on the land, and those who represent the public as a whole. When applying this to the Hungerford property, there are several pros and cons to the idea.

    For the pros, Eatonville would have direct control over what is built at Hungerford rather than being at the whim of Orange County, the state of Florida, or a private investor. Eatonville has struggled financially due to a variety of factors, so having a land trust that helps lift up the poor would be beneficial to the community as a whole. Lastly, a land trust would continue the history of Eatonville through its founding and as a Black community. Of course, there are cons as well. The presence of the land trust could deter investors from investing in the community as they do not want to share authority or cannot meet the demands of the trust. The land trust representatives could also reach a deadlock that would result in the property sitting unused. Despite these cons, the land trust could still be a viable path for the Hungerford property.

    Tying in with the chapter I read, the Hungerford property would greatly benefit from the ideas of Civic Engagement and Social Justice. For a start, Orange County could begin to make amends with Eatonville by turning over the Hungerford property to a land trust run by the community. The land trust in turn could begin to allow Eatonville to represent their story on a larger scale than before. If they don’t want to present their own history further, Eatonville could use the property to lift up their own community economically instead.

3/14: Reading: The Inclusive Historian's Handbook

    For my Blogpost this week, I was assigned a collection of articles focused on Museum collections from the Inclusive Historian’s Handbook along with one article of my choice. The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook is a collection of articles designed to foster more inclusivity and diversity in the field of public history. The Handbook started development in 2016 with 3 co-editors, Modupe Labode (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution) William S. Walker (Cooperstown Graduate Program, SUNY Oneonta) Robert Weible (State Historian of New York Emeritus), along with a dozen additional members on the advisory committee. Being co-sponsored by the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) and the National Council on Public History (NCPH), the Handbook still receives updates, such as the post about disability history in 2024. The Handbook features a variety of authors who bring their own definitions about inclusion and diversity to further open up the conversation.

           Since all of my articles tie into museums and how they should utilize their collections. I found it best to explain two of them together. The first article I read focuses on Material Culture. Historians did not originally focus on the study of objects. Back in the day, Historians focused their efforts on the study of written primary sources and only preserved the objects of the elite. Starting in the 1960s, historians began to take an interest in the lives of ordinary people. The problem historians ran into was that ordinary people did not leave a pleather of written sources behind about their lives. To remedy this, historians turned to the objects they left behind and used to tell their stories. The use of objects allows historians to put the audience into the shoes of people from the past. Material Culture cannot work by itself however, historians need to use a wide variety of sources to get the full story. The article mentions how the foil milk caps from Polk’s Dairy in Indianapolis, Indiana were originally viewed as unimportant as they only showed that the African American community drank milk. After interviewing members of the community, the historians were informed that the milk caps allowed African-Americans admission to the Riverside Amusement Park, open only to whites, on one day of the year. The article highlights how Material Culture can involve a large collection of objects that tell a wide range of stories of people from all backgrounds   

Moving past the objects, my next article focused on Exhibitions. The first thing the article notes is how these exhibitions are meant to be a visual story, rather than a textbook article or an essay. The article then focuses on how museums should collect based on their exhibitions, rather than basing their exhibitions on their collections. Instead of using a lack of objects as an excuse to not feature diverse exhibitions, the author says that the museums should take the opportunity to reach out and ask for stories and objects from the community to display. The museum can supplement their existing collection with the new donations to tell stories about things that affect all people like weddings. Another way to frame exhibitions is to use seemingly mundane objects to tell a much deeper story. The article cites an example of an ornate chair that can be used to show the stories of slavery, dangerous occupations, and deforestation in the Caribbean that it took to make the chair. Lastly, the article asks for museums to create rapid response teams designed to collect objects that would be easily lost if left for too long, such as political paraphernalia. The article cites the Orange County Regional History Center and its ability to quickly create an exhibition about the Pulse Night Club shooting. Through proper exhibition and collection efforts, museums can create presentations that reach out to the community and earn its place there.

After reading these articles, I came to better understand how museums can better foster inclusivity and diversity in their walls. I had not thought about expanding the collection to create new exhibitions, as I had viewed museums as institutions limited to caring for the objects they have been given.

3/7: Preserving & Interpreting Historic Cemeteries as Public Memorials & Educational Resources

    The preservation of cemeteries has many factors to it that separate it from the preservation of other historic sites. These sites preserve more than a structure or a property, but also the people who now rest there. This makes the preservation effort around them more emotionally charged than most preservation efforts. The evolving history of these sites continue to cause discussion in public history.

    The reason for the preservation of cemeteries has changed slightly overtime. Cemeteries are meant to bury the dead and allow their descendants to honor them. Once there is no more room for the dead and their descendants no longer visit the sites, the incentive to preserve the site plummets. As seen with site like the Daughters of Zion Cemetery in Charlottesville, VA, the cemetery fell into neglect after the original caretakers passed away over the years with the society dissolving in 1933. Efforts to preserve the cemetery occurred as the city seized the land through imminent domain in the 1970s, and the land received a national designation in 2009. It would only be in 2015 when the local community took a renewed interest into the cemetery. This interest came from descendants who reconnected with their ancestors who were laid to rest on the site. These descendants had a slight change in the reason for preserving the site. In addition to preserving the graves of their direct ancestors, they also sought to care for the many dead as a whole. By remembering all of the dead buried there, these preservation efforts reinforce the legacy of the Black community that lived there throughout the eras of slavery, Jim Crow, and beyond. A similar story has begun to unfold in Richmond, VA as renewed interest has taken place in Shockoe Hill African Burying Ground.  It was not new interest alone that caused these sites to see new preservation efforts, but changes in the field of public history as well.

    With the introduction of new technology alongside the new on-the-ground preservation efforts, the preservation of cemeteries has taken a new form that was not possible before. One example of change is the increased digitization of documents. Through this increased digitization, more people are able to look into these documents and trace their ancestry to these burial sites. It was through finding one document about her ancestor Kitty Cary that led Lenore McQueen to Shockoe Hill. In addition to the changes in digital preservation, the implementation of new technologies like GPR allows these preservation efforts to more clearly define the extent of where the dead lay buried. As the development of cities continued, the documents that defined the boundaries of these cemeteries were lost. As a result, these grounds were destroyed as roads, buildings, and other developments took their place. The last change in public history come from the involvement of people who aren’t just academics. These grassroots efforts give the preservation efforts legitimacy as the descendants show the city the local importance of preserving these sites. Places like Greenwood Cemetery conduct history harvests in order to better remember and interpret the site. In addition to the historical knowledge gained, it encourages the local community to come learn about and remember the cemetery where many former community members are buried. While I have mentioned the importance of the local community in these efforts, none of these efforts would have existed without the help of public historians who have the knowledge needed to find, document, and preserve the knowledge from the community and the site itself.

    There are challenges in preserving these sites however. Sites like Greenwood and the Daughters of Zion were lucky enough to have most of the original cemetery site left undeveloped or somewhat preserved. For Shockoe Hill however, the efforts to preserve the site as it does not truly exist anymore. The area has been built over with railroads, roads, and buildings. The area is still a location modern developers wish to build over with new infrastructure. While Lenore McQueen has succeeded in getting attention to the site and a historic marker added to it, she still had to fight against these new developments. These fights are difficult as you have to encourage the city to deny economic development for a site that does not have anything aside from a historic marker. Lenore knows this can be difficult, which is why she continues to reach out to the community and spread the word about the site. By doing so, the preservation of the site evolves from the project of a historian into a monument for the local community.

2/29: What Can "The Public Historian" Teach Us About the State of the Field?

 Summary

Article 1: Teaching Public History: A Cross-Cultural Experiment

Author: Na Li is a research fellow at Chongqing University and adjunct professor at Shanghai Normal University. She actively writes for and continues to establish public history in China. Martha A. Sandweiss is a professor of history at Princeton University and had been a professor for 20 years prior. She had also worked as a curator and museum director. She also has written many books about American history and culture.

Summary: This article focuses on a first of its kind conference in China by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on Teaching Public History where U.S. historians and 16 Chinese historians gathered to discuss on how to develop Public History in China back in 2014. The conference developed in 2 parts. Part 1 focused on educating the participants about Public History and how to fund and develop it. Part 2 focuses on the cross-cultural dialogue caused by visiting existing museums and sites in China. The conference sought to develop public history in China since there was a worry that the field would be forgotten by Chinese academia.  In part 1, the Chinese participants were open to the idea of public history as many of them were practicing it by a different name.  The need to define it arose as these historians had wildly different views about it. Theory had outpaced the academy and there were no standards on how to practice it. Participants had worries about shifting too much power to the public in online forums and from locking history into the hands of the academy and wealthy. The participants also focused on the ideas of helping the working class and urban development. The American participants noticed that Chinese historians were largely defensive about controversial elements in their presentations of history like the use of human remains and graphic imagery at the Nanjing Memorial
Museum. The Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Museum elicited a lot of interest in the American students for the story it told, but the posters largely disinterested older Chinese scholars and entranced the younger Chinese students. Questioning institutions was discouraged in China unlike in America. At the end, the American students were humbled by the cross-cultural encounter and realized that the public history they knew was actually American public history.

Article 2: A Problem of Visibility

Author: Evan Faulkenbury is an assistant professor of history at State University of New York College at Cortland. He teaches public history and recently published his first book.

Summary: This article focuses on the story of an old Union memorial in Cortland, New York and how the town sought to move the statue for a new music stage. The author does not argue for or against moving the statue, but instead he takes the time to study how the statue’s meaning had changed over time. The statue’s initial founding came about in 1875 as the North grew tired of Reconstruction. The statue symbolically looked westward to expansion rather than South at the former enemy and where the soldiers it honored had died. The memorial was also built so the community would not forget the sacrifice of the past. The statue notably left out the fight for emancipation that the Civil War became. The statue’s importance began to fade as the community did not properly care for it and as they added more monuments to the park. Only after the city announced a plan to remove the memorial and to build a music stage, did people begin to care for the monument.  The meaning of the memorial had changed over time in this debate. The whiteness, Manifest Destiny, and manliness of the monument had changed into being a veterans’ memorial and as a bastion against historical amnesia.

Article 3: Remembering Black Nashville at Fort Negley

Author: Juliet Larkin-Gilmore received her doctorate in history the year this volume was published in 2019 and Kristina E. Lee was actively pursuing her own doctorate in sociology at the time.

Summary: The article focuses on Fort Negley, which was built as a symbol of the Union’s takeover of the city in 1862. Serving as a symbol of the Union, the Confederate Nashville did not take much time to care for the fort. The fort became a symbol of the Black community as it served various roles in the Black community’s lifetime. In 2017, a new development program was announced, which threatened the Fort.  Mona Fredrick decided to raise awareness of the fort through an Oral History project at the Vanderbilt Warren Center. As the Warren Center involved student like Lee and Larkin-Gilmore, the oral history project and a following archeological study brought many new bits of information to light that led to the development plan changing. The group decided to create a digital archive since the University had access to video equipment, and so the interviews can be viewed by the community on sites like YouTube. The Center’s efforts continued to gather more publicity and interviews, and the Fort would become a “Site of Memory”. Despite this effort, the city showed that it had a lot of work to do to reconcile itself with its Black community.  

Article 4: Hippies Living History

Author: Malgorzata J. Rymsza-Pawlowska is an assistant professor of history and director of the graduate program of public history at American University. She has authored multiple books about pop culture in the 20^th century.

Summary: This article discusses the way the counterculture movement helped to develop the idea of living history exhibits. In the 1950s and 1960s, historians were still dealing with the idea of objectivity in historical interpretation. It would be through James Deetz, who was not trained as a historian that living history would be changed at Plimoth Plantation. Plimoth used mannequins in clean houses to show its living history. Deetz would change this however as the group removed the ornate furniture, signs that indicated who lived there, and mannequins in clean clothes. The interpreters were put into dirty clothes that represented the hard work that the original inhabitants would have done. Many visitors were outraged by the new changes since the new interpretations made the place look like a run-down hippie village. The author points out that it resembled the communes of the day since the hippies and living history experts both shared the same view of the past. Ideas like ecological concerns, self-sufficiency, and distance from institutions reflect both in counterculture and living history.

Conclusion

In the context of radical public history, I see that being reflected in these articles. It is through grassroots efforts that strong public history can happen. In article 1, the attempt to pass on American public history ideas onto the Chinese group proved ineffective.  In fact, the most successful part of the talk seemed to occur when one of the Chinese historians brought up his own public history project. While other Chinese scholars seemed disinterested at first, the group would be won over by the project leader’s discussion on it. The other articles demonstrated the success of grassroots efforts. Article 2 showed how a development project can be halted as a community member stands up to a development project. The article also demonstrated how something with a defined meaning can have that meaning change overtime. Article 3 shows how local allies and institutional assistance can make waves in a community. Only through institutional work and local cooperation did the project go as smoothly as it did. Article 4 shows how a non-historian can make strong impacts in certain field of history. Through the shifting view of non-conformity, did living history begin to take on a new form that better reflected the past it sought to recreate. The articles all reflect the editorial policy of the journal very well. The articles all report the work from in the field and raise questions about how to better work in public history. Some of the articles are so new that the stories aren't even fully finished by the time they are written. 

2/22: Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities

    Andrew Hurley’s book Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities plainly states in the preface that “The central argument of this book is that inner-city communities can best turn preserved landscapes into assets by subjecting them to public interpretation at the grass roots” (Hurley ix). Throughout the book, Hurley focuses on the different ways grass roots efforts can be inspired, started, and maintained. This grass roots view of public history perfectly reflects the efforts started by Eatonville to preserve their community. This effort to preserve their community has shown great success so far as the community’s efforts have garnered the efforts of large organizations like UCF and the Southern Poverty Law Center. While the whole book focuses on grass roots efforts, I decided to discuss Chapters 3 and 5 of the book.

Chapter 3 focuses on the development of Old North St. Louis and the local community’s effort to revitalize their community. The story of Old North St. Louis reflects the struggle of Eatonville greatly. North St. Louis dates as one of the oldest parts of the city where many of the city’s minorities would live. While the racial demographic differed with a large number of Germans, Poles, and Italians, North St. Louis featured a vibrant African American community in the 1940s like Eatonville. Both communities would be ravaged by the rise of highways as the new roads forced their way through the neighborhoods and uprooted many of the residents there. Both communities also began to use history to establish their independent in their larger cities. After south St. Louis began to see a gentrification of its old neighborhoods by big businesses, the north side residents founded the Old North St. Louis Restoration Group in 1981. The community found some success in getting dozens of buildings National Historic Landmark Status, renaming the area to “Old North St. Louis”, and even compiling a collection of recipes from local immigrant families. Despite these successes, by 1997 the group had not seen the success that they had hoped to see. Having already reached out to the University of Missouri, the two groups would form the Old North Partnership Center in 2001.

The new Partnership went well beyond historical research by assisting the local community with assistance in getting funding, continuing development, and guiding local residents on financial literacy and tenant organization. To stick with the history, the partnership began a two-pronged effort of collecting oral and archeological history. The community was encouraged to assist with both of these efforts through their own contributions. The Partnership helped to teach the community how to store and collect their own oral histories without the University. During the archeological digs, the community was invited to join the historians in their efforts. The historians also invited the community to bring their own artifacts as donations to the new museum that was created to display the local history. This collaboration would end by the mid-2000s, but the community would continue to teach their own history to this day. This effort to focus on history mirrors the efforts Eatonville takes to build their own community through their work with UCF and the Zora Neil Hurston festival. It also echoes the voices of people in the Eatonville community who seek to tell their own stories without being controlled by an outside force.

Chapter 5 focuses on the ways you can preserve history through its landscapes instead of just man-made structures. The book opened my eyes to the idea that the natural landscape ties into the local history of the community, such as the story of runaway slaves trying to cross the Mississippi river as part of their journey on the Underground Railroad. Tying back into the Old North St. Louis, the book tells the story of how the local community swam, fished, and interacted with the river in the past. When the city attempted to expand a fruit market into a larger complex that blocked the community’s access from the river even more, the community rose up to fight the expansion. This use of natural landscapes got me thinking about how the Hungerford property could still be used by the community as a way to teach their local history even without the Hungerford building. The school had a history of being an agricultural school, so the community can use the land as an opportunity to reignite the farming education the school taught.

2/15: Shared Authority, Shared Inquiry, and Radical Roots (cont'd)

 

I got the chance to read the story behind the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and the controversy surrounding its attempt to acquire 99 Orchard Street, which neighbored 97 Orchard Street where the museum was housed. The story follows the Lower East Side Tenement House Museum discovering damage done by the tenants of Orchard 99 who were building their own business in the building. The museum had been ahead of the efforts in the museum industry to focus on telling the forgotten stories of the common person. In addition to focusing in on the story of immigrants, the museum also celebrated their immigrant past as the equivalent of the frontier in the cities. The local community had a good view of the museum. Many local businesses had credited the museum as a boost to their businesses by attracted more people to the area. The museum under Ruth Abrams had seen great success under her leadership to the point where she had begun to seek expansion elsewhere. Abrams brought with her many connections caused by both her father’s legacy as a civil right lawyer and a member of the Reagan administration and her own work in founding and working in many social organizations. These connections allowed Abrams to acquire more funding and assistance compared to the average house museum. Abrams also brought with her a unique view point into the museum industry. She believed in the “expand or die” mentality that mainly existed in the business world.  After multiple failed expansion efforts, Abrams had zoned in on the neighboring Orchard 99 as the ideal expansion target. The attempts to acquire the property would not go as planned however.

There were two tenants in Orchard 99, and while one was willing to sell, the other was not. Lou Holtzman did not wish to sell the tenement that had been in his family for four generations. Despite multiple offers by the bank, Holtzman refused to sell the property. The museum had been offering to buy this property along with other ones well below market value. The museum had also been condescending in their offers by implying that the owners were eager to get rid of their unproductive property. Eventually, the museum decided to use imminent domain to attempt to forcibly acquire the property from Holtzman. Holtzman fought back and began to put up signs and stage protests outside the museum to bring the public’s attention to the issue. The museum had complaints about its content as well. The four families represented in the museum were all White, which undermined the non-white immigrant history in New York. Some critics also pointed out that the museum’s stories of immigrants becoming Americans went against the idea of immigrants maintaining their culture and practices. Instead of cultural citizenship being about shedding their former identity and becoming American, these critics argued that cultural citizenship is a two-way street where the individual can assimilate into the existing culture while being comfortable to express their original culture. Eventually, these critiques along with Holtzman’s protest highlighted the irony of a tenement museum actively kicking out the tenants whose stories they were trying to tell. The museum against gentrification became the gentrifier.

These issues came in part due to the museum not participating with its community. While the community liked the business the museum brought, the museum never really interacted with the community until it began to try purchasing property. The museum lacked in shared authority and shared inquiry that public historians need to practice. Shared authority is the idea that both the historian and the audience both have authority over the story being told. The Tenement Museum clearly did not share its authority in the story the museum told. As mentioned earlier, other historians had already critiqued the museum for not really acknowledging the non-White immigrant past in New York. Shared inquiry is quite similar to shared authority, but there is a notable different. In shared authority, the audience is invited to disagree with the story being presented while in shared inquiry, the audience is invited to create their own story from the ideas being presented. The Tenement Museum failed here too. By failing to invite the local people in and uplifting the descendants of those the museum portrays like Holtzman, the museum found itself outside the community it was meant to represent.

2/8: Reading: Denise Meringolo, Radical Roots : Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism

 Radical Roots: Public History and a Tradition of Social Justice Activism seeks to analyze the history of public history, and specifically argue how it evolved as an effort by activists to push their narrative. Although all histories are political, this book asserts that public history is particularly political. The book focuses in on radical public history, “which we define as public history that is future-focused, committed to the advancement of social justice, and engaged in the creation of a more inclusive material record” (Radical Roots 2). The collection of essays in the book primarily seek to bring public history away from the objective, professional field and back towards its roots of activism.

 

In his essay, Reflections on Black Public History: Past, Present, Future Pero Gaglo Dagbovie explained the state of Black Public History by studying the current state of the field. The lack of development in the field caused Dr. Dagbovie to take interest in it since he seeks to “make the study of history, specifically African American history, relevant to the past and accessible to and digestible by non-academic audiences, especially millennials ... and Gen Y and Z” (Radical Roots 525). Beginning by looking at the past, the author notes that there aren’t Black public historians like other fields. He states that those who would qualify simply referred to themselves as Black or Afro-American historians. This stems from Black history being largely disconnected from academia as a whole for the longest time since White narratives dominated the field and sought to downplay Black people’s role in America. As a result, Black historians worked to uplift their people by highlighting their history to each other. Since they were often not traditional academics, Black historians worked like regular public historians by teaching and creating material for the Black public. Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) created school material for teachers to incorporate into their teaching of Black kids who would have otherwise only received the White, state-approved education. The end of segregation and the reincorporation of Black history into academia led to an unexpected result when it came to Black public history. Many Black historians began to focus on more academic literature and writing. On top of that, the end of segregation meant that these Black-focused public projects now needed to tell a story that appealed to a broader, Whiter, general audience. Dr. Dagbovie, being an academic historian himself, calls upon Black historians to turn back towards public history efforts in order to help bring Black history out of the ivory towers and back to the people it was meant to educate and inspire.

 

I gleamed quite a bit from this essay. I never considered creating academic material for schools as public history. I had always thought of public history as something that came out of a museum or a historical site, or as something that occurred in direct engagement. I was surprised to learn how desegregation caused issues for Black public history. Dagbovie does not argue it was a bad thing, in fact quite the opposite, but it was interesting to see the professionalization of the field pull Black scholars away from public engagement and into the ivory towers. By stepping away from the public, Black history began to be more inaccessible and distant to Black folks today. Dagbovie quotes Elizabeth Clark-Lewis about Black public history to which she says “some time in their careers, most academic historians reach a point where they stop and worry whether anyone outside of a very small circle of scholars and graduate students will ever really care about their articles or publications. However, when you meet a family who has driven miles to visit a museum exhibit for the third time because it has a photo of their great-uncle, you realize that public history really can touch ordinary people’s lives” (Radical Roots 539). Her quote here encapsulates why I have an interest in public history and want to work in the field on some level.

The second article I read was What Happens Next? Institutionalizing Grassroots Success in Selma, Alabama. In this essay, Abigail Gautreau seeks to deconstruct the history of public history be focusing on the history of “a grassroots preservation project that became an institution (the Alabama Black Heritage Council) and that institution’s ongoing role” (Radical Roots 542). The story focuses on the First Baptist (Colored) Church, which was heavily damaged by a tornado. The church represented the history of Black people in the South. Not only had it been a Black congregation since the 1840s, but the church would also evolve into a source of education and public activism for by the 1960s. After the tornado, lifelong member Louretta Wimberly rallied the congregation and got help from the Alabama Historical Commission. What I found most interesting; however, was the long discussion on how preserving historic sites has become much harder as public history became more professional. In addition to funding becoming more difficult to track down as you need to reach out to many different groups, the requirements to become an officially recognized historic site have become more stringent. Due to the difficulties in the traditional fields of historic sites, the author calls for more non-traditional ways to preserve historic sites. These non-traditional preservation methods would also allow these sites to tell narratives that are not acceptable to the dominant narratives, which would normally have to be rewritten for traditional funding.

I never considered that there could be other ways to start funding and finding historic sites. I would have considered those alternatives to be unsafe due to the lack of security they would have when compared to the traditional sources. After hearing about the success of the grassroots movements like Mrs. Gautreau’s, I have reconsidered my position about grassroots efforts. I saw grassroots efforts as something that was meant to attract professional attention in order to receive a permanent source of support. Instead, this essay has convinced me that there could be a more independently owed operation meant to assist these efforts over more traditional avenues.