Exhibit Labels

One of the most important aspects of a History Museum exhibit is the exhibit’s labels that inform museum visitors of the significance of various display cases, objects, and photos. While such a task seems easy and straight-forward, Beverley Serrell’s text Exhbit Labels: An Interpretive Approach shows that there is a real art to such a process. Serrell’s work lays out everything from how to structure the information on a label to the best types of readable and handicap-accessible fonts to use in a label. Such information helps museum professionals create an exhibit – historical or otherwise – that appeals to and engages with people of a variety of backgrounds and intellectual abilities.

Serrell’s work functions more as a textbook than a singular piece that uses a historical argument to trudge its readers along. Thus, there is no one theme, but rather an in-depth look at many aspects of creating a great exhibit. One aspect of a good exhibit that she touches on that I really appreciated was the concept of the exhibit’s voice. As Serrell demonstrates, it is important to consider what types of perspective that labels embody? What type of person might be speaking through these labels and how might potential museum-goers respond to such a voice? One way to combat the dangers of a singular voice or perspective within an exhibit is the concept of sharing scholarly authority between curators and the public who might eventually frequent the museum.[1]

I was quite pleased to find Serrell uphold my all-time favorite history exhibit – The Gallery of California History at the Oakland Museum of California – as a prime example of shared authority within an exhibit. In the text, Serrell cites the Oakland Museum’s gallery regarding Californians’ experiences of the 1960s entitled Forces of Motion as a key example of this. This exhibit asked a handful of Californians of differing backgrounds who came of age during the 1960s to create their own displays in a sort of, shoebox diorama fashion that provided a glimpse into their own personal experiences during the period. The shoeboxes consist of family photos and empty packs of cigarettes, pins from California-based political groups as diverse as the John Birth Society and the Black Panther Party. As Serrell argues, these types of displays enable visitors and community members to tell their own histories and provide their own voice to a process that usually revolves around the decisions of curators and institutional authority.[2]

Additionally, I would add that such an approach personalizes exhibits not only for those community members involved in the curating process, but for those visiting the museum as well. I can very clearly remember going to this exhibit for the first time when the institution opened it five or so years ago. Having grown up in the area, I knew a few of the people profiled in the Forces of Motion exhibit. I remember being so excited by that. For example, I remember one the people profiled in the exhibit to be L. Frank Manriques, an indigenous Californian, lesbian artist who frequently gave guest lectures in many of my American Indian Studies classes at San Francisco State. Her display consisted of pictures of her with past lovers, American Indian Movement patches, and small art pieces. It really made history seem like something that didn’t just consist of theoretical arguments or names and dates, but rather something that people I knew actually experienced. In this sense, the shared authority and personalization of history that the Oakland Museum’s exhibit labels gave myself and others a way in, an opportunity to understand the larger trends and happenings of a historical period. A good history exhibit can really provide such an experience.

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[1] Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 136.

[2] Ibid, 136-7.

The Great Influenza

In preparation for our class’ upcoming exhibit on the 1918 influenza outbreak in Philadelphia, our Managing History class read John M. Barry’s work The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. The work shows how the influenza outbreak occurred during the first World War, a period in which persons from around the world travelled transatlantically. Furthermore, medical professionals remained in short supply due to the demand for doctors and nurses on the war front. As The Great Influenza shows, these conditions worsened the spread and death toll of the disease. Yet, while Barry’s work takes readers to a variety of locations around the world, The Great Influenza remains most applicable to our upcoming project for its analysis of the outbreak in Philadelphia.

As Barry shows, Philadelphia’s place as an epicenter for this outbreak can be attributed to the city’s extremely overcrowded nature in 1918. As workers migrated to the city for wartime industry jobs, the city’s population swelled to 1.75 million. Such a population growth exacerbated already crowded and unsanitary tenement conditions in the immigrant neighborhoods of South Philadelphia.[1] As could be expected, influenza’s death tolls remained much higher in these crowded immigrant neighborhoods. In fact, in one single day – on October 10^th – 759 people died from the disease.[2]

Like most histories written for popular audiences, Barry’s work includes a cast of characters that appear throughout the novel. He chronicles their life trajectories like a biographer and even tries to get at a sense of their emotions like a novelist. Humanizing history is a great tool for many reasons, but – most importantly – writing styles like this help to attract readerships that might normally recoil at a more academically-written history. Yet, it is important to note that these characters mostly consist of people like Paul Lewis, a doctor at the University of Pennsylvania who did significant research on the influenza outbreak. Most of Berry’s characters remain elites. We don’t really get a sense for South Philadelphia’s immigrant communities, apart from reading about the neighborhood’s high death toll.

Perhaps, the sources that better convey a sense of emotion like diaries or oral histories do not exist for South Philly’s 1918 working-class. Or, maybe they haven’t been preserved. From a practical standpoint, it makes sense that Barry does not feature these people in the same way that he does elites. Yet, as we discussed last week, museumgoers remain most interested in histories that convey the experiences of ordinary people, people whose lives and experiences resemble that of their own. For our own exhibit, we should absolutely build on the research of Barry. However, in order to create a more all-encompassing history of the 1918 influenza outbreak, we should keep the ordinary person in mind in our own research. Such a focus will only increase our ability to reach a wider public audience.

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[1] John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking Press, 2004), 198.

[2] Ibid, 329.

First Week of Managing History

My conceptions of seasons these days are kind of hampered by my never-ending scholastic journey through graduate school. Summer has more to do with whether I’m in school or not than it does with how hot it is outside. So, last Monday, I began the semester and officially declared summer over! Anyways, one of the classes I’m taking this time around is Managing History. The class is an introduction course to the field of Public History and, from now on, the focus of this blog. This week in class, we read two books and two book excerpts: Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, Carolyn Kitch’s Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past, an excerpt of Ian Tyrell’s Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, and an excerpt of Denise D. Meringolo’s Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History.

While all these pieces dealt with different aspects of history, all authors interrogated the manners in which those outside the profession of academic history use ideas about the past to shape their sense of themselves and the larger world in the present. In a deeper sense, these texts seem foundational in understanding what exactly public historians do and how their work differs from that of the academic historian. As Tyrell and Meringolo’s texts show, the ever-widening specialization of history that Public History represents and the study of Public History itself prove to continually be hotly debated and controversial topics among more traditional academic historians. Thus, understanding the foundations and functions of Public History remains important in order to come to its defense.

In this sense, I suppose I found The Presence of the Past most helpful. In this book, Rosenzweig and Thelen conducted thousands of interviews with ordinary Americans of differing backgrounds in hopes of understanding how those people understood history and the ways that it influenced their life. In their research, they found that participants frequently used past experiences and senses of history to better understand their own present. As the work shows, many people revisit and reinterpret past personal experiences to better understand their experiences in the changing present.[1] Historians are just normal people too, so it isn’t that wild that this frequent reinterpretation of the past bares resemblance to the types of historiographical debates with which academics engage. I think what’s more interesting is how this shows peoples’ interest in the past despite the overriding conception of the everyday person’s disengagement with such notions. This understanding of how people choose to understand history, in a sense, offers the public historian a way into bigger historical conversations.

However, I do think that this personalization of history can only go so far. As Rosenzweig writes in his conclusion, people remain shaped by more than just experiences or conceptions of the past, but also by larger societal power dynamics.[2] In my mind, the work sort of overlooks this by simply focusing on the people themselves. I found myself asking what sorts of larger economic factors might influence participants’ conceptions? Either way, The Presence of the Past remains useful in illuminating how to present history in an attempt to a wider audience.

Carolyn Kitch’s Pennsylvania in Public Memory similarly examines how ordinary people understand themselves through their past. Yet, Kitch uses the monuments, historic highway routes, and tourist attractions of deindustrial Pennsylvania to understand this phenomenon. One place she does this is in her analysis of the Quecreek, Pennsylvania Coal Miner memorial statue. This statue memorializes nine workers trapped in the town’s mine. However, on a broader level, the memorial reinforces ideas about miners heroism and the great sacrifice that they continually made for the United States.[3] In the context of the coal industry being another one of Pennsylvania’s declining industry, this narrative of sacrifice and national heroism remains important. In this sense, the memorial enables miners to see their past endeavors as benefitting not only themselves, but their nation at large. During a time in which economic changes have desecrated towns like Quecreek and others, the past enveloped in this memorial’s message provides a glimmer of dignity.

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[1] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 67.

[2] Ibid, 188.

[3] Carolyn Kitch, Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 92-3.