Historians as Activists?: A Greater Purpose or a Tired Old Trope

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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[1] Jill Ogline, “Creating Dissonance for the Visitor:” The Heart of the Liberty Bell Controversy.” The Public Historian 26 (2004): 55.

[2] Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 183.

Oral Histories & Museum Education

Last week, after our class discussed numerous readings relating to Oral History, we got to conduct one of our own. In order to relate to our larger class project, our discussion consisted of public health concerns. I spoke with my classmate, John Smith. My oral history with John covered a lot of ground. We talked about health insurance, going to the doctor’s office, and writing end-of-the-semester historiography papers. However, one of the most interesting things John mentioned was how his awareness of health concerns has really changed since moving to a larger city like Philadelphia:

I come from the suburbs, you know, the Poconos Mountains where it’s really rural and spread out. So, we don’t really talk about health concerns. But, now that I’ve moved to the city – I moved here a few weeks ago, like at the beginning of the semester – I’m constantly thinking about where my hands are, what I’m touching, viruses and diseases. You know, flu season is coming up. It’s always in the back of my mind that I should be more conscious about health concerns.

I later asked followed up on this response and asked if being in an urban environment has changed his health concerns:

I don’t think my health concerns have changed, but I’m maybe more aware. Like I said earlier, just always being in a large group of people, I’m always thinking, ‘what’s their health like?’ ‘I just saw them touching this and now, I’m touching this.’ So, it’s a sense of awareness.

John’s comments really shed light on the ways that the environments that one finds themselves in can affect health concerns. This knowledge is quite useful in considering ways to approach a public history project that seeks to cultivate a broader conversation around public health concerns within an urban environment.

Also, this week, we read numerous works relating to museum education. Many of the works stressed the importance of making exhibits accessible to family members of all ages. The Museum Educator’s Manual stressed the use of family activities that used hands-on learning in exhibits as a way involve visitors of all learning abilities.[1] On this subject, I found Judy Rand’s article “Write and Design with the Family in Mind” most helpful.

Rand’s work focuses on making exhibits accessible to children in a way that stimulates learning and takes developing cognitive abilities into account. This article encourages curators to create labels that communicate main points in a minimalistic fashion.[2]  I was particularly impressed with the label relating to Chicago’s industrial past aimed at connecting with children. The exhibit label evokes the way that industrial Chicago smelled, catching the eye with evocative statement “History Stinks!” The label also personalizes this story by asking the visitor, “What does Chicago Smell Like To You?”[3] This is a question that both adults and children can answer and connect the industrial city’s past to their present experiences within it. Such a question makes historical analysis approachable to a wide range of experiences and learning abilities.

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[1] Anna Johnson et al., The Museum Educator’s Manual: Educators Share Successful Techniques (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009), 79.

[2] Judy Rand, “Write and Design with Family in Mind,” in Connecting Kids to History with Museum Exhibitions, ed. D. Lynn McRainey et al. (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2010),258.

[3] Ibid, 262.

Oral History and the Cultivation of Trust

This week, our Managing History class read multiple works relating to Oral History. I found these works particularly helpful and relevant to my own work. For the past year and a half, I have been fortunate enough to interview numerous American activists who supported the Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and even travelled to Central America to assist with public works projects designed to support the country’s fledging socialist state during the 1980s. Growing up in the Bay Area, a center for this strain of activism, many of these activists happen to be people I’ve known throughout my life in circumstances far removed from historical research. My subjects are not only activists, but also former professors, family friends, and the parents of close friends. I feel very fortunate to have close connections to my research, but this also, in my mind, creates a series of ethical conundrums. As a historian, I have to be critical about the topics and people I research, and occasionally this means shedding light on the movement’s shortcomings and depicting activists in a sometimes unfavorable lens. Unlike archival research, Oral History involves the cultivation of relationships and, in my mind, relies on a certain amount of trust. It’s difficult to balance the trust that your subjects place within you with the desire of crafting important, useful historical narratives and arguments. Yet, it’s important to do so. You need to be fair to your subjects. But, I struggle with exactly how to do that. This week’s readings made the process a little more clear.

In Barbara Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan’s The Oral History Manual, they argue that an important part of the interview process is respect. This, in turn, creates trust. In an Oral History, Interviewers are expected to be sensitive to diversity of opinions that narrators might offer. This means not becoming visibly offended or arguing with narrators if they raise a point that might seem offensive to the interviewer.[1] Furthermore, a good Oral History project makes sure its narrators are comfortable. Sometimes, this level of comfort means pairing a subject with an interviewer that more closely resembles their own ethnic or community background. In arguing for this point, The authors evoke the example of the WPA interviews conducted with former slaves during the 1930s. In these interviews, elderly black southerners gave answers that catered to their white interviewers’ sensibilities, often glossing over the brutal realities and dehumanization involved in the institution. In these interviews, trust between narrators and interviewers remained severely lacking and the project undoubtedly suffered.[2]

Yet, sometimes, trust also means excluding important information from your final product that might reflect a damaging portrayal of a subject. In Sherrie Tucker’s article “When Subjects Don’t Come Out,” she struggles with the question of writing about the queer relationships of 1940s female jazz musicians when her subjects do not explicitly expose their sexual orientations. While Tucker wanted sexuality to be a key component of her project, her subjects felt differently. Reflecting a pre-gay 1960s/1970s liberation attitude towards lesbian identities, these women often discussed sexuality in a secretive manner and often asked Tucker to not disclose the sexual status of friends. Ultimately, these women wanted to be portrayed as musicians, not lesbians.[3] Ultimately, while Tucker arguably had information to historicize all-female jazz scenes as environments that allowed for the flourishing of lesbian identities - an argument she wanted to make – she shied away from such a telling because it would have violated her subjects’ trust and portrayed them in a way that they did not perceive themselves.[4] For me, this story shows that history does not simply involve events in the past, but effects peoples’ lives in the present as well. Historians have a lot of power over peoples’ lives in this sense. We should be aware of that.

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[1] Barbara W. Sommer and Mary Kay Quinlan, The Oral History Manual (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2009), 26.

[2] Ibid, 64.

[3] Sherrie Tucker, “When Subjects Don’t Come Out” in Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity, ed. Sophie Fuller, et al. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 295-6.

[4] Tucker, 308.

The Power of Place and Bending the Future Reading Summaries

Dolores Hayden’s 1995 work The Power of Place and Max Page and Martha Miller’s Introduction to their 2006 edited essay collection Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States both examine the potential of the historic preservation of spaces and landmarks to cultivate senses of belonging and cultural citizenship among diverse urban populaces. In particular, these authors recommend a preservation and historic acknowledgement of spaces that represent the lives and experiences of working-class and non-white communities. As these works suggest, a more diversified and inclusive historic preservation will help to communicate the roles of varying communities in shaping and reinterpreting the built environment in order to meet the needs of their changing present.

These works contribute to a larger historiographic discussion on historic preservation and the role of the built environment in creating senses of belonging and collective identity among the populace. One such work that contributed to these conversations is urban planner Jane Jacobs’ 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities. During the late 1950s, Jacobs argued for the vitality and cultural importance of Manhattan’s urban neighborhoods as a means of combatting infamous New York City developer Robert Moses’ massive urban renewal projects that sought to upend many New York neighborhoods. In response, The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that the role of urban planner should be to use the built environment of city parks and public buildings as a means of fostering collective neighborhood identities.[1] While Jacobs was not a historic preservationist per se, her avocation of urban designs that nurtured senses of communal identities and understandings remained influential upon crafting inclusive urban preservationist designs. In 1966, shortly after the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act, various authors published an essay collection entitled With Heritage So Rich. This collection advocated for preservation practices that provided historical understanding though the use of physical sites.[2] Robert Stipe’s 2003 edited essay collection A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the United States in the Twenty-First Century provides readers with strategies to cultivate a more inclusive and expansive twenty-first century historic preservation. Andrew Hurley applied both Jacobs’ theories of the urban neighborhoods and the strategies of previous preservation essay collections to the context of the historic preservation of underserved postindustrial areas. According to Hurley’s 2010 work Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities, historic preservation and other public history projects can cultivate attachments to place and senses of belonging in neighborhoods struggling for economic revenue and city services. Such a process aims to restore the prideful, collective neighborhood-based identities of which Jacobs writes.[3]

            Both The Power of Place and Bending the Future pursue different strategies towards similar ends. Dolores Hayden argues for the use and preservation of urban landscapes as a means of nurturing the collective memory of the city. This process provides a sense of urban belonging to marginalized groups often ignored by historical preservation initiatives. In The Power of Place, Hayden stresses that such a process involves both mapping political and cultural narratives onto architecture and spatializing social history.[4] For Hayden, historic preservation must emphasize sites of everyday working-class life such as housing projects, factories, and union halls.[5] By preserving and historicizing these sites, social histories embedded in urban space that fosters a greater sense of community investment and interest in the past emerge.[6] For Dolores Hayden, the social history of public space is the best avenue towards creating an inclusive and meaningful public history of the urban environment.

            Bending the Future’s introduction takes a somewhat similar stance. Yet, unlike Hayden, Page and Miller advocate for a series of measures that seek to improve upon historic preservation techniques used since the National Historic Preservation Act’s 1966 passage.[7] Yet, as Hayden similarly showed, historic preservationists still struggle with the act of preserving sites relating to the histories of people of color, women, and LGBTQ communities. Scholars like Jamie Kalven argue that such preservationist narratives should directly engage the ways that structural inequalities are often expressed and reinforced by the built environment.[8] Furthermore, Page and Miller argue that historic preservation can simultaneously fight the gentrification-fueled displacement that often accompanies recently preserved neighborhoods. In fact, scholar Graciela Sanchez argues that historic preservationists in communities of color must also be anti-gentrification activists in order to ensure that their historical work does not have adverse effects.[9] Such a conundrum represents an important challenge for preservations in an age where “revitalization” is often synonymous with the displacement of lower-income residents.

            While Dolores Hayden specifically argues for a place-based social history embedded within historic preservation techniques, Bending the Future’s introduction lists a series of points regarding approaches to the changing field of historic preservation. While both authors address concerns over gentrification occurring as a result of historic preservation, neither address such issues in a manner that lists actual tactics for ameliorating these unwanted outcomes. In an age where more urban neighborhoods are rapidly becoming cultural centers for the wealthy, it is worth considering expanding public history concepts of shared authority beyond crafting historical narratives. In an era of gentrification, if historical preservation is to be truly inclusive and beneficial to marginalized communities, it must be accompanied by some organization or legislation designed to ameliorate the harmful effects of capitalism. Historic preservations should not only involve communities in preservation projects, but also be involved in advocating for collectively-owned housing, community land trusts, heightened rent controls, and tenants unions. While both works provide important analysis in terms of creating more inclusive historical narratives through historical preservation, it is important that such inclusivity remains in the neighborhoods that the project represents. This is a task that involves more than simply history, but activism as well.

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[1] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 129.

[2] Max Page and Marla R. Miller, “Introduction” in Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, ed. Max Page et al. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 2.

[3] Andrew Hurley, Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), ix-x.

[4] Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), 9-10.

[5] Ibid, 11.

[6] Ibid, 45-7

[7] Page and Miller, 3.

[8] Page and Miller, 27.

[9] Page and Miller, 31.