I feel very
emotional today. After Donald Trump won the election last night, I’ve been
reeling for answers as to how to approach the next four years. I don’t really
have any that are too solid. In times like these, I struggle with the idea of
academic or public history as potentially being labeled as a form of activism.
In my most pessimistic moments, I can’t help but think that an academic study
or a curated exhibit won’t do much to ameliorate the harms of a Trump
Presidency. Perhaps, in the long-term, such projects can provoke deeper
understandings of important issues that impact our present. Yet, in the
immediate sense, it seems less apparent that such projects actually make a
difference. In times like these, it seems like if academic and public historians
want to be activists, they have to be out in the streets protesting with
everyone else. Otherwise, these projects we involve ourselves in simply become
barriers between our work – often labeled as a type of public service – and
meaningful grassroots change. I can’t help but wish that I saw more historians
at protests. We talk so passionately about the ways that political issues and
systemic inequalities affect the past in our classes, writings, and exhibits.
But, when opportunities present themselves to actually viscerally confront
these issues in public space, historians are often too busy writing papers or
curating exhibits to participate. I find this disappointing.
As I grappled
with these questions, it was helpful to read Jill Ogline’s 2004 article “Creating
Dissonance for the Visitor: The Heart of the Liberty Bell Controversy” and
Cathy Stanton’s 2006 book The Lowell
Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City. Both works address the
use of public history as a means of helping the public to grapple with
important issues that both shape and clearly connect with the experiences of
our present. In Ogline’s article, she addresses the exhibit constructed next to
the Libery Bell that marks the site of George Washington’s slaves’ quarters. As
Ogline argues, placed next to a symbol of nationalistic freedom and liberty,
this exhibit viscerally addresses how African slavery made notions of American
freedom and capitalist prosperity possible. Ogline argues that such a site
forces museum goers to physically confront conflicting interpretations on
similar issues and ultimately create their own understandings of the past based
on these experiences.[1]
It’s all quite similar to the ways that a historian interrogates a primary
source. In the context of what the Liberty Bell represents, I find the
existence of such a site to be a radical act. In terms of its disruption of
nationalism and reckoning with systemic inequality, this exhibit ultimately
serves an important activist purpose.
Similarly, in
her research on the establishment of a National Historic Park in the post-industrial,
former mill town Lowell, Massachusetts, Cathy Stanton illustrates the ways that
Lowell’s historical interpretation seeks to connect the city’s nineteenth labor
struggles to modern-day protest for workers’ rights. Writing about her
experiences in a tour called “Workers On The Line,” Stanton shows a workshop
leader addressed the group, mostly consisting of students, by asking if labor
struggles still persisted into the present day. Such a question provoked a
larger discussion spearheaded by students’ teachers that illuminated their work
in the teachers’ union. By illustrating this connection, this tour illustrated
that oppression does not end but simply takes on new forms and adapts to changing
times. Thus, the Lowell Historic Park also takes on an important activist
purpose.[2]
The question of activism as a component of historical work is one with which I
will continue to struggle. However, these examples provide examples of
important political work approached through public history. More projects like
these are needed in these dark times.
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