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.