The overarching theme of responsible museum stewardship is present in this week’s readings. To begin, Cauvin explains that while the role of academic historians revolves primarily around the interpretation of archival collections, the public historian must be prepared to step significantly farther out of that sphere to attain a multitude of necessary skills beyond those involved with interpretation. Instead of merely interpreting the past, public historians must be able to collect, preserve, and manage the production of the past. Additionally, they must do all of this in cooperation with their audiences, not as “missionaries of truth,” but rather as facilitators of historical connectedness (Cauvin 2016, 27-8).
Stewardship in cooperation with the community is a central point in Richard Moe’s “Are There Too Many House Museums?” Moe posits that the “velvet rope” strategy of house museum as shrines to the elite-centered “Good Old Days” has led to a multitude of struggling sites that fail to connect to their communities and have become “mere relics from a distant past that is perceived as having little relevance” (Moe 2012, 55-6, 58-9). This failure, he says, proves that non-profit management of historic home sites is not necessarily the best solution for their stewardship (Moe 2012, 61). Instead, Moe contends that keeping historical sites in active and even private use might be the solution to longevity (Moe 2012, 60-1). Of course, this presents a host of issues that Moe does not address, but his ideas and the case studies he presents are certainly food for thought.
In Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory, historian Mike Wallace lays out a fascinating overview of the history of the preservation movement and the birth of museum sites. Wallace explains that politics, fear, and elitism ushered in the age of the museum in the United States. Before the Civil War, New York Governor Hamilton Fish asked the New York State Legislature to save George Washington’s revolutionary headquarters at Newburgh, stating that "It will be good for our citizens in these days when we hear the sound of disunion reiterated from every part of the country...to chasten their minds by reviewing the history of our revolutionary struggle" (Wallace 1996, 2). It was this call to use a historic site for the cause of fear-based civic education that not only created the first shrine to a Founding Father, but also kick started a nationalist preservation revolution to establish America’s identity.
Wallace goes on to weave a fascinating narrative using the examples of Henry Ford’s, “static utopia,” Greenfield Village and John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s, “top-down” “shrine of the American faith,” Colonial Williamsburg, as case studies that examine the motivations of the “patrician” class who used history as a weapon in their fight against “subversive ideologies [that] were destroying the Republic” and by using history like a “moral armor” these early arbiters of history created an Americanized collective identity for themselves, though not necessarily the for wider public (Wallace 1996, 6-8, 12, 15, 18).
The remaining readings this week primarily looked at more specific examples of historical institutions and exhibitions including the United States Holocaust Museum, Civil War museums in Richmond, Virginia, the Chicago Historical Society, and the topic of spontaneous memorials which grew out of the September 11th attacks.
Bibliography
Broomall, James J. “The Interpretation Is A-Changin’: Memory, Museums, and Public History in Central Virginia.” Journal of the Civil War Era 3, no. 1 (2013): 114–24. Accessed March 31, 2023, http://www.jstor.org/stable/26062023
Cauvin, Thomas. “Collecting, Managing and Preserving the Past: Public History and Sources.” In Public History. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Greenspan, Elizabeth L. “Spontaneous Memorials, Museums, and Public History: Memorialization of September 11, 2001 at the Pentagon.” The Public Historian 25, no. 2 (2003): 129–32. Accessed March 31, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2003.25.2.129
Lewis, Catherine M. The Changing Face of Public History: The Chicago Historical Society and the Transformation of an American Museum. 3-34. Chicago: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.
Linenthal, Edward T. “The Boundaries of Memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.” American Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1994): 406–33. Accessed March 31, 2023, https://doi.org/10.2307/2713271
Moe, Richard. "Are There Too Many House Museums?" Forum Journal 27, no. 1 (2012): 55-61. Accessed March 31, 2023, muse.jhu.edu/article/494513.
Wallace, Mike. Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory. 3-32. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.
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