Public Historian

Today Eric Johnson and I have a guest post at Museum 2.0 about Oldenberg’s The Great Good Place, part of this month’s discussion on the book.  Do go read it: we shoutout to John Cotton Dana.

At the inventive, playful and democratic new history galleries at the Oakland Museum, which I had the pleasure to visit last month, there is a section about objects.  What does it mean for an object to be in a museum?  What sounds do different objects make?  How do you tell objects apart?  Visitors can also explore what it means to BE a museum object–there’s a photo opp where visitors can stand in a case with oversized tags reading things like “most beautiful thing in the museum” or “ancient artifact.”  I want to talk about that “ancient artifact” tag.  It’s a common joke, but it gets to a history museum phenomenon I’m struggling to understand.

Contemporary collecting of everyday objects for a history institution is an interesting beast.  Often we use recent objects to provide an emotional hook for visitors into the stories and contexts of unfamiliar objects of the past (a 1990s cellphone for an exhibit of telephones from the 1880s on, for instance).  But it’s more complicated.  People of a certain age, usually under 50, when seeing a childhood toy or object they used in their lifetime, are totally derailed from any interpretive context or social interaction and say this:  ”Oh no, I’m so old!  My stuff is in a museum!”

Despite any assurances that this means not that the visitor is “old,” but that their stories are important, it’s very difficult for visitors to get over this experience of seeing their recent past as “history.”  This phenomenon might be less pronounced in a local or community history museum; letting aside the reverence value an object gains simply from becoming part of a museum collection, I suspect that the severity is greater at my current museum, where iconic, sainted objects of national importance share the floor with the Speak n Spell.*

Certainly there’s nothing wrong with reminding visitors of their mortality, or of making room for and supporting visitors’ varied emotional reactions to museum artifacts and experiences, but I’m worried that this “I’m old” reaction is harmful to visitors and museums.  In a relentlessly neophilic age, history museums contextualize novelties and remind visitors of historical continuities almost erased by the American culture’s collective short attention span.  If visitors leave with the idea that their lives are museum pieces, rather than that museums reflect their lives, are we doing them a disservice?  If they leave feeling that their stories are outdated and over, rather than important and historically valuable, are we doing good public history?

Has anyone done research on this phenomenon?  I welcome any references or leads!

*Which always features in my tours.

Disaster preparedness is necessary for cultural institutions.  When the waters rise, or the fire breaks out, does your museum know what to save first?  Who to call for conservation help?  May 1 is the international day of cultural heritage disaster preparedness awareness (I’m sure someone has developed a catchier title), and this year it coincided with the enormous floods we’ve seen affecting our friends and colleagues in Tennessee.  I thought I would share some disaster resources and do a roundup of reports on the health of Tennessee museums and archives after the flood.

Disaster Resources for the LAMs

SAA has a nice list of ideas for small tasks to do to increase your institution’s disaster preparedness.

AAM has compiled a document, Emergency Flood Recovery Resources for Museums (pdf)

Heritage Preservation + FEMA = Heritage Emergency National Taskforce

Tennessee Museums News Roundup

Flood reporting from the Tennessean.

Our colleague Gordon Belt of the Posterity Project lives in middle Tennessee and has been reporting on the flooding.  I am glad to hear that he and his family are okay.  He also reported that the Tennessee State Library and Archives avoided damage.  I’m going to quote this list he posted of affected heritage landmarks:

This list of major heritage landmarks in Tennessee damaged by the storm and flooding comes courtesy of Dr. Carroll Van West, Director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University…

Grand Ole Opry House (1974), Nashville. Brenda Colladay will let us know next week if and how many volunteers may be needed to work with the collections.
2nd Avenue North and Lower Broadway Historic Districts, Nashville
Riverside Park, Clarksville
Historic Town Square, Lebanon
Dyersburg downtown historic district, Dyer County. Downtown Dyersburg is really being hit today with the rising water from the Forked Deer River.
Bemis Historic District (the old mill town), Jackson
Millington Naval Air Station, Shelby County
Bethesda Presbyterian church and cemetery, Purdy, McNairy County (tornado)
Hartsville historic district, Trousdale County
Kingston Springs and Ashland City, Cheatham County

The following are more open landscapes that have been impacted:

Mound Bottom/narrows of the Harpeth State Park
Bicentennial Mall State Park
Springhouse, Carnton Plantation, Franklin
The Hermitage grounds and cemetery
Old City Cemetery, Nashville
Historic cemeteries, Franklin
Nashville Greenway system (especially Shelby Park)
Germantown greenway (contains Fort Germantown), Shelby County
Pinkerton Park (Fort Granger), Franklin

An interview with Kyle Young, director of the  Country Music Hall of Fame.  Their collections were not affected (exhibits and storage are on upper floors), but their building was severely flooded.

The Hermitage received some flood damage to grounds and buildings, though collections were not affected.

A disaster recovery post from a Tennessee archivist.

A report on local libraries.

A flood resource page from the Nashville Public Library.  Always nice to see the library as a key community space in a disaster.

I would be happy to update this post with information from other cultural institutions or ways to help.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an internet-wide recognition and celebration of women in technology. (Here’s my post about women telegraphers from last year.)  

One common narrative early women in technical professions had constructed for themselves was that of downplaying the challenges (or any role at all) of gender in their careers. Nora Stanton Blatch, a fiery women’s rights activist and civil engineer, broke this mold in the early 20th century. She was a rare technical woman working to connect her profession and her suffrage activism. Trained at Cornell as part of the first classes of women accepted to its Sibley School of Engineering, she once said that she had chosen civil engineering as her major because it was the most male-dominated field she could find. Her feminism was no accident: the granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and daughter of Harriet Stanton Blatch, she was raised in a milieu of struggle. Ruth Oldenziel suggests that her “rich feminist heritage enabled her to envision a narrative device in which to frame her life story.”

For a short period of time, Nora was married to the electronics engineer and radio and TV inventor Lee de Forest. As an engineering partnership, they pioneered radio broadcasting and, as a first transmission of their wireless phone in 1909, Harriet Blatch gave a speech declaring “Travel by stagecoach is out of date. Kings are out of date: communication by canalboat is out of date; an aristocracy is out of date, none more so than a male aristocracy.” But after their first child was born, Lee began to rail publicly against Nora’s insistence on continuing to work as an engineer at New York City public works departments and as a suffrage activist. They divorced soon after: Nora was now an engineer and a single mother, continuing to value both her work and family.

Nora’s feminist activism in engineering included professional societies. She was accepted into the American Society of Civil Engineers as a “junior member” in the early stages of her career, but once she turned 32, their age limit, she was booted out, despite her experience at bridge and hydraulic firms and in government, including supervising draftsmen. The ASCE was trying to stake out the rapidly professionalizing field of engineering as a high-status, high-class profession, and one way they did that was by strictly limiting membership, excluding surveyors, for instance, and certainly excluding women. Nora sued the ASCE for membership in 1916, but lost her suit; no women joined the society until 1927.  Nora died in 1971 after a long life of activism.

Further reading:

Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine

Margaret Rossiter, Women Scientists in America

I had a lovely time last week at NCPH, when some of my favorite public historians (and environmental historians too) gathered in Portland to talk about history and walk around in the rain.  What follows is a transcription of some of my notes on interesting sessions.  (I will discuss our future of public history session in another post.)  This is quite long, so I’ll put it after the jump.

Wood, Water, Work and a Welcoming Public:  At the Intersection of Oral History and Environmental History in the Great Lakes

This session inhabited the intersection of environmental history and public history  by exploring the use of oral history in doing research on the Great Lakes.

Steven Dast and Troy Reeves talked about the UW Digital Collections, specifically oral histories from the Forest Products Lab, which are transcribed, searchable, listenable (though mystifyingly in realaudio) and have been getting a surprising amount of traffic.

Aaron Shapiro of Auburn discussed his research on Minnesota tourism as a landscape of work, as seen through MHS’s oral histories.

Meg Stanley’s paper on her project “the oral history of progress” covered a story of 8 dams in British Columbia, on the Peace and Columbia Rivers, from the 60s to 80s, as lived by 130+ informants who worked on the dams.  She found a nuanced idea of “progress” in the stories of those who worked on the dams, a carefully measured move toward the end of a project.

Brad Gilles from Grand Valley State talked about American Indian lumber workers in northern Michigan, and how oral histories of their lives and work really told a different story than the ones accessible in archives.  ”It opened my eyes to a lot of things that are unthinkable without talking to them.”

Hidden Histories in Museums

Dorothea Crosbie-Taylor and Adam Nilsen from the Oakland Museum of California spoke on their upcoming exhibit Forces of Change focusing on individuals’ experiences in California in the 1960s and 70s ( it opens May 1).  This exhibit was community-curated in an amazing participatory project that respects the multiple identities and stories of individual Californians.  24 people each have “niches” to talk about their lives.  I found very interesting that the exhibit team spent a lot of time assuring participants that their personal stories were important and worthy of being in a museum.  They want to showcase a welter of voices instead of a totalizing narrative about what it meant to be in the state in the 60s and 70s.  I was very impressed by this talk and hope to visit the museum when I’m in the Bay Area in late May.

There was also a paper from Abby Hathaway on what she saw as a disappearance of working class stories in the new permanent exhibit at the Heinz History Center.  I thought the most compelling part of her paper was her personal involvement with the museum in the past as a Pittsburgher and employee, and the way she saw her own family’s story disappear, and I wish she’d incorporated that into her paper rather than very briefly at the end.

Tory Swim Inloes then discussed “Changing Conceptions of Childhood and the Museum Experience.”  She argued that since many museums (history museums in California were the object of her study) interpret the history of childhood/kids as historical subjects in school programming, this should be reflected in exhibits.

Here, Too?  Interpreting Slavery in ‘Unexpected’ Places

Andrea Reidell discussed the audiotour stop at Eastern State Penitentiary that focuses on George Norman, and what kind of context visitors might need to understand the story.

Kevin Maijala from Fort Snelling discussed their recent radical reinterpretation of the site (goodbye, 1827!) and the decision to focus more on Dred Scott’s time in Minnesota.

Greg Shine spoke on Fort Vancouver’s research on slavery in the Army encampment there, included the story of Monimia Travers‘ trip to Portland as a slave in an officer’s household, followed by her manumission.  He also discussed their research into Indian slavery at the fort around the time of the Hudson’s Bay Company encampment there.

John Willis from the Canadian Museum of Civilization discussed preliminary research on the Canadian Underground Railroad.

There was vigorous discussion, including why should it be a big deal for visitors to encounter slavery interpretation in “unexpected” places?  Why should it be unexpected?  Panelists spoke on getting beyond the “It happened here?  Really?” factor.

Telling the Story, Engaging the Public:  Some New Approaches

A diverse session giving lots of possible futures for public history work.

Tom Ancona, who runs a big design firm, gave a paper called “History is Good Business” and spoke on how companies are using heritage for brand building and customer engagement, as a building block of brand culture and marker of authenticity.  As an example, he talked about what he called “industrial heritage experiences” like our own FRFT, the new Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee and the Boudin Bakery experience his firm designed in San Francisco.

The next two papers provided interesting counterpoints.  Brian Horrigan talked about all the great participatory projects they do at the MHS (which, honestly, I assume my readers know about):  wotr, their public commenting feature, MN150 , the MGG film competition, and the 1968 project.  The key, said Brian, quoting Nina, is to find the right job for visitors to do.

Finally, Mike Lansing from Augsburg spoke on “New Possibilities for Public History in a Post-Carbon World.”  Peak-oil public history!  He argued that particularly living history farms could be models for folks about how to live in a world with limited energy resources, and an assurance that we can make it on similar resources.  Specifically:  public history institutions are repositories of preindustrial knowledge on technology and energy, a resource for local ecological knowledge and the history of human/environmental relations in the area, and a resource for locally-produced culture and community.  Public history institutions could be useful resources for policymakers, too, who are envisioning and planning post-carbon communities.  I thought his talk was really interesting, and of course I like to think that public history can save the world, but, well, I think we need more options than going back to the garden (especially in Detroit, where that’s a major sentiment.)

Mining Landscapes and their Publics

This session was the very last, Saturday afternoon at 4:30, and was tragically sparsely attended.  I went in part because some of my cronies were in it, but it turned out fantastic.

Brian Leech spoke on the destruction of the Columbia Gardens in Butte, an amusement park funded by the mining company, and what the public outcry over the destruction meant for public land use and the relationship of the company and the city.

Erik Nystrom discussed the way mining models from the 1904 Gateway Exposition were taken out of context and exhibited in the US National Museum in the teens.  In the museum, the models meant something very different than in the commercial World’s Fair: they became about model, rationalized, clean mining societies.

Hilary Orange’s paper was pretty fantastic.  She’s a public archaeologist who works at UCL, and her work is on former Cornish mining landscapes and how people interact with and think about them.  The particular moor she spoke about, in Minions, has been an active landscape:  it has prehistoric stone circles, industrial heritage from 19th C copper and tin mining, and is actively grazed by “commoners” who have rights on the land.  The people she interviewed, surveyed and walked the moor with had very interesting questions:  ”Would being a World Heritage Site [like other Cornish mining landscapes] mean we can’t mine in the future?”  Locals described (romanticized) the landscape as a haunting, romantic, natural one, not an industrial or heritage landscape.  In the context of a mining history panel, this really brought out ideas about how publics interact with the material culture of technology.

Peter Liebhold, in commenting on the session, suggested that these papers represented “the new mining history,” less focused on ores and getting things out of the ground or even labor history, but on landscape and visualization.

This weekend the Cleveland Plain Dealer had a long article about the Western Reserve Historical Society’s systematic selling of collections to pay off debt.  Please go read the article right now.

While the current recession has hit museums, nonprofits and others especially hard and has them scrambling to survive, the society has long used its collection as a means to raise cash, something others find astounding.

The Western Reserve is not an accredited member of the American Association of Museums, unlike Ohio’s two other major history organizations, the Ohio Historical Society and the Cincinnati History Museum. Western Reserve had been a member for 20 plus years, but the membership lapsed in 1998.

Davis said the association is more appropriate for art and science museums and said they were members of a living history association.

But the AAM, established in 1906, represents 3,000 institutions that include, art, history, science, military and youth museums and others. It sets standards and best practices for museums, including for sales of museum collections, called de-accessions.

While many history museums routinely sell off collections that are duplicates or don’t meet their missions, accredited museums set aside the proceeds to buy new artifacts or care for the ones they have.

“It seems counterintuitive, whether art, history or science museum . . . that you’re going broke and you can’t sell,” said Ford Bell, American Association of Museums president. “The reason that policy exists is once they start to fund operations [by selling artifacts] the collections become assets and not collections.”

Bell said this standard has created and kept safe some of the greatest museums in the world, even though tough “awful economies of the past.”

At Western Reserve, the sale of many items such as guns, Indian artifacts and furniture have been kept private and quiet. The society refuses to say what is being sold or even how much the sales earn.

On the society’s tax forms that nonprofits must fill out, it reported $1.18 million in artifacts sold from October 2007 through June 2008. From October 2006 through September 2007, it reported asset sales of $2.1 million.

In the last several years, there have been a number of scandals in the art museum world about museums (the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis, for instance) selling or proposing to sell off collections to address financial crises.  Critics wondered why museum people were so up in arms about the ethics of deaccessioning for profit.

The WRHS shows us some consequences of treating museum collections as assets, rather than, as is our mission and responsibility, objects held in trust for the public.  Lack of trust among donors, the public, and the profession.  Lack of accreditation.  The secrecy about their deaccessioning process, what items are chosen and how, what money was made from each item, only exacerbates the problem.  As a counterexample, see the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s deaccession database, which notes where each piece was sold and for what amount:  that’s radical transparency.

The museum community upholds ethics rules around collections deaccessioning not to be punitive or prudish, but to protect our collective cultural heritage and to keep museums as a third place, one that facilitates social encounters with historical objects and stories and is insulated from the market.  Our visitors and our donors deserve institutions that serve them.  This is a tough economy for everyone, but without our ethics we cease to be museums.