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FEATURES A conversation with Neil Kerwin |
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See the USA in your Chevrolet. In the 1950s, Dinah Shore’s jingle was the soundtrack for the way America spent its summers. The dawn of the automobile age had ushered in a kind of vacation that AU adjunct professor Paul Reber describes wryly as “the stations of the vacation cross.” Newly mobile families piled into their station wagons and tail-finned Chevys for a circuit of historic landmarks: Gettysburg, Valley Forge, Independence Hall, Williamsburg. Along the way, there might be detours to the homes of the great men whose stories lay at the heart of history books. It’s not just the cars that have changed. The appeal of history itself is changing. While surveys show that Americans retain a deep interest in their nation’s past, and families still visit historic sites, they don’t go to pay homage. They’re thinking about history in new ways. To bring the past alive, a public historian has to understand the present. “There is a hunger for historical connectedness, especially in times like our own, filled with disconcerting change,” says Robert Griffith, chair of the Department of History, College of Arts and Sciences. “AU’s public history program prepares historians to meet that need. “Public history,” Griffith continues, “embraces history as practiced outside the classroom.” AU is surrounded by America’s history. The region is arguably the home of more museums, historic homes, and landmarks than anywhere else in the country. AU’s graduates will be the ones working at those homes and battlefields, probing questions from the past while searching for the answer to a question at the heart of their field: how can the places that embody the past survive and thrive in the twenty-first century? “Museums are in such a transitional period. When museums started, they were glass cases full of stuff. Now people want more than that,” says public history graduate student Amy Johnson. “There’s a big generation shift that’s occurring right now,” adds graduate student Allison Powell. “It really is a period of intense reevaluation of how we treat historic sites.” Part of this, of course, is the Internet. “The Internet is providing new opportunities for historic homes and museums to reach the public in ways that they never could have imagined,” says Linda Neylon, CAS/MA ’06, coordinator of living history for York County Historical Society in York, Pennsylvania. Through virtual tours and online research, “Visitors can now access more information and arrive at historic sites with a far greater base of knowledge than ever before,” says Emily Weisner, CAS/MA ’07, now acting lead park ranger at the USS Arizona Memorial at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. “This allows historians and visitors to engage in a deeper conversation of history once the visitor actually arrives.” But it also means that visitors are looking for an experience beyond what they could find online. They already have a lot of information. They’ve even seen some of the rooms and objects. They want something more. “You have to find that hook,” says graduate student Courtney Esposito, “a narrative that’s engaging enough to draw people in and want to actually come to your museum—not just see it as, ‘Oh, this was Robert E. Lee’s home,’ but, ‘How does this connect to me? Why should I be personally invested in this?’” A visit to a historic site is a chance to project ourselves imaginatively into the past. How would a woman have lived in colonial times? What about the people who cleaned the clothes, cooked the dinners, and picked the tobacco? “Obviously a whole group of people in this country are descended from slaves, and they want their own experiences reflected,” Powell says. And whether or not visitors are women or descendants of slaves, they are all heirs of the civil rights movement and women’s movement, with a contemporary education and mind set. A public historian needs to know what that means. Telling a story
“Public history isn’t just about how to do great research, but how to tell a great story,” says Kathleen Franz, director of AU’s public history program. “The use of objects often gets people very excited, even in the Internet age. If they can really touch the past, it brings it alive. If objects . . . can be brought alive with a story that is relevant to their personal lives, people get it. They connect.
“You have to ask what questions to ask to involve your audience in the past,” Franz adds. “I think the training we give [students] helps them focus on that, so by the time they graduate, they’re really good at it. It’s not just presenting history. It’s about involving your audience.” Today, an effective museum exhibit shouldn’t be just objects on a wall. A crowd-pleasing exhibit curated by Franz at the National Building Museum is a case in point. Like many AU faculty, Franz practices what she teaches, and the exhibition gave her students a chance to see a contemporary approach to museum curating. David Macaulay: The Art of Drawing Architecture explores the career of the illustrator of such children’s classics as Cathedral, City, and Underground, which have intrigued children and their parents for more than 30 years. As a cultural historian with specialties in twentieth-century history, the history of technology, and museum studies, Franz was intrigued by the way Macaulay communicated engineering and architecture to the general public by using drawing to increase readers’ understanding of the built environment. The exhibit has a scholarly purpose, but it doesn’t only reach out to scholars. At family-friendly activity tables visitors try their hand at projects that introduce some of Macaulay’s artistic tricks of the trade. At a table where visitors could practice perspective drawing, Joseph McInerney of Vienna, Virginia, watched as grand- children, 12-year-old Drew and 8-year-old Ellie Sauder of Louisville, Kentucky, sketched a railroad track that vanished in the horizon. Drew wasn’t stopped by a sprained thumb. “See, this is a joke,” he said, pointing at the reproduction he was copying. “These are supposed to be tourists, and they’re coming to see the vanishing point.” Graduate students Johnson and Allison Boals have both worked at the National Building Museum as gallery representatives and have made a point of noticing how much time people spend at different panels and what draws them to linger. “Anything hands on, people like,” says Johnson, who, like many of AU’s public history grad students, has spent a great deal of time in the area’s museums—critiquing exhibits, developing skills through internships, or simply taking advantage of opportunities to work or volunteer. “I think,” Boals says, “we’re all holding these thoughts in our head for later programming.” Puzzle Pieces Ninety-five miles outside of Washington, another group of public history students tackled the challenge by assembling a puzzle made up of a shard of glass, a fragment of ceramics, a photo of a plantation fallen on hard times, and a toy horse that may have been the plaything of a young Robert E. Lee. They were gathered for a week-long seminar at Stratford Hall, the home of generations of Lees, to decipher the approximate date of these objects and fit them into the story of the old plantation. Living together for a week in cabins at the site, they dreamed up imaginary programming: a Civil War tour that would include Stratford Hall; a family retreat for grandparents and grandchildren that would include digging for Miocene and Pleistocene fossils on the beach. There were mock board meetings, discussions of marketing, and an afternoon spent cataloguing and identifying a collection of artifacts. The shard of glass turned out to be from a wine bottle discarded in the 1700s. The old photograph depicted a fence that they determined through house documents would have been on the property around 1908. Research on historic toys indicated that the toy horse probably came from the period around 1810. Could a little boy named Robert E. Lee have played with the toy’s leather bridle, stroked the real horse hair, and imagined that he was a big soldier riding off to war? The era was right, but there was no way to tell whose hands touched the horse. But the week at Stratford Hall was a chance to touch history and imagine a world that has vanished. After all, a public historian is a scholar, but also a story teller. And it will be the job of AU’s public historians to ensure that the story of America’s past still touches the people of America’s future. |
