When Ta-Nehisi Coates came and spoke with the History
Department a few weeks ago, he remarked on the ways that historians
consistently dispute each other’s portrayals of the past in order to understand
history’s many complexities. Oftentimes, such portrayals challenge the ways
that nations, communities, and individuals conceive of themselves in
uncomfortable and inconvenient ways. “You guys have conversations that most
people aren’t ready to have,” he said. In a way, this week’s readings speak to
a similar dynamic. In the last forty years, Public Historians have sought to
engage the public in such conversations through curated exhibits with varying
results. While Museums have often functioned as monuments to the past in a
commemoratory fashion, Public Historians in recent years have sought to use an
exhibit’s display of the past to address community concerns and provoke larger
conversations around controversial topics.
Andrea A. Burns’ 2013 book From Storefront to Monument: Tracing
the Public History of the Black Museum Movement examined the development of
black history museums around the country during the 1970s and onwards.
Responding to a lack of coverage of black histories in nationalistic history
museums, black curators applied the black nationalist politics of the late 60s
that demanded black community control over its institutions and resources to
museum curation. These Public Historians sought to create exhibits that
addressed black pasts and engaged with the community issues of the present. For
example, in 1969, the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum in Washington, DC featured
an exhibit called “The Rat” that addressed rat infestations in the community.
While the exhibit eventually proved to be a success, some museum officials
argued against “The Rat’s” honest portrayal of urban life. These officials
worried that the exhibit would depict the community in a negative light and
thus, be rejected by its visitors.[1] In
this sense, while museum exhibits can be used as a tool with which to inspire
public discussion of difficult topics, those same topics nearly always invite
controversy.
A similar case is seen in the National Air and Space
Museum’s (NASM) proposed Enola Gay exhibit of the early 1990s. In its coverage
of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima,
the exhibit aimed to not present any one particular point of view, but present
a variety of interpretations that accounted for the varying experiences
affected by the bomb’s destruction.[2]
Yet, conservatives and veterans’ groups pushed back against this attempt at
wider conversation condemning it as revisionist and anti-American.[3]
Ultimately, the intense controversy around the Enola Gay exhibit resulted in
its dissolution. Unlike “The Rat” exhibit, the Enola Gay exhibit’s open
interpretation of the Atomic Bomb dropping proved too controversial for public
acceptance.
While exhibits can provoke important conversations around
sensitive issues, unlike academic texts, they must grapple with the issue of
public acceptance. The wider audience that an exhibit attracts can certainly be
rewarding, Public Historians must straddle a fine line of acceptance between causing
contemplation of new historical interpretations and alienating their audiences
all together.
[1] Andrea A. Burns, From Storefront to Monument: Tracing the
Public History of the Black Museum Movement (Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2013), 95.
[2]
Edward Linenthal, “Anatomy of a Controversy” in History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past,
ed. Edward T. Linenthal et al. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996), 18.
[3]
Ibid, 21.
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