Author: Michelle Puccinelli

I was fascinated  by the villains (too harsh a label? …I think not) in this week’s readings…so I google stalked them.

Patricia Pangloss, the manager of the Baron Von Munchausen Historic House, is painfully absent from the internet. The Historic House doesn’t even have a website. The biggest hit on her name was the Larry Cebula article. Like the rest of you, I was infuriated by her response to Cebula’s open letter. Particularly by the assertion that, “You have to understand the younger visitors know very little about the Revolutionary War period, due to the
fact that the schools have gone downhill and do
not give this generation a good education …The
younger students can barely start a sentence
without the word “like, like” and continue to
ramble with the worst English imaginable…” Shouldn’t an educational facility strive to IMPROVE student’s education and confront historical inaccuracies, instead of promoting falsities because it is easier?

My search for Joy Masoff, the author of Virgina’s flawed textbook, was more fruitful. Her publisher’s website listed her biography as follows:

Joy Masoff, mother of two, fell into the world of gross when she became scoutmaster to a den of burping Cub Scouts, and then discovered that her Brownie troop has the same fascination with the feculent. She lives with her family in Waccabac, New York.

Jacketflap.com’s biography of Masoff:

Joy Masoff is a published author of children’s books and young adult books. Some of the published credits of Joy Masoff include All Better Now, Oh, Yikes!: History’s Grossest Moments, We Are All Americans: Understanding Diversity.

Hmmm. Not exactly the credentials that I would look for when seeking an author for a historical textbook that would help teach hundreds of thousands of students. Masoff is obviously the wrong candidate for this job, but I don’t believe the fault lies with her. She obviously did not complete impeccable research and failed to critically evaluate her sources. But how much can we really blame her? She is not a historian. She is a children’s book author. She used the Internet to research a contentious and serious matter and it came back to haunt her.

The real fault lies with the Virginia State Board of Education. The board chose to hire someone who could entertain students rather than educate them. As a daily user of textbooks, I can attest that K-12 textbooks are mostly bad. They are either far too boring and complex for student’s levels or far too juvenile and summarized. Until state boards of education begin to invest more money into the adoption of excellent textbooks (or better yet…hire and train outstanding teachers who don’t rely on textbooks), false education is going to continue to happen in America. Masoff clearly made a mistake in her book. But the true blame lies with the administrators who allowed a children’s book author to write a historical textbook.

Consulting has always been high on my list of answers to the question, “What in the world are you going to do with a Master’s of History?” I like to research and I like having varied projects which require me to work with many different kids of people. However, I am only interested in working for a governmental agency or an already established business. I respect Historians.org’s assertion that, “consulting is a business…and the historical consultant should be skilled in dealing with a variety of clients, preparing realistic and fair proposals, and completing high-quality work on schedule”, yet I have zero interest in running my own business. I have a high appreciation for professionalism and client relationships, but I lack the ambition to “be my own boss.” I prefer the stability of an established company to any independence that might come from being a small business owner.

While I think museum, archives or city/state consulting would be wonderful, my dream consulting job would be as a production consultant. Who among us wouldn’t love to be a historical consultant in media? Be an advisor for our favorite BBC show or help weed out anachronisms in a Hollywood script? Sign me up!  Although it seems like those kind of consulting jobs come at the end of  a long and studied career as an expert on a specific topic. Still…a girl can dream!

My other dream job would be working for a company which develops digital tools for public history or history education. I interviewed John Lutz for my professional career assignment, but I also interviewed another digital pioneer, Mark Tebeau, creator of Curatescape. He described the long and winding journey to creating this city or state history tool (check out this Kentucky example), but he also gave me some great advice about how to break into this field. He discussed how the humanities are facing a period of crisis, where they are having to fight against STEM and Business for funding and importance (as we WELL know). However, he cautioned against seeing these disciplines as the enemy and to instead embrace them to help show history’s relevance. He noted that public historians are not going to be handed funding for projects, but must instead design their own projects that engages the local community in a new and interesting way. Use technology to serve underrepresented areas. Use networking to connect unlikely allies. Use K-12 education as a way to break into the game. As I already mentioned, I do not want to run my own business, but I would like to create something that I can then use to partner with some organization to engage the public with history.

While I love historical films, books and experiences, historical reenactments of wars have always bothered me. I know that many reenactors see it as “honoring the dead”, but I don’t really think play acting an actually horrifying battle from a script, laying “dead” still for a few minutes (hours?), and then going home is honoring anyone. My brother is a soldier and I find it horrifying that someone in 100 years might recreate the violence that he has been a part of. I think it trivializes history and makes it almost seem fictional…like a play. I appreciated Little’s statement, “Why bother reenacting a 250-year old war, when Americans in 2009 can just go to Iraq or Afghanistan to see a bloody war for the empire up close?” It seems morbid to me.

In particular, Civil War reenactment is hard for me to stomach. When I was 15, I spent a summer traveling through the deep south and was shocked at the presence of so many confederate flags, “Land of Dixie” bumper stickers and Civil War memorabilia. As a born and raised Yankee, I was offended that people in America could still celebrate such a deplorable “side” of war. When I posed the question to  my friend who had grown up in Mississippi, she shrugged and said “We aren’t celebrating being slave owners or fighting to protect slavery. It is simply part of our past and is still a part of our identity. It’s not about racism, it’s about being proud to be from the South and that’s what the Confederate flag represents.” I still struggle to understand that perspective. Dressing up in a Confederate uniform and reciting lines about “The War of Northern Aggression” seems to celebrate a culture that was willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of American lives to protect that “curious institution.”

I am so glad that we had to read two perspectives on Wikipedia. After reading Messer-Kruse’s piece, I felt vindicated by my refusal to accept Wikipedia as a source from my students. I made plans to have them read this article at the beginning of every year to prove the fallibility of the cite. I have learned to approach many secondary sources with caution (as in school textbooks) and was appalled to learn that Wikipedia rejects evidence cited from primary sources, instead holding that, “Wikipedia is not ‘truth,’ Wikipedia is ‘verifiability’ of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that.” (Messer-Kruse) WHAT? That lemming philosophy does not sit well with me.

However, my opinion of Wikipedia softened after reading Famiglietti. Although I can not accept Wikipedia as a cited source in research projects, I do understand that the editing process in Wikipedia is quite stringent and reliable(ish). I generally tell students to use Wikipedia as a jumping off point. Get some background knowledge from the website and then do some additional research to verify. A good historian must make good use of many secondary AND primary sources.

There are two places in Boise that I am most concerned about preservation; downtown and Boise State University. I love what downtown offers to Boise and I would like to see it thrive and maintain its historic roots. I am vested in BSU, not because it is particularly beautiful (because we all know…it’s not), but because I owe both my undergraduate and graduate degree to this place and I would like to see it become grander, bolder, and more prestigious.

There have already been a lot of mistakes with Boise’s downtown. After the Boise Redevelopment Agency began an urban renewal project in the 1970’s that destroyed entire historic blocks of downtown and threatened beloved landmarks like the Egyptian Theatre, the city faced public outcry over the destruction. L.J. Davis famously wrote about the idiotic project in his 1974 Harper’s Magazine piece “Tearing Down Boise”, saying “If things go on as they are, Boise stands an excellent chance of becoming the first American city to have deliberately eradicated itself.” Although the Egyptian was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, it wasn’t until private individuals (with deep pocket books) got involved that the theatre was safe from the chopping block.

I think this is an excellent example of how real and lasting protection for historic places occurs. While much of the public would like to see history preserved, few of them want to do it at the expense of their standards of living. Even Tyler et al. notes in Historic Preservation that, “the preservation of a downtown’s physical elements, including its older buildings, historic facades, and streetscape, (is) important, but only in combination with maintaining functional aspects of the downtown environment.” (pg. 278) Boise’s downtown may seem like a thriving component of our city, but there are many parts of it that are vacant and the entire balance of the area is pretty precarious. Now that Anthropology is leaving, I fear that hole (combined with the obnoxiously STILL vacant Macy’s) will be large enough that shopping in the area will slow and all those small businesses will suffer. I love the old buildings and the history and the character of downtown. But without businesses to keep the history worthwhile, I fear downtown could slide back into its 1970’s rut.

As far as Boise State is concerned, I know that there isn’t a lot of history to preserve besides what we discussed last week; the Administration and Campus School buildings. But I really hope that BSU keeps those buildings. I am uneasy about their intentions (INNOVATION! METROPOLITAN RESEARCH!) and was

especially alarmed at Tyler’s assertion that, “State institutions are not subject to local ordinances and need respond only to state regulations. Universities frequently ignore local historic district commissions…and the larger the institution, the more it can disregard local pressure for its structures to be included in a historic district.” (pg. 179) I know that BSU is not, and probably never will be, a historic district, but it worries me that the university has very little interest in preservation or responding to public pressure. It makes me feel a tad hopeless and powerless. I want BSU to become a place of distinction as well. But I think distinction comes not only from progress but also from maintaining links to the past.

 

This week’s reading raised two questions for me; How do I get hired? and How important is private property in preservation?

My first concern is in the relevance of preservation to our qualifications. Last year, I attended a “Speed Dating” night of history professionals and history students. We were exposed to different avenues that our history degrees could lead us. One of those was historical preservation and it was one of the paths that I was most intrigued by at first. Unfortunately, my interest was way-laid as I learned from the two professionals that a MAHR does not really equate to historical preservation. Both of them had Master’s of Historical Preservation and either majored or minored in architecture.

As we learned from chapter 3 of Tyler’s Historic Preservation, knowledge in architectural history is a pretty essential component to being a historic preservationist (at least professionally). I would love to work for a city or in a State Historic Preservation Office, but I’m doubting my qualifications? Tyler asserts that preservation is done either by private individuals as part of a personal crusade, or government entities. My question is…how does one make a living in this? Who is doing these jobs and can we, as MAHR students, actually get hired?

I am also contemplating the tricky issue of private property. I was disappointed in the toothless National Register “Does and Does Not” list. While it’s wonderful that the register identifies places and “encourages their preservation”, I was dismayed that it has no power to protect or guarantee preservation. In true American fashion, the Register does not, “restrict the rights of private property owners in the use, development, or sale of privately owned historic property.” (p. 49) What then is the point? If we are not going to actually fight the good fight, why bother identifying those places at all? I was particularly irked by Tyler’s assertion that “it was politically necessary to leave such control (federal government protection) out of the original act.” (p. 50) I’m exposing my radicalism, but I believe that once artifacts and places mature past a certain point, they should enter into the public domain and should be removed from private ownership in order to be enjoyed by all. It is no different than classic literature.

I know. That will never happen. But I’d like to see preservation have a little more punch and power. Had we had that in Boise, we might not have lost so many fantastic historic buildings downtown to the gharish mall renovation in the 1970’s or seen so much gentrification and renconstruction of historic districts like the North End or Warm Springs.