Everyday Living

One of our Managing History readings this week was the November 12, 2007 New York Times article, "Auctioning the Old West to Help a City in the East" by Eric O'Keefe.  The article highlighted auctions held to sell more than 800 objects purchased by Harrisburg, PA Mayor Stephen R. Reed for the purpose of establishing a National Museum of the Old West.  Instead, the items were sold to raise funds to help balance the city's deficit budget.  A quote from a Western memorabilia expert about the mayor's collection jumped out at me.  "The mayor's vision of the Old West was incredible.  He bought pots and pans, cans of evaporated milk, and coffee tins, things for everyday living.  He wanted the whole picture, not just the highlights."


The collection of readings for this week are diverse.  In addition to the NYTimes article we read two articles from The Public Historian, the journal of the National Council on Public History.  "The End of History Museums: What's Plan B?" by Cary Carson and "Geographies of Displacement: Latina/os, Oral History, and The Politics of Gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District" by Nancy Raquel Mirabal.  


Carson asks if "history museums, and historic house museums in particular" are in a "nosedive to oblivion."  His article looks at attendance at cultural organizations as a whole over the last thirty years, what may and may not have attributed to declining interest in museums, and the industry's response to perceived and real decreases in attendance.  He highlights both what has worked in the past, what has not, and what is working now.  


I appreciate Carson shaking his finger at public historians, urging us to move away from the temptation to raise museum revenue by hosting weddings and cocktail events, relegating history to "sideshow" status. (p. 15).  He also chastises us to remember that attendance cannot be the sole measure of a healthy museum.  In these statements, he raises the topic we've discussed regularly in class this fall.  The public historian's obligation to teach history.  "We must never forget that fundamentally we are history teachers.  If our institutions of lifelong learning are not teaching history, or if we are teaching to ever-smaller numbers of learners, then those are the problems we need to tackle and solve." (p.15)  


Also of immense value is Carson urging us to consider how the generations currently visiting museums learn and get excited about learning.  He specifically challenges current arguments that one must instill trust (can we translate this as comfort?).  "Trust is not the issue.  What is, is the ability of museums to make effective connections with the way people today have become accustomed to engaging in the learning process...how today's learners actually prefer to organize information and put it together to make meaning." (p. 17)  


What do today's visitors to museums want?  "To be transported back in time...to meet ordinary people to whom they can relate."  They don't want to hear about the past or see a display about it.  They want to live it by relating directly to historical figures.  They want everyday living and the whole picture, and they want to "live it - feel it - experience it." (p. 18)


The individuals and families in Mirabal's focus group aren't museum visitors who want to experience history firsthand; they are a class of people whose history was dislocated and erased by the gentrification of the Mission District of San Francisco during the dot-com boom of the late 1980s, early 2000s.  Mirabal's article relays the findings of a student-driven oral history project started in 1999 designed to investigate "the reasons for the economic and political changes in the Mission District." (p. 9) While I knew of gentrification as a concept, I'll admit to having been in the only category of folk who assumed or were taught that gentrification is "an organic, natural, and even random process, shaped by an uncontrollable market economy." (p. 16)  Mirabal builds a solid case, using individual voices and empirical research, to show that the Mission District gentrification was a "calculated process designed to benefit developers, real estate companies, speculators, and investors." Not to mention politicians or city planners who wish to change the commercial and ethnic complexion of a neighborhood from "bad" to "good." (p. 16) 


What does an essay on gentrification of a working class neighborhood - even a really good essay - have to do with public history?  Because part of the success of gentrification is erasing the neighborhood that existed previously and imposing a new persona in its place.  Mirabal uses concrete examples such as the whitewashing (read destruction) of (city sanctioned and national landmark credited) murals in order to make space for logos of new dot-com companies now in residence in buildings that used to house Latino families to represent what one interviewee described as "taking out our culture."  (p. 23) Equally alarming is her tale of historical markers scattered through the neighborhood now.  "The prevailing thought is that memorials based on a constructed past prevent erasure and allow for a collective remembering of a neighborhood, people, and community that no longer exists.  I don't buy it.  Because in the end, whose memories are the ones that we are allowed to remember, whose memories are the ones officially on display?  Who decides how we remember and why?" (p. 30)


While Mirabal isn't shaking her finger in frustration - and hope - at public historians specifically, I hear her nonetheless.  We must remember that the presentation of history requires deciding whose memories to preserve and choosing to whom you focus the telling. To tie back to last week's discussion, when we are studying history with the goal of interpreting it, we must also remember the context within which such markers were made.  Mirabal's oral history helps preserve that context by recording voices of the people who were displaced.  To use another example, we can look back at my childhood friends, the New York State Historical markers.  To understand those markers in context, we need to look at who chose which, or whose, history to share, what the state of the nation and the world was when the text was written, and who the State of New York thought would be reading those blue and yellow metal signs.  


Absolutely everyday life of everyday people can be shared, in new and technologically brilliant ways, with Generation X,Y,and Z.  In order to ethically do so however, we as historians need to capture the history of everyday people and also remember to ask hard, pointed questions of the preserved history to determine whose lives might not have made the cut into the historical record.