Interpreting difficult history is a challenge faced by many historic public sites who must consider many factors in presenting stories that might lead to discomfort in “broad non-academic audiences” (Cauvin 2016, 107). Thomas Cauvin states that interpretation has “become a buzzword in history” which, given recent public debates, is something that public historians will be considering with an even greater degree of discernment than was ever thought necessary (Cauvin 2016, 107). We can, however, take note of the varied examples of erasure of these difficult histories to examine the track record of what it means to the field. One such example is presented quite eloquently by Tiya Miles in her work The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story which recovers the narrative of The Chief Vann House Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia.
Miles resurrects difficult truths about the celebrated “civilized savage” James Vann whose homesite she sees as “a sieve for contemporary place-based identity formation and as a site of historical truth struggle for human dignity and survival” (Miles 2010, 21, 3). In her look at both the interpretation of the site and the history behind it, she explores many erased, unexplored, and romanticized versions of the house on Diamond Hill, particularly focusing on Cherokee women and the enslaved individuals who were completely left out of the original interpretations of “the finest home in the Cherokee Nation” (Miles 2010, 1).
An interesting point that Miles makes regarding the romantism of the site is the correlating nature of Southern exceptionalism and associations of pride that visitors feel comparing the Cherokee struggle against an unjust government to the experience many Southerners connect to deeply as a part of the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War. This point, and the general point Miles makes, about the failures in the breadth of interpretations at the site, can be viewed firsthand in Google reviews that primarily identify The Chief Vann House Historic Site as a “beautiful home” that “speaks to the wealth of this family.” While many of the reviews touch on the beauty of the site, only six mention slavery while eight mention the Trail of Tears. It appears that the site may have more work to do in shifting fully from celebration to commemoration to attract an audience beyond those that simply want to revel in the “mythical...memory of a genteel America elegant with agrarian grace” that the site represents (Miles 2010, 10).
Bibliography
Cauvin, Thomas. “Making Public History: Media and Practice.” In Public History. 107-111. 1st ed. New York: Routledge, 2016.
Miles, Tiya. The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story. North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.
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