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.