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.

2/1: Reflections on the 2024 Afrofuturism Conference as Public History

I had the opportunity to attend the Zora Festival 2024 to watch several Eatonville speakers talk about the history of the Hungerford School and their community. I got to see first hand how these people have taken action against the development of the Hungerford school property that would hurt their community. Speakers like Dr. Scot French highlighted the long history that Eatonville has had as an independent Black community in the midst of the Jim Crow South. By going through its history, Dr. French highlighted the many ways Eatonville and the Hungerford school had been under developed by the county. The history showed the county spending much less on the education of the Hungerford school. The school’s lack of funding led to the community being more self-reliant on itself or outside donations than the county itself. On top of being underfunded, the county would eventually remove the community members from the board of directors that was meant to represent the Hungerford school. This new board would eventually give the school and its land over to the county. The county would begin to slowly sell off the land around the school and remove the restrictions that required the property to be used for Black education. Once Dr. French illustrated the ways Eatonville and its community had long worked under the county’s indifference, other community speakers began to talk about how this problem continues into the modern day.

The next speakers were activists John Beacham and Julian Johnson. Mr. Beacham and Mr. Johnson spoke about their personal connections to the community and how they felt about the development. Mr. Beacham told his story about how he had grown up in Eatonville his whole life and explained how the town tied the Black community in the area together. He told the story about how his uncle and father would go to a local nightclub that was the only Black nightclub in Orange County. Mr. Beacham also talked about how he felt about the overnight destruction of the Hungerford school, which led him to start the #LandBack movement along with Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson had not grown up in Eatonville, but he was excited to move into the community and start his business. He just so happened to attend the town meeting where the land development proposal was taking place. After that meeting, Mr. Johnson decided that he wanted to take action, and he just so happened to meet Mr. Beacham. The two decided to team up to push the #LandBack movement further. They began to put out the news through various signs and social media activity about the scandalous development. The movement has also pitched their own ideas as to what could go onto the Hungerford property such as a new hotel, park, and museum. As the news went around, the Orlando Sentinel sent their reporter, Desiree Stennett, to investigate the movement.

Mrs. Stennett spoke next, and she told her story of how what she thought was a regular news story would become a key story for her and the Sentinel.  The efforts of the community inspired Mrs. Stennett began to research the history of the Hungerford property and discovered the way the county had treated the former school. Desiree’s research found that the county may not have the ability to sell the property as they did. Her reporting got the word further out and eventually led to the Southern Poverty Law Center taking notice of the movements in Eatonville. The SPLC did a great job moving in to help by continuing to work with and listen to the community even as they take their own actions. This group have taken action against the county, which has since backed down from selling the property, but continue to insist that they can’t give the property back to Eatonville. The SPLC did not stop once the county cancelled the sale, and now the SPLC are looking into the county’s claim that they can’t give the land away.

After the talk, I was surprised to see so many different people involved in the movement. The on-the-ground action from John Beacham and Julian Johnson garnered the community’s support and gave the movement a personal touch that really touched me and made me want to support the effort. Seeing the grassroots movement achieve success in getting the attention of places like UCF, the Orlando Sentinel, and the SPLC. People like Dr. French and Mrs. Stennett dug into the history of the Hungerford property to better illustrate the ways the community had been wronged by the county. These wrongs being demonstrated allowed groups like the SPLC to step in and take more direct action that would get the property transferred back to the town.