Additional Mission for House Museum

The Decatur House, opened as a museum in the 1960s by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, is reported to have a new mission and focus: the history of the White House.  According to the New York Times, the museum will now, "support research related to White House history, store historical documents, offer expanded educational programs for children, and host lectures and other programs that explore the history of the White House and the surrounding area."  The National Center for White House History at Decatur House will be operated by the White House Historical Association.

I have talked before about house museums as products of the political climates within which they are born.  (See Patricia West's Domesticating History: The Political Origins of American's House Museums.)  What drove Decatur's new mission? A political understanding that only part of the story was being shared? A desire to prove that lessons were learned from the discussions and controversies surrounding the revisioning of the Liberty Bell Center?  The intent to share with the public research compiled over the last several decades that represents a shift in how history is viewed and portrayed?

I am interested to see (not only on the museum's web site but also in the NYT) the emphasis on the museum's intention to interpret the lives of all who lived in Decatur House, free and slave.  Is this new or just newly talked about?  The original mission of the Decatur House Museum was to "educate the public about American cultural and social history as it relates to the House, its location, architecture, preservation, and its occupants and their stories,"  according to this document.  However, the museum summary also makes reference to discussions of who lived in the house and how space was used, demonstrating that urban slave life was being discussed at the Decatur as early as 2000.  Perhaps the "new" aspect at the Decatur is simply the public announcement of good history already being presented.

In addition to the links presented above, visit the National Trust for Historic Preservation's page on the Decatur House for more information, including images.

Reviews of West's book can be found here and here.

Historic Bethlehem Event

Looking for a fun evening in late January? The Historic Bethlehem Partnership is hosting a Winterfest and Beer Pairings on Sunday, January 24th from 4-7 p.m. at the Hotel Bethlehem.  Smithsonian Institution speaker Warren Perry will speak on the repeal of Prohibition.  

Can Scrensavers be an Engagement Tool?

A child of this digital age, my laptop is more than a tool, its a physical space where I work, play, think, relax.  I could pretend that this post was triggered because thinking about the spaces we inhabit is of interest to me.  Truthfully, I've been a junkie for pretty pictures and cool animation ever since the first flying toasters chased toast.  Luckily, that penchant can lead to deeper thoughts.


Today's early-morning-pre-coffee rumination was, "Hmm.  Christmas is over.  Need new screen saver that doesn't have presents and garlands in it. Wonder if there are history ones?" A simple search led to the cheesy screen saver sites of which a smart user is leery.   A few more minutes and I had found that PBS creates screen savers for some of its programming.  Those with a historical bent include: The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Ken Burn's The Civil War, Lewis and Clark, Tesla, and Theodore Roosevelt.  (For more, go to the PBS search page and put "screensaver" into the search box.) 


What about museums? Colleges and Universities discovered years ago that wall papers and screen savers featuring their campuses could draw alumni to an institution's website.  Surely museums have learned the same thing?  Along with this thought, however, came the question of resources.  How affordable/feasible is it to make a screen saver, even if you already have digitized images? Fast on the heels of THAT question...what about image policies and digital copyright? 


First, is the material available? Absolutely.  The Smithsonian's online exhibit, America by Air, has a page of images and objects.  The New York Historical Society online library has a digital collection, also.  (Check out Brooklyn Revealed for an example of a great history website.)  So pictures exist and are already online.  


The question of copyright from a user point of view boils down to "read the rules."  Some museums give you access to images and don't mind if you download for individual use, such as loading into a screensaver slideshow.  Others do mind.  Find, read, and follow the photography or images policy.  From an institutional viewpoint, have a policy.  Having spent last fall investigating museum policies, one of the mechanisms I found most useful as a user was the FAQ page offered within some policies.  A FAQ page allows the museum to answer specific questions such as "May I download an image to as a screen saver or wall paper on my personal computer?"


If the images are there, why then aren't there screen savers for download? I cannot be the first person to think of this.  Must be concern for resources.  While I can get my way around my laptop, I am not a power-user and definitely not a programmer.  However, my initial unscientific research suggests that creating an actual screen saver is much more than throwing some digital images together.  A screensaver is an application, one that must be specific to a platform i.e. PC or Mac, and one that would have to be written for each set of pictures.  Hmm.  Ok.  So where does that leave me as a user and as a professional?


Personally, depending on the institution's policy and my willingness to invest the time, I could download individual images into a folder, point my screensaver to the folder, and create a slideshow.  How can institutions benefit from the public's desire for images without spending significant resources?  My initial thought, based on half an hour of work and two cups of coffee, is this.  If your institution has digital images and a clear image-use policy, on a page where you offer individual images, also offer an option to download the entire set.  This allows me as an end use to have the entire set in a few key strokes instead of repeating the download process for each image.  


Where does this leave me this morning? Still with Christmas Trees flashing on the laptop screen when I stop to think a bit.  But also with the idea in the back of my head to be aware of collections of images I find while surfing history sites and the awareness to be thoughtful of how I professionally present images on web sites.  Now...what else can I find out there?

Separation, marginalization, collaboration - St. Augustine's Slave Galleries

Sometimes we compartmentalize our lives.  Work, school, home, church - we divide our resources between the activities and demands that call us.  Sometimes the lines blur, but often we work to keep them separate.


During today's morning routine of coffee and laptop, I skimmed the headlines of Episcopal Life Online and found a historical example of such separation.  Fairly front and center is a story on the recently renovated and interpreted slavery galleries in St. Augustine's Episcopal Church on New York's Lower East Side.  The church, built in 1828 (a year after slavery was abolished in New York State) collaborated on a renovation project with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum on the historic building's slave galleries, two small rooms behind the organ where blacks were allowed to worship - out of site and separated.  


This is the second recent project (within my awareness) where an Episcopal congregation has dedicated resources to understanding their own past in terms of slavery.   Why the Episcopalians?  On the modern end of the timeline, we've done a lot of soul searching of late (complete with hard work and loss) about owning differences and removing separations.  On the other end of the timeline, if one generalizes about Colonial congregations, Episcopalians tended towards possession of wealth, status, and in some cases, slaves.  The rooms existed in St. Augustine's because there was a (perceived) need.  Some congregants owned slaves (or had free blacks in their households depending on the date) as did some of the founding fathers who attended Christ Church in Philadelphia, another congregation putting commendable effort into revealing its past associations with slavery.  The Christ Church Preservation Trust sites a "mandate from the 2006 General Convention of the Episcopal Church to give a full, faithful, and informed accounting of its history" as the impetus for delving into their past and designing a tool for engaging that past in the present.  Sarah's Story is a 30 minute interpretive experience offered at Christ Church during the summer months.  An interpreter portraying a young, black, female slave shares stories of several historic figures, black and white, in a deliberate review of "early Philadelphia and its silent past." 


I remain proud of the Episcopal Church's work to own who we are and choose whom we will be.  Issues of segregation and marginalization are not only in our past. May we continue to find the strength to own and discuss past examples in our efforts to remove such obstacles from our present and our future.  Also continuing to "do good history" in the process - well, that's a delightful benefit.  Road trip to New York, anyone?

Review: Mary Lyon on the Web

Mary Lyon on the Web

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/marylyon

Designed and constructed by the Mount Holyoke College Office of Communications.

Reviewed November 17-22, 2009

The founder of Mount Holyoke College and a pioneer in women's education, Mary Lyon left school at age 13. Aimed at students of the same age, the site opens with questions for consideration, sets Lyon in context, and invites students to picture themselves in the story. Pages focused on specific themes follow: Childhood, Student, Founding, Opening Day, Seminary, Daily Life, Science, and Legacy. The pages are clear, interesting, and consistent. Each has a pictorial header, quote from Lyon, historical narrative, and a picture. Sidebars appear on two pages, listing facts placing Lyon's story into the larger context by sharing information about life in 19^th Century United States. One discusses childhood, the other historical highlights. Additional pages include a “cool facts” list, suggestions for school projects, and links for further research on Lyons and on women in the 19^th Century.

The content is written to appeal to the adolescent student and be appropriate for use in a classroom. For example, no mention is made of religion or of Lyon's death in 1849. Lyon is presented at all times within the lens of education – either a learner or a teacher. While keeping the target audience well in mind, the narrative considers issues of gender and to some extend class. No mention, however, is made in the narrative about race. A single sidebar bullet mentions slavery and the abolition movement. The reader leaves the Web site with a sense of daily life for girls and women in 19^th Century America and the understanding that the story of Mary Lyons and the young women who attended her seminary was the exception for the day, not the norm. A slight slant towards appealing specifically to and focusing on young women can be explained, if not excused, by the ownership of the site by Mount Holyoke College, and the assumption that while a teaching tool, it is in at least some small part a recruitment tool also.

The use of pictures is striking, especially those of personal objects. They create a tangible link with Lyons while also depicting a facet of life for a women of her time – a pin cushion, drawings she made, the green velvet bag in which she collected donations for the opening of the school – making the experience seem three dimensional. The site does not make creative use of other Web based technologies. This may be a result of being created in 1997. However, this lack is tempered by the crispness of the design and the creative interplay of narrative, list, and picture.

This site provides a biographical snapshot of a woman whose accomplishments directly affected women's history in the United States, appropriately written for its target audience of middle school students. Whether as a source for a student paper or as part of a classroom presentation, the site provides solid history.

Lyndsey Brown

Temple University

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Tools of the Trade

Questions Questions

A goal of our Managing History course, and of Temple's Public History program as a whole, is for each of us to wrestle with and construct an informed definition and answer to the questions, "What is public history?" and "What do public historians do?"  While this is an evolving process for anyone in this field, every historian must define an initial place to stand and from which to speak.  This is mine:

Public history is any process through which an individual tangibly studies the past in order to understand the present and to be an informed, active participant in the creation of our collective future.

Public historians commit to creating access for all individuals and communities to the most current research on what historians know and understand about the past, presenting that information in ways that allow for direct, personal experiences, and advocating the stance that knowing and understanding how past events unfolded is critical to creating and living in a healthy, stable society.  

So we have to know the history, share the history, make learning the history a tangible, livable experience, and assure that everyone in our society has access to that experience.  How do we do that?  As in any other trade, we do it with tools.  Let's add another question to those I'll spend a career defining. "What are the tools of a public historian?" As several of our readings this week explored new media and digital technology, let me focus in this post on how these new developments serve as tools or allow us to use old tools in new ways.

Tools of the Trade

Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig wrote the book "Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web" to address the question, "What is the process of '...doing digital history, (of) making use of the new computer-based technologies?'" (Introduction)  They identify "the need 'for a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web,'" review the "qualities of digital media" that allow historians to work, and counter with a list of dangers that the same technologies present.  In doing so, they have simultaneously gifted historians with a tool (the book) and a review and analysis of the tools provided by digital media.  Additionally, they have challenged an area of concern regarding access, means, by publishing the book not only in traditional paper form, available for purchase, but also on the web, available for anyone with digital access.  What other tools do we use?

Information  Historians work with facts, data, stories, opinions, dates - in short, information.  History can be defined as what we know about what happened that we have at hand to share with others.  New media has changed not only how historians disseminate history but also how we gain the information in the first place, i.e.  research. From online archives to discussion groups such as H-Net to Google Scholar to the ability to access JSTOR from my home office, the access historians have to data and discussion continues to increase daily.

Interaction  History is created by the interaction of people with objects and with each other.  (While an idea may be born in a vacuum, the effects of that idea ripple out beyond the individual.)  One new technology offers an answer as to how to "bridge the gap between online communities and the physical world."  In his article, "Hyperlinking Reality" librarian Nate Hill explains how a two dimensional bar code, such as your library may use to tag their books, can be placed on an object in the community.  Individuals can then take a digital image of that tag, connect with a website linked to the code in the tag, and either gain or share information about the object or location.  Hill explains how this might build community in cyberspace. "Now an online community can grow each time an individual happens to walk by the park bench, take a picture, and collaborate, much the way that conversation and interaction happen in a real-world community."  Hill's article speaks to how technology may connect individuals and may help create sources for the recording of interactions that may eventually become history. He also shares a tool that we historians might be able to use.  What if we place a bar code placed on the back of historic marker? When you take a picture of the bar code with your cell phone, a link to a website is saved.  When you get home, you access the website and expand the knowledge gained by seeing the space and reading the sentence on the marker.  The tag for the marker of a battlefield could lead to a map of the battle, a personal story of a soldier who fought and died there, and the coordinates of his grave back home in another state.  Upon which, perhaps, is another bar code.

Objects  Some will ask why we need the bar codes.  One can go and see both the site of the battle and the grave of the fallen soldier.  A fear raised by technological advances specific to objects is that people will content themselves with representations of things and no longer desire interaction with things themselves.  However, digital media can also allow us a type of physical access to objects.  I cannot go to see this piece of lace personally, but I can examine it digitally.  Moreover, even if I was able to travel to the location where it was displayed and the lace was on exhibit, I would be limited to looking at the object through a glass case, from at least inches, if not feet away.

Spacial sites  The concept of sites, physical locations of interactions of note, is a tool used frequently by historians.  The attraction of historical localities as places to visit and learn is centuries long and still relevant per recent studies.  The importance of spaces to the study of history is not new, and the expansion of the definition of "space" continues.  Last week in Prosthetic Memory we read Alison Landsberg's concept of transferential space - a public, constructed space "in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships to  events through which they themselves did not live." (p. 113)  Digital history can take us into spaces in a way we may not be able to experience physically.  Whether a set of pictures accompanied by text, a virtual tour or a rendering of a building that no longer exists, digital resources let us explore spaces.  New endeavors in social media sites such as Second Life allow one not only to explore a museum but to interact with other people at the same time, adding the benefit of building community.

The Future   The future itself is a tool.  By considering where we as a culture and civilization may be, we can speculate about what we may need to know.  We can then use that lens when deciding what to teach about our past so that we make conscious choices about our future.  The Center for the Future of Museums (CFM) is a think tank that "helps museums explore the cultural, political and economic challenges facing society and devise strategies to shape a better tomorrow." (p. 3)  Its report, "Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures" is fascinating reading.  A group of very smart people, Reach Advisors, "...poured over nearly a thousand articles, data sets, interviews and discussion forums to identify the trends that are most likely to change U.S. society and museums during the next 25 years." (p. 4)  This paper should be required reading for any American with a stake in the year 2034.  From an population that is increasingly multi-ethnic and aging to a society with dramatic changes in gender roles and an unprecedented divide between those who have means and those who do not to possible mindsets about energy, consumerism, technology, and globalization, the possible future painted is one we should not go into blindly.  Speaking specifically about museums, Elizabeth Merritt, Founding Director of the Center for the Future of Museums, adds a challenge to public historians.  "Working together we can help create a healthy, stable society in which every person has the leisure and ability to enjoy what museums have to offer."

What about the challenges?

While digital resources can create access by allowing one to read newspapers stored in a basement a country away or see markings on a vase only visible from one inch away, one still must have the access to a computer and the knowledge to use it.  If we want to be able to teach with these resources, public historians must be committed to working towards a society where access to technology is not limited by one's class, race, or gender.  Cohen and Rosenweig urge historians not to leave the issue of access "...to the technologists, legislators, and media companies, or even just to our colleagues in libraries and archives." (Introduction)

There is also the concern of translation.  Cohen and Rosenweig note Gertrude Himmelfarb's dissent on the new technology.  "The Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral....Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other." (Introduction)  Virginia Heffernan, in "Haunted Mouses," poses the concern that personal information added to the internet creates neither cohesive memory or tangible history.  "Today's new methods of making and sharing digital images have not allowed us to see things more clearly....Rather, they've introduced new kinds of visual and auditory static."  Heffernan makes a follow up comment, however, that offers a possible "in" for public historians determined to make this information relevant.  "The Internet's greatest production might in fact be just this beguiling static, unpredictable bytes of sound and light that fly around in cyberspace until someone interprets them."  Interpretation.  That's part of what we do, right?  Cohen and Rosenweig's book can be a resource here, too.  The chapters of their book walk historians through how they might personally use digital resources, specifically the internet, to teach and interpret history.  

The AHA has also weighed in on helping historians use both digital media and digital history.  The May 2009 issue of Perspectives on History provided the forum, "Intersections: History and New Media," a collection of articles on topics from teaching and research to public history challenges to information about blogs.

The response from both academic and public historians as to how all historians can use the internet and other digital media is perhaps the most important tool we all have to hand as it both explains new tools and suggests ways they can help us better use older, more familiar ones.  It also suggests ways said new tools may help to further blur the line between the academy and the community, refocusing us all on our ultimate goal - the study of change over time and the dissemination of that information to others for the betterment of the whole.

How Does One Remember - Commodity and Empathy

commodity ~ empathy ~ memory ~ history ~ sensuous ~ cognitive ~ agency ~ distance ~ structure ~ rupture ~ vision ~ perception ~ action ~ feeling ~ pain ~ cost

Elie Weisel asked, "How does one remember?" Alison Landsberg has answered specifically from our vantage point of a society infused with, and in many ways defined by, mass culture.  In her book, Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Lansberg  adds to the historiographic record of the study of memory by examining how specific mass culture tools - film, books, television, comic books, experiential museums - have been used to instill memories of specific cultural events - immigration, slavery, the Holocaust - in those who did not live through the experiences themselves.

I am at a loss.  Cognitively, I can see Landsberg's theory and argument, understand how they fit into the historiographic record of studies on memory, and even respect how she bridges memory study with social history questions of class and race.  I follow the logic.  But I cannot see through her eyes to share the memories because I do not share with her any of the points of entry.  While I know of every source she uses, I have not lived through - watched, read, visited - any of them.  Yes, I've walked through the room while Blade Runner and Total Recall have blared out of the television.  I remember when Roots aired as a mini-series.  The volume containing Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is upstairs on a shelf.  I've read Morrison, but not Beloved; Butler but not Kindred.  While I have the means to experience this "new form of memory largely made possible by the commodification of mass culture" I have not braved the experience of sitting through the experience that is Schindler's List nor had the opportunity to visit the Holocaust Museum.  I have not lived through the specific experiential and meaningful contact that she posits might allow me to "see differently," and through sensual, not cognitive experiences, enter a "transferential space" where I can perceive another's experience to the point of creating personal pain.

However.  I think she's onto something.  The ability to pay to physically partake in an experience that stimulates our senses through a technologically possible medium.  The rupture of one's one comfort or experience or timeline as a mechanism for being able to see through someone else's eyes or walk through another's experience.  The human ability to be transported through empathy to creation of a memory.  And the possibility for social action or change because of that assumed - or prosthetic - memory.  Yes,  I can see that.  I don't yet possess it.  I cannot draw the personal analogy to her specific examples.  As Jay Winter says in his essay, "The Generation of Memory: Reflections on the "Memory Boom" in Contemporary Historical Studies", I haven't experienced the trauma. Or going back to Landsberg, paid the cost.  However.  While I do not feel, I do think.

Her work supports thoughts we've had this fall that comfort, while good for tourism, doesn't support the social agenda of public history.  That if through discomfort our perspective can be shifted to a point where divisions of "other" are dissolved through the sharing of memory, then there is hope for political and social action that can further erode boundaries and create understanding.  We've already on the path.  We've gone from using film to propagate nationalist concepts of "American" sameness in the 1920s to educating - and experiences - the horrors that have occurred when nations erase differences.  We have, one could say, the technology.  Now to use share that technology with more and more people, widening the base of those who share the memories and choose to take the subsequent actions.