Interactive public history – Applied History

Inclusion or exclusion? Where is the line?

After the multiple readings, I could not help but think to myself,” Is the inclusion of a group that is normally overlooked exclusion of other groups?” I find that all too many times movements like the #BlackLivesMatter are severely hindered by this thought exactly. Although they clearly did not intend to exclude people from their movement, the wording alone seems to have charged people both to its side as well as against it almost immediately. From the prospective of the museum, where is the line drawn between these two ideas? Often the traditional narrative of American History has been exclusionary. To allow this to go uncontested is one of the many great tragedies of history. On the other hand, for a museum to get involved with groups that are seen by others as exclusionary due to their own lack of inclusion can spell trouble. Certainly, even just by choosing a theme for an exhibit, a museum can show their own possible bias one way or another, such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture choosing to document the history and artifacts of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, but can a line be drawn between documenting a social movement and the goals and actions of the movement itself? I found myself drawn to the section in the Smithsonian Magazine where it talked about Darian Wigfall, and more significantly where the article discussed the idea that “In addition to the poster (New Age of Slavery by Patrick Campbell) Wigfall also donated a 20-foot wide banner that says, “When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty.”^[1] Also, a sign that said “White silence is White consent” caught my attention. Immediately, being someone who studies the 19^th century, I recognized the Transcendentalist overtones in both of these ideas. It made me think of a quote by Edmund Burke (although the source of the quote is argued) “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Although both of these examples were from the #BlackLivesMatter articles, I found the same ideas in the Tenament Museum article only based on the idea of immigrants. The real question to me is, how are museums to walk the thin line between inclusion of often overlooked groups without winding up exclusionary themselves?

[1] Katie Nodjimbadem, “How the African American History Museum Is Curating “Black Lives Matter”, Smithsonian.com, December 14, 2015, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/african-american-history-museum-black-lives-matter-180957530/.

It appears museums will do anything to improve their numbers.

Is the primary mission of history museums providing visitors with the opportunity to learn or keeping the doors open? If learning history is the goal, I think few of the museums included here are achieving it. If getting attendance, membership, and donations up is the goal, there is almost no evidence indicating success.

Letting Go? provides interesting ideas in how to move museums from being presenters of content to facilitators of learning. Public Curation, finally provides an approach to validate whether or not new approaches accomplish the learning incumbent on all history museums. The authors ask the right questions and suggest these issues be fully researched.

Embracing the Unexpected shows the art-history dialectic taken in a more useful direction, not a shared-authority alliance as much as it is a more tightly-bound collaboration between artists and historians. The American Philosophical Society approach shows what can occur when there is meaningful conversation between, and useful boundaries set, for both participants.

Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum highlights the failure of the resident historians at the Maryland Historical Society. By juxtaposing various pieces found at the museum and utilizing various museum tropes, visitors confronted an uncomfortable reality regarding slavery and the relevance of that reality, today. Why didn’t the museum curator think of a way to accomplish this?

The performance art pieces capturing the life and community of The Black Bottom and the individual stories of working class people captured by Story Corp and described in Listening Intently show where great ideas can take you. The materials collected in each effort may be invaluable to the historian, but both fall short in their own way. Chaotic pieces of performance art and personal stories with no context are of little use to historians.

Where would "Hamilton" fit in art versus history debate? — Where does “Hamilton” fit in art as history debate?

Where each succeed is in their ability to show the historian the “power of seeing history as stories.”[1]

For brevity’s sake The Fever Dream of the Amateur Historian, Sanford and Sun, and London Travelogue are lumped together as failures. The The Fever Dream of the Amateur Historian wasn’t even a good idea and shows what can happen when an artist is given too much latitude. I have no idea why Sanford and Sun was included in this book and London Travelogue may be a wonderfully novel idea, but it would be one place I would avoid in London. There is no historical context to what I see and no one to provide it. Without context what is to be learned?

[1]Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, eds. Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Left Coast Press, 2011. Pg. 189

The public historian in the world of the world wide web

While reading Letting Go? I find myself intrigued by an idea that most historians understand, but one that the general public does not always seem to grasp; the internet has everything but in having everything, the internet is not always correct and certainly does not always provide a complete story. Even some seemingly reputable sources (ie. Newspapers) often have an agenda of their own that taints the information that they put out. The public, in general, expect the nearly impossible from museums; to give completely unbiased views yet maintain a multitude of different viewpoints. The web 2.0 has added to both the ability to accomplish this as well as the difficulty of such an undertaking. Although the web 2.0 has facilitated the ability for many people to add to the narrative of history, it has also opened a new role for the public historian as an expert that can differentiate between sources with solidly researched information and those sources that are closer to opinion presented as fact. In this there are pitfalls that must be avoided. The public is, in general, often drawn to the stories that we have been told, good or bad, of what and how things happened. Deviating too far from this traditional narrative can put public historians in a position of being more augmentative than as an authoritative voice on the subject. Letting Go? introduces the thought through Matt Fisher, who explains the dominant viewpoints when he says, “Introducing different prospectives is vital, but simply criticizing or undermining dominant or authoritative viewpoints is ultimately limited.”[1]I find this interesting in that many of us look at situations in history, and due to its controversial nature, are asked to argue one thing or another but rarely stop long enough to think of whether or not arguing against past indiscretions is actually useful to anyone. Many of these arguments were not only carried out at the time but also tend to either bore or infuriate a large number of people that are less read on the situation and only know the traditional narrative.

[1] Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski, Letting go?: sharing historical authority in a user-generated world, (Philadelphia, PA: Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011), 49.