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.