History News Fall 2017

Putting

History to Work GIVING IN AMERICA:

A History of Philanthropy

Into the Storeroom Bending the Future of Historic Preservation TECH LEAFLET:

Environment and the Care of Prints and Drawings

TRANSFORM AND EXPAND THE WAY YOUR HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS ARE VIEWED, ACCESSED AND UTILIZED. AND LET YOUR HISTORY INFORM THE FUTURE.

www.historyit.com

Contents

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AUTUMN 2017 VOLUME 72, #4

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ON THE COVER The Levine Museum of the New South sponsored a

Departments

Features

3 On Doing Local History

9 Putting History to Work

By Carol Kammen

By Bruce W. Dearstyne

5 The Whole Is Greater

15 Into the Storeroom

By LaNesha DeBardelaben

By Steven Lubar

7 The Value of History

22 Bending the Future of Historic Preservation

By Sarah Sutton

33 Book Reviews

By Gretchen Jennings and David M. Grabitske

36 AASLH News

By Max Page and Marla Miller

28 Giving in America: A History of Philanthropy

community-created exhibit about policeinvolved shootings in its hometown of Charlotte and elsewhere in the nation, K(NO)W Justice, K(NO)W Peace.

Photo Levine Museum of the New South

INSIDE: TECHNICAL LEAFLET

Environment and the Care of Prints and Drawings

By Margaret Holben Ellis

By Amanda B. Moniz

History News is a publication of the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). History News exists to foster publication, scholarly research, and an open forum for discussion of best practices, applicable theories, and professional experiences pertinent to the field of state and local history.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL HISTORY

EDITOR Bob Beatty | MANAGING EDITOR Aja Bain | ADVERTISING Darah Fogarty DESIGN Go Design, LLC: Gerri Winchell Findley, Suzanne Pfeil

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Article manuscripts dealing with all aspects of public history are welcome, including current trends, timely issues, and best practices for professional development and the overall improvement of the history field, particularly articles that give a fresh perspective to traditional theories, in-depth case studies that reveal applicable and relevant concepts, and subject matter that has the ability to resonate throughout all levels of the field. For information on article submissions and review, see about.aaslh.org/history-news. Single copies are $10.

Postmaster, send form 3579 to History News, AASLH, 2021 21st Avenue S., Suite 320, Nashville, TN 37212. Periodical postage paid in Nashville, Tennessee. Entire contents copyrighted Š2017 by the American Association for State and Local History. Opinions expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of the American Association for State and Local History.

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From the Editor

ow and why is the study of history important? Why do we engage in this work in the first place? I’d venture that many of us do so because we know history is significant to our lives and to our communities. It is important, then, to practice what we preach and regularly look to the past to better understand our work in the history endeavor.

We strive in each History News issue to share examples of the belief that history has its most impact “when it connects the people, events, places, stories, and ideas of the past with people, events, places, stories, and ideas that are important and meaningful to communities, people, and audiences today.” The articles in this issue document these connections in action as they relate to the history enterprise.1 In our lead essay, Bruce W. Dearstyne shares examples of public history in practice in a multitude of ways. I am particularly struck by his illustration of how for-profit businesses put history to work. Take note of the quote he uses from the famous business tome The Leadership Challenge, about the importance of a business looking to its past as it plans for the future.

The other three articles herein urge us to follow this example and consider the history of our own field. In an excerpt from his book Inside the Lost Museum, Steven Lubar looks at one of the foundations of our field: collections. He urges us to think of collections storage areas not solely as locations to house objects,

but also places where we can hone our own “museum sense” regarding these collections.

Max Page and Marla Miller examine another aspect of our field’s past: historic preservation. Their article and the book it is excerpted from, Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, address John Sprinkle’s admonition, “From time to time…it is prudent and reasonable to take a look backward; to try to understand ‘why we do what we do’ in historic preservation” (24).

Finally, Amanda B. Moniz professes the importance of understanding the history of American philanthropy. Giving is not only essential to nonprofit sustainability, it is also, she argues, “A defining tradition in American life” (28).

In recounting this history, Moniz asserts how sharing the history of American philanthropy also might inculcate a sense of giving in our stakeholders.

We know history shines light on the present and future of the communities we serve. These articles show that it is also helpful to reflect on the history field’s past as well. We would be wise to consider how we put these principles into action in our own work.

AASLH

H

Bob Beatty 1

History Relevance, www.historyrelevance.com.

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On Doing Local History

By Carol Kammen

It Is Not Only about the Generals

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he history versus heritage issue du jour relates to memorials dedicated to Confederate leaders. But ultimately, it is not only about those men.

Historical research and critical thinking cause us to reexamine, rethink, reconsider, and recover from our national historical amnesia concerning signs, memorials, and monuments located across the continent. As we probe the past, we enhance our understanding. We don’t change history, but we unfold it to see what else there is to learn. We ask who was where (and when). We explore the circumstances, figure out how things worked, and look at all that has helped create our ideas. We look at the way memory has shaped a narrative that is often cuddly but is more often distant from our current understanding. And we realize memory has long been used to foster one view of the past at the expense of others. This is the difference between history, which is a discipline, and heritage, which is frequently something recalled to make us feel good about a mythic past.

For me, the case against Confederate monuments is fairly easy, even if the outcome is not always pleasing. Those men who fought against the United States of America in the 1860s were traitors to our nation, plain and simple. They fought to break apart the Union. This is true even if they returned to their home heroes, even if they were fine husbands and fathers, men firm in their patriotism to locality.

Placement of monuments to the Confederate cause is additionally problematic. The United Daughters of the Confederacy erected many statues in the 1890s as the South further codified Jim Crow segregation and the region enforced strict social mores and insults upon southern African Americans.

Southerners erected additional statues throughout the first half of the twentieth century, many times to tamper African American demands for civil rights.

I believe communities should move these statues to an appropriate museum.

They should be reinterpreted and exhibited with an explanation of why they were

relocated. This should include why they are in their current location and current thinking about the meaning of these memorials.

This was my position of late, until I remembered a lovely day in 1996 when my husband and I drove down Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Here, statues of proud, triumphant Confederate leaders command the road and the nearby neighborhood. We stood among the crowd at the dedication of the statue to African American tennis star and activist Arthur Ashe, a Richmond native. We felt a sense of pride that the city had erected such a memorial on this boulevard—one of the most beautiful in the country—that theretofore had only featured white Confederate leaders.

Recalling this example two decades later caused me to reconsider my current position. What should be done about that parade of statues that so defines the area? There is not one statue that would be moved, but a host of them. It is almost unthinkable to consider the roadway without them.

Levar M. Stoney, a young black man, is mayor of Richmond. He too has considered these same statues. In an April 2017 blog post, Mayor Stoney noted that it was time to redefine the narrative of the triumphal Confederate parade. He created an impressive committee charged with adding to the diversity of personalities the city honors. Stoney suggested the creation of living memorials: new schools, a community center, or “dignified public housing” to “embrace just causes, not lost causes.” This seemed a reasonable solution until I read one comment to his blog that noted if Richmond were 51 percent Jewish rather than African American, none of us would allow statues to Hitler and his henchmen to remain.1 Furthermore, the issue extends beyond statues and monuments to Confederate generals. It includes place names, historic markers, street names, as well as names on buildings and in town squares.

Countless memorials inappropriate to our current understanding of the past dot the landscape in all corners of the country.

Some of these are meaningless or were placed merely as a statement of family status or organizational pride. Some are just plain offensive because of language or purpose; others were placed for reasons of controlling the narrative of the past—presenting the way one group wanted everyone to think about who we have been.

We also have markers celebrating imperfect individuals who accomplished things worth remembering. These should stay where they are. We have done a fairly good job of understanding George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison, among others. Despite their flaws—most obviously their connections to slavery—they are men who created our nation who we now see as whole people, not only as impeccable marble men. But the statue in New York City’s Central Park to Dr. Marion J. Sims (called the father of gynecology), who experimented on enslaved black women in the 1850s? I think he should go.

Many of our monuments reflect a white, Protestant perspective and lack discussion about the complexity of a community’s past. Recently, I wrote an article about the two monuments in our community’s small central square, one extolling white explorers who came into the area and the other, to the Oregon Mission, inaugurating the 1830s parade of missionaries from Ithaca to the Pacific Northwest to bring Indians the “white man’s book from heaven.” The text of the markers is factually correct but ignores a more complicated past: the fact that they stand upon land that unnamed hunter-gatherers passed over, land that until the Revolutionary War was part of the Cayuga Nation. We can acknowledge that our forbearers did not consider this perspective when they erected these markers in the early part of the twentieth century.

But we are much more aware of these layers of civilization today, and these markers should have added interpretation acknowledging this.

Many markers across the nation likewise honor these “firsts.” Thus, they fit what geographer Wilbur Zelinsky identified as the persistence of the culture of the earliest HISTORY NEWS

3

tle. We need to take heed, the memorial cautions, of the banality of war, the futilgenerations. Those dominant narratives ity of bullets, and the finality of death. are important to community memory, but Who cannot be moved by it? It is also a it is equally important that we recall the memorial that reminds us that while warothers present at founding moments and time leaders often make horrific mistakes, those displaced from the land before the we should always honor those who were first white settlers arrived. My point is that bound up by those decisions. there are many narratives and they deserve I think, too, of statues that comformal recognition as well. memorate major events. The memorial Some markers and monuments make buildings and pool at the site of the Twin us take a step back to understand someTowers in New York City are moving for thing beyond our own experience. I am their stark simplicity and the grandeur stunned each time I stand in front of the of the grand central station that is the Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s Robert Gould oculus. The same is true for the reflecting Shaw Memorial in Boston. Young Shaw pool and empty chairs at the Oklahoma leads the Massachusetts 54th, an African City National Memorial.

American regiment, in the American These memorials do not perpetuate a Civil War. In the sculpture we see the partisan view and certainly do not prodetermined faces of the men marching mote disunion. They are monuments with him, each soldier at the ready. The to human courage, to the bonds formed memorial lifts every sculpted face to stand by those who go to war, and to a nation for all those who go to war. These are founded on the idea of equality for all. individuals facing battle and probable They reinforce that when one part of us death. The memorial stuns me with its is attacked, we are all under fire. They power. It tells me it is not armies that speak to us echoing through the ages. fight our battles but people. And those They remind us who we are as a people, people are “us.”2 one nation, E pluribus unum.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial by I believe some reminders of the past Maya Lin in Washington, D.C., sends the should be generic. Shouldn’t we create same chilling message—a warning that memorials to the laborers who built railan army is a collection of people and that roads, to the mothers who died in childthose people suffer one way or another. birth, to those who constructed our roads Here are the names of all those who fell and our sewer systems, and to our teachscreaming on the field and those who ers—especially to our teachers? I would tories com h aepiens aal n z ee ss a n d s i z e s stoteobatri ine sa lcl osm l d s hsai p died in a hospital bedsor en route see s t o r i e s c o m e i n a l l like s h ato pe s amemorials n d s i z e s that stun us over

On Doing Local History >

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AUTUMN 2017

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time, those that speak of the displaced: millions of American Indians, those hounded from their homes, those who lost their way, those who took themselves elsewhere, and to the many immigrants who come to the promised land and make it their own.

We have in this country a number of memorials that should make us shudder.

But they also show us that over time we have changed our minds about events and people because our historical thinking has deepened and embraced a new and important fairness and solid research.

Such a realignment would reaffirm the idea that we can grow, that we can open our eyes and see things differently. It shows that we can understand old events in a new light, that history itself asks new questions of things that we have taken for granted, and that the past has something of value to teach. I would like to see memorials that say we have gotten better and perhaps have gotten it right—at least now and again.

Everywhere there are signs that signify not much at all—typically offering a vapid pattern of ancestor worship. They are in your county and your state, mine too. We roll past them in the car and barely look.

Should we do something about them?

Some should probably come down; some should be paired with an explanation showing we think differently now. Some will definitely remain, reminding us that the past was complex. And in that way it mirrors the present.

When we remember the past, we honor those who represent American values while recognizing that they are, at the same time, human. When we make a mistake, we learn from history that we can fix things. This is a great example of why history, both national and local, matters.

With all this in mind, two questions linger in my mind. It’s not only about Confederate generals, is it? And, what do we do about Christopher Columbus? t “On Doing Local History” is intended to encourage dialogue on the essential issues of local history.

Carol Kammen can be reached at ckk6@cornell.edu.

1 See richmondvirginiamayor.blogspot.com. See also History News 71, no. 4 (Autumn 2016).

2 Interestingly enough, the memorial’s official title, Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw, does not include the 54th Massachusetts.

The Whole Is Greater

By LaNesha DeBardelaben

Shaping the Future of the Museum Field through Mentoring Each one can reach one.

Each me can reach three.

“The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own.”

T

—Benjamin Disraeli

he vast majority of us in the public history field did not arrive at our professional positions because of sheer impressive credentials or good fortune alone. Somewhere along the way someone likely encouraged us, gave wise words of wisdom that refined us, shared transformative insights that better prepared us, and/or inspired us with motivation that positioned us for the next level. Someone helped widen the door of opportunity a bit further for us. It is this gift of mentoring that has the promise to proliferate growth in our museum field.

Mentoring simultaneously strengthens the mentee, the mentor, and the profession in immeasurable ways.

For those desiring to grow in museum knowledge and practice, securing a mentor is a wise decision that accelerates learning. Finding an established professional from whom to learn either specific pointers in the field or general knowledge has tangible benefits. Having a mentor allows one to learn without always making the mistakes common during the learning process. Gleaning insight from the missteps made by a mentor will forecast avoidable pitfalls, surface detours, and spotlight preventable brick walls.

Through transparent conversation and honest dialogue, the pitfalls of a mentor’s past can strengthen the learning curve of the mentee.

Moreover, one can grow within a supportive and safe space through a mentoring relationship. Climbing the professional ladder can be an intimidating, risky process. The mentoring

relationship gives professionals an opportunity to ask questions without concern of sounding naive, the confidence to exchange insights with a seasoned professional, and the space to present drafts of concepts and creative thoughts to an informed listening ear. It is within the context of mentoring that a professional can refine one’s best ideas for work. The listening mentor can respond from a place of experience.

True mentoring

is never a one-way street.

Furthermore, those who take advantage of mentoring are better positioned to launch into their next level of operations with a wider breadth of awareness.

Spending time with a mentor, whether infrequently or on a scheduled routine, inevitably expands one’s level of exposure and insight. Not only is one more keenly aware of the mentor’s seasoned views, but one is often introduced to the mentor’s peers as well, thus expanding access to various opinions and viewpoints. This can sharpen the mentee’s practice.

You get as much as you give as a mentor.

True mentoring is never a one-way street. In a well-matched mentorship, the mentor gains as many rewards as the mentee. Anyone with experience behind them and a heart for helping someone else has the capacity to be a mentor.

Beyond that, little more is required to mentor. There is a plethora of promising professionals who need the wisdom of a willing mentor to help them contour their budding growth in the field.

Being a mentor also validates one’s professional expertise. It has been said that you cannot lead where you have not been and you cannot teach what you do not know. Mentoring allows one to share

insights and lessons from one’s professional journey, making one’s own mistakes medicine for the next generation.

Choosing to mentor is to extend opportunities for someone else to use your insights to steer them down a path of success. Everyone who has been in the field for a considerable amount of time has insights and experiences that are instructive and valuable when shared. Mentoring then becomes a laboratory for growth.

Mentoring naturally expands one’s own reach and influence. Anytime you are investing your time, insights, and reflections in the next generation of practitioners, your influence will be seen and felt in their work. AASLH Vice Chair John Fleming, for instance, is the mentor to one of my mentors, Juanita Moore.

Through my mentor’s words and actions, I hear and see the influence of her mentor. On a larger scale, media mogul Oprah Winfrey is known to repeatedly share with her worldwide viewing audience the insights and wisdom of her mentor, the late poet Maya Angelou. As a mentor, your reach proliferates beyond the measure of your own work and sphere of daily contact, and oftentimes even beyond your own lifetime.

The 360-degree rewards of mentoring enrich the mentor’s professional life.

Quite simply, it feels good to make an investment in others. Taking the time to dialogue with, respond to, and engage a mentee yields mutual benefits for both parties. While the mentee flourishes from gaining insight and support, the mentor gains a sense of satisfaction from the exchange, both immediately and further down the road as the mentee develops.

Through the mentoring relationship, mentors sharpen their leadership skills and learn how to be even more effective mentors.

To mentor is to shape the field forever.

Any field of professional practice benefits from the custom of mentoring.

Particularly in the museum field—a

HISTORY NEWS

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The Whole is Greater > profession in which diversity, inclusion, accessibility, and measurable impact are essential to our future—mentoring can keep our field progressing in a desirable direction. A continual investment in the next generation of leaders and practitioners through formal and informal mentoring strengthens the industry.

Maximizing the talent, creativity, and energy of emerging practitioners through mentoring is a win-win arrangement for the entire field.

AASLH thanks the following individuals for their leadership as members of the

AASLH LEGACY SOCIETY. The Legacy Society provides AASLH members an opportunity to donate to the endowment via estate planning.

Ms. Sylvia Alderson Winston–Salem, NC

Anonymous Mr. Bob & Ms. Candy Beatty Franklin, TN

Mr. Robert M. & Ms. Claudia H. Brown Missoula, MT

Mr. & Mrs. Charles F. Bryan Jr. Richmond, VA

Ms. Linda Caldwell Etowah, TN

Ms. Mary Case & Mr. Will Lowe Washington, DC

Ms. Terry L. Davis Nashville, TN

Mr. Stephen & Ms. Diane Elliott St. Paul, MN

Mr. John Frisbee* Concord, NH

Mr. J. Kevin Graffagnino Barre, VT

Mr. John A. Herbst Indianapolis, IN

Mr. H. G. Jones Chapel Hill, NC

Ms. Katherine Kane West Hartford, CT

Ms. Kathleen S. & Mr. James L. Mullins Grosse Pointe Shores, MI

Mr. Dennis A. O’Toole Monticello, NM

Ms. Ruby Rogers Cincinnati, OH

Mr. David J. Russo Ontario, Canada

Mr. Will Ticknor Las Cruces, NM

Mr. Jim & Ms. Janet Vaughan Washington, DC

Mr. George L. Vogt Portland, OR *Deceased

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Mentoring is essential to continually diversifying our field. Kyle Parsons, Manager of Inclusion and Community Engagement at the Minnesota Historical Society, notes, “I am one of those oft-discussed millennials who are known for job-hopping and leaving organizations quickly. However, I have stayed with my museum for nearly eight years now because my boss and mentor has actively looked for ways to develop me. He is more than a supervisor; he has stated that he views himself as my mentor, and I work hard to ensure his time and effort is well-invested. The fact that he is another male of color in a predominantly white industry has also allowed me to trust that he understands some of the unique challenges that I encounter.”

In addition to enhancing diversity, mentoring is often an exchange of trust and support. Parsons continues, “The mentor-mentee relationship has been the most important part of my professional development to this point because it means I am not the only person actively thinking about my career and growth.”

For Parsons and for the entire field, mentoring fosters industry-wide collegiality and connectedness. The lines drawn from one professional to another are multiplied through mentorships.

Relationships are deeper and more meaningful in a field that encourages mentoring. Cultivating a mentoring culture in the museum field can take place at the micro level, within museums that encourage staff members to mentor and be mentored, and at the macro level, with professional associations offering formal mentorship programs. Peer-to-peer and horizontal mentoring is another option that fortifies linkages in the field.

Aaron Berger, Campaign Director for Coxe Curry & Associates in Atlanta, who led art museums for fifteen years as a high-performing executive director, reflects on the role of mentoring upon the success of his museum. “For me, gathering a diverse group of mentors was critical. As a museum director, I met regularly with the directors from nine other area museums/attractions: the history museum was represented, as was the zoo, the art museum, the historic house, the cultural center. Some had budgets of $1 million, while others were $18 million operations.

Each of these organizations was vastly different from my own but there were

commonalities that helped shape my perspectives on marketing, attendance, donor development, membership, financial management, and so on. We met quarterly and ensured our conversations were kept confidential. This built not only trust between the organizations but also facilitated some tremendous partnership opportunities.”

Mentoring generates creativity within the field. The very nature of exchange in a mentoring arrangement elicits heightened, open-minded dialogue, as Berger’s experience affirms. Innovative ideas surface. Tim Barber, Executive Director of the Black Archives in Miami, Florida, pushes his mentees to strive for the most creative, thoughtful solutions in every instance. Through mentoring, outcomes are more creative.

Additionally, long-term sustainability in the field is more viable through mentoring. Good work is made better when practitioners are mentored. Mentoring strengthens the field from one generation to another and improves the outlook of the field. It supports the growth and development of the mentee, enriches the professional experience of the mentor, and is an essential practice that sustains the museum field.

Take time for a mentorship.

Mentoring is an intentional choice.

Sometimes you fall into a mentorship unexpectedly. Sometimes you strategically arrange it. But by all means, choose mentoring. The investment of time produces enriching rewards. t

“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.

If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.’”

—Toni Morrison LaNesha DeBardelaben is Executive Director of the Northwest African American Museum in Seattle, Washington.

She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Association of African American Museums, Michigan Museums Association, and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. She can be reached at LNDebar@aol.com.

The Value of History

By Sarah Sutton

Museums and the Paris Agreement

W

hen we lift our eyes up from the present struggles—politics, health crises, homelessness, and hate—and look around with a view to the larger world, what do we see?

More of the same.

Not only this, of course, but it is what draws our attention. That’s what symptoms do, draw your attention; but they’re not the real problems. The world’s on-the-surface struggles have root causes in poverty and inequality, lack of education and valued work, economic imbalances, and resource scarcity and depletion. History has answers. History museums and historic sites can easily and effectively contribute to finding new answers as well.

Most people, who have valuable work, basic education and resources, and who feel fairly treated, generally do not battle, threaten, or hurt others, and are therefore healthier and more productive than those who are not or do not. The Paris Accord of the United Nations (generally called Paris Agreement or Agenda 2030) recognizes this and sets out goals for addressing areas of risk, want, and struggle. They call these Sustainable Development Goals or SDGs. There are seventeen of them. They have 164 implementation strategies spelled out quite specifically. History museums and historic sites, through programming and action, can raise awareness about, or directly address, at least sixty-five. Many institutions already do this work because it is a natural extension of their mission. Each of us can find ways to align our work with the Sustainable Development Goals. They are so much more than the poster child of climatereducing carbon in our atmosphere.

The SDGs seek to reduce poverty domestically and internationally; improve health and access to food; and support education, gender quality, and justice.

They care for the land, oceans, and the atmosphere. They provide affordable clean energy to everyone, and they support decent work and reasonable economic growth. They reduce inequality, build communities, and encourage col-

laboration to solve the big and the small problems.

Who better than history organizations to lend a hand in this global crisis? As charitable and educational institutions, as places and as people that take from and give to our communities, and as humanities professionals who care about peoples’ stories and who know how to learn from the past to benefit the present and the future, we can do this.

Our exhibits and programs explore the human experience: personal choice, poverty and wealth, or economics; water use, industry, and industrialization; and cultural heritage. At our sites we manage landscapes and structures, protect open space and waterways, and foster biodiversity in plant and domestic animal life. We can use less energy and generate more of it sustainably. We can be thoughtful when building exhibits and maintaining structures so that we use and dispose of resources more thoughtfully. #museums forparis acknowledges the opportunity and responsibility of museum and historic sites to contribute to the fulfillment of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Here are a few examples. Can you see your institution here, with those who are or could be #museumsforparis?

SDG #1-

No Poverty

Settlement houses such as Jane Addams’s Hull-House or the House of the Seven Gables provide programming exploring homelessness, poverty, and the need for social networks to support community members.

SDG#2-

Improve Nutrition and Promote Sustainable Agriculture

Open-air history museums already practice heirloom breed protection and cultivation for animals and plants. Their contribution to partnerships providing sustainably produced food choices for people who need it most can save lives now and in a future that requires widespread sustainability enhancements in food production.

SDGs #6 and SDG #11-

Clean Water and Sanitation and Sustainable Cities and Communities

The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (already a #museumsforparis endorser) is partnering with the Michigan Science Center on a stormwater infrastructure project to physically benefit the city’s water systems while engaging the public in a critical local discussion over fees and access.

SDG #8-

Decent Work and Economic Growth Consider the movement in our field against unpaid internships, and the efforts to diversify the museum workforce and address the imbalance of too many qualified applicants per job. That matters domestically. We can continue to articulate our value as economic engines, and improve our ability to fuel our local economies.

SDG #9-

Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure

Goodness gracious, how many of you have reinvented your industrial history museum as “the history of innovation” museum? The Henry Ford in Dearborn, the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, and the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle can tell the story of the past and project it forward to encourage innovation in areas that support these SDGs. SDGs #10 and #16-

Reduced Inequalities or Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions

Old Salem Museums and Gardens is training staff to thoughtfully interpret race and slavery as part of its Hidden Towns initiative.

SDG #12-

Responsible Consumption and Production

The National Building Museum has been greening its exhibits since before there was a green museum movement.

We can use the greenexhibits.org checkHISTORY NEWS

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The Value of History > list and avoid items on the Living Future Institute’s Red List to reduce harmful impacts of our exhibits.

SDG #13-

Climate Action

Each. Of. You. Can. Do. This. This and SDG #7: Affordable and Clean Energy are the carbon ones, what the media focuses on. First cut back your energy use, then eliminate fossil fuels by building and using renewable energy resources as appropri-

ate. Then quantify it using Energy Star Portfolio Manager as your free database.

Save money; save the planet.

SDGs #6, #11, and #15-

SDG #17-

Clean Water and Sanitation, Sustainable Cities and Communities, and Life on Land

If we counted up the acres of greenspace protected by museums and sites, we would have a significant resource to activate as a carbon sink, as species habitat, and for ecosystem services that benefit Earth. If we manage it well, and in con-

AASLH

COUNCIL Bill Adair, Class of 2018

Pew Center for Arts & Heritage

OFFICERS

Melanie Adams, Class of 2020 Minnesota Historical Society

2016–2018 Katherine Kane, Chair

Dina A. Bailey, Class of 2018 Mountain Top Vision, LLC

Harriet Beecher Stowe Center

Marian Carpenter, Class of 2019

John Fleming, Vice Chair National Museum of African American Music

Julie Rose, Immediate Past Chair Homewood Museum

John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

Lisa Eriksen, Class of 2021 Lisa Eriksen Consulting

Kim Fortney, Class of 2020

Norman Burns, II, Treasurer

National History Day

Conner Prairie

Leigh A. Grinstead, Class of 2018

Linnea Grim, Secretary

LYRASIS

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello

Erin Carlson Mast, Council’s Representative President Lincoln’s Cottage

Jennifer Kilmer, Class of 2019

Washington State Historical Society

Stacy Klingler, Class of 2021

Aja Bain, Program and Publications Coordinator Bob Beatty, History News and Publications Editor Cherie Cook, Senior Program Manager John R. Dichtl, President and CEO Natalie Flammia, Education and Services Coordinator Darah Fogarty, Marketing Coordinator Bethany L. Hawkins, Chief of Operations Terry Jackson, Membership and Database Coordinator John Garrison Marks, External Relations Coordinator Brandon Reid, Administrative Assistant

Partnerships for the Goals

Each. Of. You. Can. Do. This. Too. For the last fifteen years, collaboration has been a common term in our quest to do our jobs better. The bonus is the increased ease and impact of sustainability work when we do it collaboratively. This means neighbor organizations, corporations, higher education, and your local or state government. New partnerships can deepen engagement of the public and museums on behalf of those sixty-five targets within the UN SDGs. The Sustainable Development Goals describe what must be done to create a healthy, thriving planet for all. It’s not about what humans will do to undo misdeeds so significant and far-reaching that they have changed conditions for life on Earth. That is too small-minded. It’s about how humans can reframe our role on this planet so that many, many more of us are safe, healthy, and thriving.

Contact me to endorse #museumsforparis.

And remember to use the hashtag to announce your SDG work as you go. t

William Butterworth Foundation

STAFF

cert with cross-lot line partners, we can significantly increase the value and impact of the natural resources we steward.

Nicola Longford, Class of 2018

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

Kyle McKoy, Class of 2020

Mercer Museum and Fonthill Castle

Brent Ott, Class of 2021

Sarah Sutton is a sustainability consultant for museums, zoos, gardens, and historic sites. Her website is www. sustainablemuseums.net. She can be reached at sarah@sustainablemuseums.net and on Twitter: @greenmuseum.

The Henry Ford

Sarah Pharaon, Class of 2019

International Coalition of Sites of Conscience

Trina Nelson Thomas, Class of 2021 Stark Art & History Venues

Scott Wands, Class of 2020 Connecticut Humanties

T H E A M E R I C A N A S S O C I AT I O N f o r S TAT E a n d L O C A L H I S T O R Y acknowledges and appreciates these Endowment Donors for their extraordinary support:

Dr. William T. Alderson Society

AASLH President’s Society

Friends of the Endowment Society

Mr. Leslie H. Fishel*

$10,000 – $49,999

$5,000 – $9,999

Madison, WI

National Heritage Museum

$50,000+

Ms. Sylvia Alderson

Mr. Edward P. Alexander*

Atlanta History Center

Ms. Barbara Franco Harrisburg, PA

Nebraska State Historical Society

Atlanta, GA

Anonymous Mr. John Frisbee*

Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

Mr. Rick Beard

Mr. James B. Gardner

Harrisburg, PA

Washington, DC

Concord, NH

Williamsburg, VA

Mr. & Mrs. Salvatore Cilella

National Endowment for the Humanities

The J. Paul Getty Trust

Historic Annapolis Foundation

Ms. Laura Roberts & Mr. Edward Belove

Atlanta, GA

Annapolis, MD

Los Angeles, CA

Mr. & Mrs. Charles F. Bryan Jr.

Indiana Historical Society

Mr. Dennis & Ms. Trudy O’Toole

Richmond, VA

Mr. David Crosson & Ms. Natalie Hala

Ms. Sandra Sageser Clark

Ms. Terry L. Davis

Baltimore, MD

HISTORY

Mr. John & Ms. Anita Durel

Martha-Ellen Tye Foundation

Mr. Stephen Elliott

Winston–Salem, NC

Washington, DC Monticello, NM

Washington, DC

Holt, MI

New York, NY Marshalltown, IA

San Francisco, CA Nashville, TN

Baltimore, MD St. Paul, MN

Mr. Dennis Fiori Boston, MA

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Indianapolis, IN

Maryland Historical Society Missouri History Museum St. Louis, MO

Ms. Candace Tangorra Matelic Pawleys Island, SC

Ms. Kathleen S. & Mr. James L. Mullins Grosse Pointe Shores, MI

Lexington, MA Lincoln, NE

Cambridge, MA

Rowman & Littlefield Lanham, MD

Ms. Ruby Rogers Cincinnati, OH

Mr. Jim & Ms. Janet Vaughan Washington, DC

Mr. George L. Vogt Portland, OR

Ms. Jeanne & Mr. Bill Watson* Orinda, CA *Deceased

PUTTING HISTORY TO WORK:

S T R AT E G I E S

T O I N C R E A S E T H E V I S I B I L I T Y A N D I N F L U E N C E O F H I S T O RY

Tianyu M. Fang

By Bruce W. Dearstyne

T

his should be a time when people in the United States are looking intensely to history for enlightenment and guidance.

In the current political climate,

This demonstration in Boston illustrates one of the tenets of the History Relevance Campaign's Value of History Statement: "At the heart of democracy is the practice of individuals coming HISTORY NEWS together to express views and take action."

9

the country seems anxious, perplexed, and beset by “a stew of unease, fear, rage, grief, helplessness, and humiliation.” Some days, it is difficult to tell “where your anxiety disorder ends and where actual news begins.” The sense of drift, puzzlement, and anger has been growing for several years due to several factors, including the twenty-four-hour news cycle, spread of social media, erosion of the middle class, shifting values, and other factors and was intensified by the tumultuous, divisive 2016 presidential campaign. As an essay in Time magazine noted, “All of this anger and derision in which we’re marinating isn’t healthy…for the country.”1 Given the need for insight, objective analysis, and understanding, the history profession ought istory to be flourishing. The History Relevance Campaign affirms “the programs value of history in contemporary can help get life…. By bringing history into discussions about contemporary discussions going issues, we can better understand on neutral ground the origins and multiple perspectives on the challenges facing our by encouraging communities and nation, clarify misperceptions, reveal complexpeople to see the ities, temper volatile viewpoints, historical sources open people to new perspectives, and lead to more effective soluof the issues and tions for today’s challenges.” 2 how people have Renowned history filmmaker Ken Burns assures us that “the engaged with past often offers an illuminating them. and clear-headed perspective from which to observe and reconcile the passions of the present moment, just when they threaten to overwhelm us. The history we know, the stories we tell ourselves, relieve that existential anxiety, allow us to live beyond our fleeting lifespans, and permit us to value and love and distinguish what is important. And the practice of history, both personal and professional, becomes a kind of conscience for us.” 3 But as former New York State Historian Robert Weible explained recently, “History isn’t being kind to historians these days.” Shrinking university history departments are turning over teaching responsibilities to part-time adjuncts.

Underfunded history museums are turning to volunteers and interns to do work once handled by paid professional staff. The federal government is once again targeting humanities and education programs for downsizing, perhaps even elimination.4 We need to find ways to make history more popular and relevant. This article offers some suggestions.

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Provide Historical Perspectives on Public Policy Issues

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istorians need to offer more analysis and perspective on key public issues via traditional media (newspapers, television), social media, and in other ways.

Historians are particularly adept at explaining the process of social and political change over time. But our presentations need to be objective; fact-based; with sources cited; clearly written for a broad, popular audience; and connected in some discernible way to important issues under discussion and debate.

If you offer an opinion on a controversial issue, expect (in fact, hope) that it will engender discussion, even if some people take issue or offer different views. “Find a way to enter these conversations as historians,” says American Historical Association Executive Director James Grossman.

“Point out in local press and radio, social media and other online spaces, at the dinner table, in bookstores and bars, the PTA and public meetings, that history’s relevance need not be proven by imperfect analogies or mere precedent alone, but also by exploration of process and rhetoric, reading widely and weighing evidence with care.” 5 Historians are taking up this challenge. For example: • The mission of History News Network is to “help put current events into historical perspective.” HNN features op-eds and essays by prominent historians on current events. It aims “to put events in context. To remind us all of the complexity of history.” (historynewsnetwork.org) • The American Historical Association launched Everything Has a History: Bringing Historical Context to Current Events in 2016, a series of videos where historians “provide context for the pressing issues facing the country and the world” (www.historians. org/news-and-advocacy/ everything-has-a-history-bringing-historical-contextto-current-events).

• The Organization of American Historians initiated in July 2017 an online resource to connect media representatives with historians with expertise on historical precedents of current events. The OAH noted that “in these contentious times, understanding our nation’s history is of critical importance” (www.oah.org/programs/news/ oah-launches-new-media-resource).

• Each month, Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, an online initiative of Ohio State University and Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, produces an article by “an expert who analyzes a pressing issue—whether political, cultural, or social—in a broader, deeper context.

The main articles of Origins focus on the long-term trends and patterns, search for the foundations of today’s events, and explore the often complicated nature of a particular current event” (origins.osu.edu).

•T he Conversation is a forum where academic experts and others offer informed opinions on current issues, often including historical dimension. Its slogan—“Academic Rigor, Journalistic Flair”—captures its image of authenticity along with popular appeal (theconversation.com).

•B ack Story with the American History Guys is a public radio program and podcast that brings historical perspective to current events and news stories (backstoryradio.org).

•H istory and Policy, a British partnership of university history departments, publishes white papers and reports with historical perspectives on current events, sponsors lectures and seminars, and creates opportunities for historians, policy-makers, and journalists to connect and learn from each other (www.historyandpolicy.org).

Levine Museum of the New South

• Made by History, launched by the Washington Post in July 2017, is intended to provide “historical analyses to situate the events making headlines in their larger historical context” (www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history).

Participants in the Levine Museum's “Breaking Bread” series explore the historical roots of current events.

•B unk History links to “the most interesting articles, maps, videos, conversations, visualizations, and podcasts about history we can find” to illustrate that “history is not something that happened once and then is past, but rather asserts itself in the present and future in unpredictable ways” (www.bunkhistory.org).

• The author of this article regularly writes opinion columns on current issues for the Albany Times-Union (www. timesunion.com); an online New York City news site, Gotham Gazette (www.gothamgazette.com); as well as the History News Network. This suggests that even a single historian can make at least a small difference.

All of these examples are useful, but they mostly focus on an audience that is inquisitive and receptive. As historians, we need to build on that and go further, finding new ways of reaching a broader audience, including people who are not inclined to look to history for enlightenment and guidance.

Serve as a Forum for Discussion and Perspective on Sensitive Social Issues

S

ome issues, such as immigration, race relations, the government’s responsibility for the poor and disadvantaged, gun control, and environmental issues, seem so divisive and intractable that opposing views have hardened and real discussion is rare. History programs can help get discussions going on neutral ground by encouraging people to see the historical sources of the issues and how people have engaged with them in the past.

One particularly interesting model is the Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina. It presents exhibits, public programs, and activities that not only illuminate history but also draw people into discussions of what the history tells them about current affairs. Its exhibit Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers: Charlotte and the Carolina Piedmont in the New South offered hands-on experience to help people understand both the glories and the setbacks of the South during the past century.6 Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor included an exhibit, public programs, a public TV documentary, and an interactive website to explore the changing racial composition and diversity of the region and encourage people to reflect on its meaning and their reactions to it.

NUEVOlution: Latinos and the New South related the history

of Latinos in the South but also included provisions for visitor dialogue and reflection “to deepen understanding of Latinos’ histories, cultures, and experiences; foster connections across differences; and promote exploration of contentious issues in a safe environment.” 7 The museum’s History Matters public lecture and discussion series is designed to “provide historical context to contemporary issues” and its Breaking Bread dinner and dialogue series features conversations around challenging community issues, facilitated over a hearty dinner served family style.7

Use History as a Basis for Guiding Organizations

U

nderstanding an organization’s history can be critical to informed decision-making and planning. “As contradictory as it might seem, in aiming for the future, you first need to look back into your past,” notes the classic leadership book The Leadership Challenge. The authors advise leaders to read history to deepen their ability to understand the present and plan for the future. “The job of leaders, most would agree, is to inspire collective efforts and devise smart strategies. History can be profitably employed on both fronts,” wrote the authors of an article on the value of history in the Harvard Business Review. Decision-making improves when leaders consider why their predecessors made certain decisions and took certain actions in the past and how the organization’s strategies, values, and culture evolved over time. A shared history is central to group identity, and past experiences can be summoned up and studied

HISTORY NEWS

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in times of great challenge and change to inspire people’s commitment and energy. A well-developed, long-term perspective on the organization helps a leader make wise decisions in times of challenges and turmoil.8 History demonstrates that though current circumstances may be new, the organization has accommodated changing circumstances in the past. It may have experienced periods of crisis, challenge, and change, which provide insights into how it should cope with contemporary issues.

For instance, when Louis Gerstner became president of IBM in 1993, he studied IBM’s traditions and culture and particularly the values and principles of its founder, Thomas J. Watson Sr. The business had changed, and Gerstner knew he had to lead the company into new competitive areas. But in doing so, he revived and updated Watson’s values—dynamic research and development, excellence in everything the company does, superior company service, respect for the individual—to make IBM an innovative leader once again.9

Help Individuals Make Connections to History

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Some approaches to consider:11 • Draw on progressive enterprises beyond the public history arena for ideas we can adopt and use. For instance, modify and adapt useful good ideas about world-class customer experiences from companies such as Disney and Southwest Airlines; about customer responsiveness from companies such as Starbucks and P&G; and about design and progressive change amid rapidly changing circumstances from Apple, Amazon, IDEO, and others.

• Much of the new thinking is user- or customer-centric.

It focuses on connecting with users on a deep, even emotional, level, recognizing that for younger people in

Design Thinking: Strategies for Strengthening Levine Museum of the New South

O

ne of the symbols of people putting themselves at the center of things these days is the “selfie”—photos individuals take of themselves alone or at the center of a group, or with some interesting background behind them. People want experiences to involve them or at least connect directly with them, hopefully in ways both intellectual (they learn something) and emotional (they feel or experience something).

This leads to the need to carefully study visitors to history museums, historic sites, and similar programs. “How do we know what matters to our guests? We asked them.

We studied their interactions on our grounds, how they learn and what they enjoy,” notes the Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, one of the most successful outdoor history museums in the nation. “Conner Prairie is a fun place but it’s more

than that. It’s an invigorated path to the future that values curiosity, learning, and the pursuit of varied disciplines.”

People—including audiences we would like to reach but who are disinterested now—may be looking for convenience, novelty, or exploration of values. We can borrow concepts and insights from the business practice of Design Thinking, which emphasizes customer responsiveness (see below).10

D

esign thinking refers to creative strategies designers use to connect people with products and services.

It has been applied mostly in the business sector but is gaining influence in the museum arena. It has potential for new approaches to raise the visibility of history programs and strengthen their engagement with the public.

Some useful sources: Bridgespan, Design Thinking. www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/ nonprofit-management-tools-and-trends/design-thinking.

Tim Brown, Change by Design (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

Design Thinking for Museums, designthinkingformuseums.net.

Nathan Furr and Jeff Dyer, The Innovator’s Method (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2014).

IDEO, Experience Innovation, www.ideo.com/post/ experienceinnovation.

Tom Kelley and David Kelley, Creative Confidence (New York: Crown Business, 2013).

Jeanne Liedtka and Tim Ogilvie, Designing for Growth (New York: Columbia Business School, 2011).

Roger Martin, The Design of Business (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009).

Stanford University d[Design] School, Virtual Crash Course on Design Thinking, dschool.stanford.eduresources-collections/ a-virtual-crash-course-in-design-thinking.

particular, it is often about me: my experience, my interests. Museums in particular are recognized by the public as authentic, trustworthy places. But we need to provide vivid, engaging experiences for visitors.

• Make program information available “anytime, anywhere” on the web, and accessible by mobile phones and other mobile devices.

• Museums, historical societies, and other similar entities welcome all visitors. But resource constraints mean that they have to set priorities in deciding what groups they most want to attract. This may include getting more of their current visitors and/or users, or reaching out to new audiences.

• A helpful way of doing this is to analyze and profile audience groups—their interests, concerns, media usage, barriers to participation, what they want from your program, etc.

• Engage users and potential users, particularly the ones you most want to reach, in soliciting and developing ideas for new initiatives and programs.

Public Engagement with History

• Try small, controlled experiments to introduce innovative design instead of (or in addition to) our usual approach of coming up with major new program initiatives or exhibits.

Testing things on a small scale also means less investment of time and resources. Try them as experimental prototypes and if they work, scale them up.

• New initiatives—exhibits, public presentations, etc.—do not have to be absolutely perfect before they are launched.

Many times, insisting on perfection may mean the work takes too much time and costs too much. Instead, we should build a culture of continuous improvement and consider launching when we have something that is viable and good enough to launch. Let the public know it is something of a prototype and that you are inviting their reaction in improving it. Use that input to make it better.

• Taking risks, experimenting, and occasionally failing are not bad. We always want things to run smoothly but fear of failure can sometimes lead to being overly cautious, too risk-averse, and discouraging staff and others from advancing iconoclastic new ideas. 12 One interesting model is the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz, California. It has multiple initiatives for reaching out to and engaging current users and attracting new ones, particularly people who have not been interested in museums. Its director, Nina Simon, writes the very interesting Museum 2.0 blog and is the author of two books, The Participatory Museum and The Art of Relevance, about how to make museum programs relevant and popular.13

Ensure History Is Taught in Schools

T

he best strategy for moving history more into the arena of public life is to ensure it is adequately taught to young people in the public schools.

But history is part of social studies, a broad rubric that includes geography, economics, and other topics. In the national Common Core standard for social studies, history receives only a few pages in a very long document. The standard describes historical thinking and historical inquiry, explains that “history is interpretive,” discusses the nature of historical sources, and briefly covers “causation and augmentation.” But it provides little guidance on working solid historical content into state curricular guidelines and classrooms and does not mention state and local history.

The historical community in each state should monitor and advise state education authorities on how history should be included and covered.14 The coverage must be substantial. One thing that has to be refuted is the assertion that students studying individual documents to boost literacy skills is tantamount to their learning of history. The curriculum needs to be fresh and responsive to changes in research and scholarship, but not be tailored to superficial, politically correct interpretations.

This requires continual judgment calls. As the California History-Social Studies Social Science Framework notes: The framework and standards also emphasize the importance of history as a constructed narrative that is continually being reshaped and retold. The story of the

HISTORY NEWS

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W

e should expect to learn something from the past that helps us to face the ethical issues of today.

past should be lively and accurate as well as rich with controversies and dynamic personalities.... California’s students need to know the story of the founding and peopling of different parts of the North American continent. They study the diverse history of their own state and how California’s story relates to a national narrative. They learn about this nation’s founding principles of freedom and democracy, and of America’s ongoing struggles, setbacks, and achievements in realizing those principles. They consider the fight for political and social equality and efforts to achieve both economic growth and justice.15

Beyond learning the content of history, students need also be taught historical thinking concepts. This will help them as adults to weigh evidence, consider historical precedents, understand complex developments, and carry out civic responsibilities. This understanding of the value of history will help ensure it is put to work wherever appropriate.

These skills are particularly important:16 • Establish historical significance. “Significant events include those that resulted in great change over long periods of time for large numbers of people.”

•U se primary source evidence. Set documents and other primary sources in historical context and interpreting sources as evidence.

• I dentify continuity and change. Understand history as a complex mix of tradition, status quo, continuity, evolution, and disruption.

•A nalyze cause and consequence. This enables students to analyze “how and why” things happened.

• T ake historical perspectives. “Understanding the social, cultural, intellectual, and emotional settings that shaped people’s lives and actions in the past…illuminates the range of human behaviour, belief, and social organization.

It offers surprising alternatives for the taken-for-granted conventional wisdom and opens a wider perspective from which to evaluate our present preoccupations.”

•U nderstand the ethical dimensions of historical interpretations. “We should expect to learn something from the past that helps us to face the ethical issues of today.”

A Call to Action

T

his is an opportune time to push history into more public prominence. This article is, hopefully, a judicious call to action. Of course, every history program will take its own approach depending on its mission, resources, and other circumstances. It will require selecting opportunities; carrying out research; and customizing strategies, messages, and programs depending on opportunities, issues, and audiences. For some, that would be a new dimension, but for many others, it would be mostly an extension or expansion of their traditional mission to connect people with history.

Pushing into new areas may require innovation, improvisation, and maybe some trial and error.

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Putting history to work more regularly, particularly in the ways summarized in this article, is likely to be a good investment of time and resources. It would raise the visibility of history programs, help them engage with more people, and thereby provide added evidence of their value and relevance.

Society stands to benefit as well. More extensive reliance on historical perspectives and insights will help strengthen public policy on key social, economic, and political issues.

Discussion of sensitive issues will ultimately, one hopes, become more objective and insightful when historical roots are thoughtfully considered. Management of business and other organizations will be strengthened when leaders gain understanding of historical precedents and development of the enterprises over the course of years. More study of history in schools holds the promise of producing civic-minded adults who look to history for guidance and insights.

Strategies to increase the visibility and influence of history will have long-term, beneficial impacts. t Bruce W. Dearstyne holds a Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. He served on the staff of the New York State Office of State History and directed programs at the New York State Archives. He has taught history at SUNY Albany, SUNY Potsdam, and Russell Sage College and was a professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies. He is the author of many articles, three AASLH Technical Leaflets, and a number of books, including Leading the Historical Enterprise: Strategic Creativity, Planning, and Advocacy for the Digital Age (2015) and The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State’s History (2015), winner of a 2016 AASLH Award of Merit. He can be reached at dearstyne@verizon.net.

1 Nitsuh Abebe, “America’s New ‘Anxiety’ Disorder,” New York Times Magazine, April 18, 2017; Susanna Schrobsdorff, “Viral Anger Spreads like a Disease—And It’s Making the Country Sick,” Time, July 10-17, 2017.

2 History Relevance, The Value of History Statement. www.historyrelevance.com/ value-history-statement.

3 Stanford University commencement address, June 12, 2016, news.stanford. edu/2016/06/12/prepared-text-2016-stanford-commencement-address-ken-burns.

4 Robert Weible, “What’s Happened to Historians?”, History News Network May 28, 2017, historynewsnetwork.org/article/165805.

5 American Historical Association, “Again and Again: Historians, Politics, and Popular Culture,” Perspectives On History, May 2016.

6

Levine Museum of the New South, www.museumofthenewsouth.org.

7

Ibid.

James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner, The Leadership Challenge (New York: Wiley, 2017), 100; John T. Seaman Jr. and George David Smith, “Your Company’s History as a Leadership Tool,” Harvard Business Review 90 (December 2012): 45-52.

8

9 Stephen Chambers, “History Can Be a Recipe for Organizational Change,” Winthrop Group, April 2016; Louis V. Gerstner, Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance?

Leading a Great Enterprise Through Dramatic Change (New York: Harper Business, 2002), 182.

10 Conner Prairie Interactive History Park, Our Mission at Work, www. connerprairie.org; Max A. van Balgooy, “The Visitors’ Perspective on Visitor Engagement,” Museum July/August 2017.

11 Bruce W. Dearstyne, “New Approaches for Historical Societies and History Museums,” New York History Blog, March 21, 2017.

12 Elizabeth Merritt, “Failing toward Success: The Ascendance of Agile Design,” Museum, March/April 2017.

13

Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, santacruzmah.org.

National Council for the Social Studies, College, Career, and Civic Life: C3Framework for Social Studies State Standards, 2013, www.socialstudies.org/c3.

14

15 California Department of Education, History-Social Science Framework, 2016, www.cde.ca.gov.

16 Centre for the Study of Historical Consciousness, Historical Thinking Concepts, 2014, historicalthinking.ca/historical-thinking-concepts.

Into the K

BY STEVEN LUBAR

Storeroom L

This excerpt from Inside the Lost Museum opens with John Whipple Potter Jenks, curator of Brown University’s Museum of Natural History, preparing to collect in Florida, and builds on this example to consider the relationship between curators and their collections. The book takes a similar approach to all aspects of curatorial work, using history to understand current-day practices.

J

enks set off on his 1874 expedition to the “miasmatic swamps and everglades around Lake Okechobee in southern Florida,” prepared for the collections he would make. “For hunting-dress outfit,” he wrote,

“Images of Brown” Collection, courtesy of the Brown University Archives

I was provided with a suit of sail-cloth, colored yellowish-brown or butternut, to resemble dead leaves, the sack-coat prepared with ten pockets, besides one, full size of the skirt, for large specimens, the pants with six pockets…

For preserving and transporting specimens, I found a tin knapsack, constructed with various apartments for alcoholic vials, lunches, medicine-box, and eggs, very convenient.

At least ten gallons of alcohol and twenty pounds of arsenic were provided, besides some hundreds of muslin bags of different sizes, for keeping specimens distinct when thrown into one large jar.1

Jenks, with his pockets and boxes and bags for storage and his alcohol and arsenic for preservation, was ready to turn his collecting into a collection.

Museums acquire things, and they need to take care of them. Museum collections need to be preserved, cataloged, and made accessible, available for use in the museum, by other curators and scholars, and by the public. They need to be honored for the nature and history and cultures they represent.

Extracted from Inside the Lost Museum, by Steven Lubar, published by Harvard University Press, $35.00.

Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

J.W.P. Jenks dressed for his Florida collecting, 1874.

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standard storage conditions. Thirty percent of museums, according to the report, had not cataloged any of their artifacts and fewer than 10 percent of museums had cataloged all of them. Many didn’t have plans in place for keeping track of what came in or clear guidelines for who’s responsible for taking care of it.3 Many museums have not come to terms with the legal and ethical issues that their collections raise, still working through the legal arrangements for dealing with collections from native peoples, or which might have been seized by Nazi authorities during World War II, or which might have been looted or excavated without proper authority. But even artifacts without legal issues raise ethical concerns. Museums need to think about the ethics of holding artifacts: Who they are available to? What community can claim them or the stories told about them? Does owning artifacts demand a certain standard of care and accessibility? Organizational consultant Peter Walsh gives this advice to individuals who want to declutter their lives. “It’s only a collection,” he writes, “if it’s displayed in a way that makes you proud, if it brings you pleasure, if you enjoy showing it to others, and if it’s not an obsession that is damaging your relationships or getting in the way of living the life you wish you had.” His advice is not perfectly transferable to museums, but the spirit is.4 Museums need to bring their collections under control in four ways: physical, intellectual, ethical, and administrative.

That is, museums need to take care of what they have; they need to know where it is, what it is, and make it accessible to those who want to use it; they need to do so in a way that honors the objects and the communities they represent; and they need processes in place to make sure they do these things consistently, lawfully, and efficiently. This article considers how museums think about the objects they store.

Before objects can be used, they must be

stored, described, and organized

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so that they can be discovered when needed, and put to use.

Storage at the Jenks Museum of Natural History.

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“Images of Brown” Collection, courtesy of the Brown University Archives

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t the Jenks Museum, objects were transformed into a collection and the collection into an exhibition. We can sort out his processes of cataloging, storing, and displaying from what survives: a few hundred artifacts from the museum, tags attached; a few dozen more of the tags that have lost their artifacts; a few photographs; and two decades of annual reports.

Jenks, like many museum directors of his day, believed that visitors should be able to see the entire collection. He complained about having unopened crates in the basement.

He worried about protecting the collections and must have been troubled by the large objects that he couldn’t fit into cases. His museum was packed with display cases, and yet a constant in his annual reports is the need to acquire still more. Jenks’s son Elisha must have inherited the concern: he became a museum case builder, selling exhibit cases with his patented locks to the Smithsonian and other museums.

The Jenks Museum had about 50,000 objects. American museums today contain more than one billion objects— some 820 million natural science specimens, 200 million archeological specimens, 48 million historic and ethnographic objects, and 21 million pieces of art. Not included in these numbers are libraries’ 1.7 billion books, 1 billion microfilms, more than 700 million photographs, and an untold number of digital files. All in all, according to a 2004 report, American cultural heritage institutions have responsibility for almost 5 billion collection items.2 Collecting is only the first step toward turning art, artifact, and specimen into museum objects. Before objects can be used, they must be stored, described, and organized so that they can be discovered when needed and put to use.

That’s a big job and much of it remains undone. The 2004 report found that two-thirds of museums admitted to sub-

The Jenks Museum of Natural History at Brown University.

The Jenks Museum had

about

50,000 objects.

American museums today contain more than one billion objects—some 820 million natural science specimens, 200 million archeological specimens, 48 million historic and ethnographic objects, and 21 million pieces of art.

“Images of Brown” Collection, courtesy of the Brown University Archives

Museum Sense and Object-Love

The place to start thinking about museum collections is in a collections storeroom. These are the backrooms of museums, mostly closed to the public, where artifacts sit on shelves, waiting patiently to be put to use. In large museums more than 95 percent of the collections are in storerooms, not on display. Some museum experts suggest that museums should devote at least as much space to storerooms as to exhibition. Storage defines the modern museum.5 Mention museum storerooms and scenes from Hollywood movies come to mind. There’s mystery there: the Ark of the Covenant, locked away forever in a government warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Museum artifacts coming to life in Night at the Museum. Gore Vidal gave us science, seduction, and monsters in the basement storerooms in his novel The Smithsonian Institution. Linda Fairstein used the storage areas of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History as settings for murder and mayhem in The Bone Vault. She offers foul smells and pickled creatures, “prehistoric crawlers...unidentifiable wet specimens that glowed against the darkness of the room,” and “stacks and stacks of bones.”6 Look online for stories of museum storerooms, and the words one finds are “secret” and “hidden.” It’s a visit “behind the scenes,” with an implication: They don’t want you to know about this. This is where the special things are, viewable by invitation only. Museums occasionally play up

this aspect. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) organized an exhibit in 1990 with a name that suggests mystery: Unlocking the Hidden Museum: Riches from the Storerooms. The show didn’t quite live up to its name, but it explained why some things don’t make it out of the storeroom: too many of one kind of thing, poor quality, dirty or damaged, delicate or difficult to display, or just plain out of fashion.7 As the MFA exhibition’s categories suggest, storerooms tend not to be that exciting—or rather, not exciting in the way that writers of museum fiction imagine. A modern storeroom might be rows of shiny white cabinets, sealed against light and insects. At a history museum, there might be a vista of open industrial shelving, stretching to the ceiling and into the distance, piled high with objects arranged roughly by size, or material, or type: furniture, machines, sealed crates.

Textile collections look like closets; open the doors, and they look like extremely neat, well-organized closets. Technology collections resemble old factories, but with machines more tightly packed. Gun collections appear to be armories.

Natural history museums have shelves lined with jars of animals swimming in alcohol, closed drawers containing skeletons and skins and dried plants, and freezers full of tissues gathered for DNA analysis. Art museums keep prints and drawings in metal cabinets with many drawers, and paintings packed tight on metal-mesh panels that can be pulled out on tracks. Anthropology collections present the diversity of the world’s creativity at a glance, sometimes arranged by source HISTORY NEWS

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Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, Brown University

location; you can vicariously visit the Amazon, or New Guinea. Herbaria and natural history museums often shelve by relationship in family-genus-species taxonomic order; you can vicariously recapitulate phylogeny. Many museums arrange collections more practically, by material, or size.

Storerooms are full of treasures, but they are backup treasures, treasures in waiting. Not secrets, as the movies and novels suggest, but rather the raw material for teaching and research, ready for use. More like the stacks of a library or the stockroom of a factory than Fort Knox or (that dreaded comparison) an attic.

Smithsonian photographer Chip Clark reveals the essence of these spaces in his photographs of the National Museum of Natural History’s storerooms. A fisheye lens captures an enormous warehouse holding some of the anthropology collections. In the foreground are crates, pallets, an Easter Island stone figure, a totem pole, and dozens of smaller objects on tables. Behind them shelves reach at least thirty feet high, filled with pallets holding large artifacts. His view of the bird storeroom is even more dramatic: a long, long aisle lined on either side with cabinets, drawers pulled open to show a few hundred of the institution’s 640,000 bird specimens. Other photographs show similar views: open drawers of butterflies, shells, fossils, fishes. In the spaces shown in these pictures, the museum superimposes a structure—an organizational scheme, a way of making sense—on the organic, disorganized, real world.

Or, more precisely, a way for the museum staff to make sense of it. Clark is careful to show museum staff in these rooms: curators and collections managers overwhelmed by the scale and scope of their collections, perhaps, but doing the essential work of knowing them, cataloging them, and caring for them.

Clark’s photographs hint at the emotional connections between curators and collections staff and “their” objects.

Curators like to visit their storerooms to show them off.

One of the pleasures of curating a collection is taking a visitor behind the scenes to see an object not on public display.

When I worked at the Smithsonian, I had the opportunity to show George Armstrong Custer’s buckskin jacket to a military history buff and R2-D2 to a Star Wars fan. The combination of behind-the-scenes access to an object unmediated by cases or labels allows a powerful emotional connection. Storerooms are where curators, conservators, and researchers come to know their objects, to bond with them.

The curator of fishes at the Field Museum in Chicago told a reporter that he didn’t want to use the word “storage”—it sent the wrong signal. “We don’t call it storage because we don’t collect these things and just store them away. We think of it as ‘collections facilities’ because we and visiting scholars go into these jars constantly to study the specimens.”

I changed the name of Brown University’s Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology’s offsite storage from “Storage Facility” to “Collections Research Center.” It not only sounds better; it’s more accurate.8 Museum staff connect with their objects in many ways, but in the storage room they connect with their physicality: what they look like, what they weigh, how they’re constructed, how to move them, where they’ll fit, what conditions will

K

Some surviving labels from the Jenks Museum.

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keep them happy. Storerooms highlight the materiality of objects, their heft and presence, a perfect counterbalance to the way that the registrar’s files capture their history and exhibitions their meanings.

In the storeroom curators also connect with, and make sense of, their objects as groupings of things. A museum storeroom might be thought of as a kind of memory palace, an extension of the curator’s brain. Things are organized, available, visible on shelves or ready to be discovered behind neatly labeled cabinet doors. Knowing the collection often means having a physical sense of the layout of the storeroom—and vice versa. I still remember the locations of many of the things in a storage room I oversaw more than a decade ago, and can remember the collections by walking through that room in my mind’s eye.

For natural history museum curators, that physical layout can also be a guide to taxonomy. Louis Agassiz, founder of the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ), trained his students by assigning them a section of a collections storeroom to study, memorize, make sense of, and, eventually, reorganize. At the MCZ, the storerooms were designed to reflect the order of the natural world. Historian Lukas Rieppel writes, “These cases, as well as the drawers within them, were arranged taxonomically, subdividing the natural world into a nested series of kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species. Thus, a naturalist could literally trace the history of life on earth by moving from drawer to drawer and case to case, watching the wisdom of God’s divine plan unfold in the material objects before his very eyes.” 9

Curators pondering exhibitions wander their storerooms, absorbing information about the ways the collections look and feel that’s impossible to get from a written description or a photograph. Artifacts are more complex, more interesting, than any description or image. Or perhaps more accurately, descriptions never quite capture what you really need to know. Curators need to browse.

I remember touring storerooms at the National Museum of American History as a young curator working on an exhibition called A Material World. The exhibit was intended to show something about changing materials in American history, and we were looking for objects that were particularly expressive of their materials. What chair might best show the peculiarities of woodness? What trinket might capture the essence of plastic? What teapot would reveal the purity of porcelainity? No one would ever catalog an object in this way, and it was only by looking at hundreds of artifacts in their storage areas that we could even begin to answer the question.

Artist Mark Dion captured the inevitable failings of catalog description and the power of curators’ knowledge in his 2005 Center for the Study of Surrealism project at the Manchester Museum when he asked curators for objects in their collections that “make you smile, laugh, shake your head in shock and condemnation, or gasp.” Search for that in the database!10 Otherwise staid and practical curators slip into poetry when they describe what George Brown Goode, nineteenth-century director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum, called “that special endowment...‘the museum sense.’” Philip S. Doughty, keeper of geology at the Ulster Museum, defined this further: “Hunches, intuition…the apparent mystique is in reality a

synthesis of a large mass of detail, the product of generations of talented geological curators who have developed, tested, and refined skills and practices.” Curators speak of “objectfeel,” or “a good eye.” Nowhere does this better express itself than in the storeroom. There, curators engage with artifacts directly, thinking through the problems of exhibitions or research in a material way. The Material World exhibition required “the museum sense.”11 Storerooms are places where curatorship, the “museum sense,” exists in its purest form. They are places for what anthropologist Sharon Macdonald calls “object-love”: a curator’s passion for his or her collection, and for every object in it. Curators love their collections, and storerooms, note museum geographers Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess, are “shaped by the emotion attached to the objects they house.”

They allow for the affective, emotional, and sensory relationship between things and the people responsible for them.12 Professor Jenks, on that Florida expedition, remembered shooting a roseate spoonbill, only to have it fall into a lake: “I could plainly see about six feet deep the pink hues of the spoonbill as it was held down by the alligator. Two or three thrusts of my pole so astonished the brute that he let go the bird, and it now graces the Museum of Brown University.”13 Curators don’t need to wrestle alligators for all their objects, but museum collections are hard-won, expensive to acquire and maintain. Developing that “museum sense” is a step toward making collections useful. There are many more steps: caring for them, cataloging them, sharing knowledge about them, making them available for the museum and community purposes. The rest of the book describes that work. t Steven Lubar is professor of American Studies at Brown University. He was a curator at the National Museum of American History for many years, and was director of Brown’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage and its Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Email: lubar@brown.edu.

1

J. W. P. Jenks, Hunting in Florida in 1874 (Providence, RI: n.p., 1884), 2–3.

Heritage Preservation, A Public Trust at Risk: The Heritage Health Index Report on the State of America’s Collections (Washington, DC: Heritage Preservation, 2004), 28.

2

3

Ibid., 2, 79.

Peter Walsh, It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff (New York: Free Press, 2007), 134.

4

5 George Ellis Burcaw, Introduction to Museum Work, 3rd ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 1997), 102.

6

Linda A. Fairstein, The Bone Vault (New York: Scribner, 2003), 334, 355.

7

Mark Starr, “Secrets from the Storeroom,” Newsweek, July 22, 1990.

William Mullen, “Space to Grow Becoming Thing of the Past at Field,” Chicago Tribune, January 14, 2001.

8

9 Mary P. Winsor, Reading the Shape of Nature: Comparative Zoology at the Agassiz Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 37; Lukas Benjamin Rieppel, “Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2012), 237.

10 “Surrealist Cabinet of Curiosities Bought for Manchester,” Art Fund, December 2, 2014.

11 G. Brown Goode, “The Relationships and Responsibilities of Museums,” Science 2, no. 34 (August 1895): 205; Philip S. Doughty, “Research: Geology Collections,” in The Manual of Curatorship: A Guide to Museum Practice, ed. John M. A. Thompson (London: Butterworths, 1984), 156.

12 Sharon Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 65; Hilary Geoghegan and Alison Hess, “Object-Love at the Science Museum: Cultural Geographies of Museum Storerooms,” Cultural Geographies 22, no. 3 (July 2015): 445–65.

13

Jenks, 43.

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AASLH acknowledges and appreciates these Institutional Partners and Patrons for their extraordinary support!

Institutional Partners

Alabama Department of Archives and History

Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture

Belle Meade Plantation

Billings Farm & Museum

Nashville, TN

Montgomery, AL

Charleston, SC

Woodstock, VT

Bullock Texas State History Museum Austin, TX

Butterworth Center & Deere-Wiman House

California Historical Society

Cincinnati Museum Center

Moline, IL

San Francisco, CA

Cincinnati, OH

Conner Prairie

First Division Museum at Cantigny

Florida Division of Historical Resources

Hagley Museum & Library

Fishers, IN

Wheaton, IL

Tallahassee, FL

Wilmington, DE

Historic Ford Estates

Historic House Trust of New York City

Historic New England

HISTORY

Grosse Pointe Shores, MI

New York, NY

Boston, MA

New York, NY

History Colorado

Idaho State Historical Society

Indiana Historical Society

Denver, CO

Boise, ID

Indianapolis, IN

Indiana State Museum & Historic Sites Corporation Indianapolis, IN

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Kentucky Historical Society

Massachusetts Historical Society

Michigan Historical Center

Minnesota Historical Society

Frankfort, KY

Boston, MA

Lansing, MI

St. Paul, MN

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Institutional Partners cont’d

Missouri History Museum

Museum of History and Industry

Nantucket Historical Association

National Trust for Historic Preservation

St. Louis, MO

Seattle, WA

Nantucket, MA

Washington, DC

Nebraska State Historical Society

North Carolina Office of Archives and History

Ohio History Connection

Old Sturbridge Village

Lincoln, NE

Raleigh, NC

Columbus, OH

Sturbridge, MA

Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission

Scottish Rite Masonic Museum & Library

Senator John Heinz History Center

The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

Lexington, MA

Pittsburgh, PA

Dallas, TX

Strawbery Banke Museum

The Strong

Tennessee State Museum

Virginia Historical Society

Portsmouth, NH

Rochester, NY

Nashville, TN

Richmond, VA

Harrisburg, PA

Wisconsin Historical Society Madison, WI

Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources

Thank you for your contributions as we continue to grow!

Cheyenne, WY

Patron Members Ellsworth Brown

Leigh A. Grinstead

Katherine Kane

Jean Svandlenak

Georgianna Contiguglia

John Herbst

Thomas A. Mason

Richard E. Turley

John R. Dichtl

Lynne Ireland

Thomas McGowan

Bev Tyler

Stephen Elliott

David Janssen

Kyle L. McKoy

Tobi Voigt

Karen Goering

Trevor Jones

Rebecca Merwin

Robert Wolz

Madison, WI Denver, CO

Nashville, TN St. Paul, MN

St. Louis, MO

Denver, CO

Indianapolis, IN Lincoln, NE

Cedar Rapids, IA Lincoln, NE

West Hartford, CT Indianapolis, IN Fairview, OH

Doylestown, PA St. Croix, VI

Kansas City, MO

Salt Lake City, UT Setauket, NY Detroit, MI

Key West, FL

Linnea Marie Grim Charlottesville, VA

HISTORY NEWS

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HI

O T S

N O I T A V R RESE rla Miller

P C I R

By Max Pa

ge and Ma

Max Page and Marla Miller outside the Campus Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

John Solem, University of Massachusetts Amherst

B

g n i d n e

f o e r u t u F e th

Adapted from the introduction to Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation in the United States, edited by Max Page and Marla R. Miller. Copyright © 2016 by University of Massachusetts Press.

I

f you have ever waited for a train at Pennsylvania Station in New York City— by far the busiest station in the nation— you may have been struck by photographs on the walls around the main timetable board, images of a massive classical building that seems to take up an entire Manhattan block. Photographs capture a grand hall, with soaring columns and Roman arches. Carved iron railings lead down to railroad tracks. As you struggle to find a square foot to call your own in this windowless space, you may start to resent that someone thought it a good idea to taunt riders with images of what was once one of the greatest railroad stations in the world. The architectural historian Vincent Scully memorably said about the loss of the 1910 Pennsylvania Station that one once “entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” 1 The 1963 demolition of Pennsylvania Station, designed by the celebrated firm McKim, Mead, and White, was part of what sparked the creation of both the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966.

Although birth is not destiny, there is no doubt that the image of that building succumbing to the wrecking ball, its pieces being dispersed around the country, reinforced the

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culture of the modern preservation movement. But you didn’t have to have mourned Penn Station to embrace this emerging ethic: as urban renewal efforts reshaped communities everywhere, cities and towns across the country witnessed their own tragedies, from the loss of India Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts, to the razing of much of San Francisco’s Fillmore District. By the time of the publication of the growing preservation movement’s manifesto, With Heritage So Rich, in January 1966, “Almost half of the twelve thousand structures listed in the Historic American Buildings Survey of the National Park Service had been destroyed.” As the New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote at the time, the National Historic Preservation Act marked “the culmination of a growing national concern with architectural and natural beauty and the physical environment.”2 As national law signed by Lyndon Baines Johnson on October 15, 1966, the National Historic Preservation Act established the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, created a network of State Historic Preservation Offices, formalized the National Register of Historic Places (managed by the National Park Service), and established the Section 106 review process, which required the evaluation of federally funded projects for their impact on cultural resources. Within a year of the act’s passage, all fifty states had appointed state preservation officers (or “liaisons,” as they were called at that time). A new era in preservation had begun.3 But if the NHPA seemed revolutionary at the time, as historian John H. Sprinkle Jr. has shown, many of its intellectual underpinnings had been articulated over the full course of

Max Page

Photos of the historic Penn Station, demolished in the early 1960s, adorn the walls of the current rail station in New York City.

the twentieth century, beginning with the federal Antiquities Act of 1906. In late 1933, the federal effort to put people back to work resulted in the Historic American Buildings Survey. These efforts were later expanded by the Historic Sites Act, which led to the creation of the National Historic Landmarks program. As Sprinkle contends, that initial implementation was not as narrow as often believed, and looked well beyond “the houses of great white men and their battlefields.” Nevertheless, as Diane Lea notes, the shift in priorities and practices was palpable; With Heritage So Rich called for a preservation practice that would provide a “sense of orientation to our society, using structures and objects of the past to establish values of time and place.”4 We were both born in 1966, the year the modern historic preservation movement was created with the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act. We grew up, and became scholars and practitioners of preservation and public history, in the shadow of the preservation act, which fundamentally changed how American cities and towns, and state and national government, shaped their environment. We have both served on local historical commissions, the heart of the U.S. system of preservation, where most discussions about what is important to save begin. And we both teach at a university—on a campus just a short drive from Deerfield, Massachusetts, scene of the first (though failed) U.S. attempt to preserve a historic house—introducing students to the history, present, and possible futures of preservation.5 And so, as the anniversary of the NHPA began to approach, we wanted to contribute to national conversations about preservation’s future by bringing together a collection of

powerful voices, both from within and beyond traditional preservation communities, to help suggest where the next half century of practice might, and even should, lead. About a third of the essays contributed to the volume that eventually appeared from University of Massachusetts Press were the product of conversations in the spring and summer of 2015 at Kykuit (the Rockefeller family estate, a historic site in the Historic Hudson Valley owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation) and at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, both sponsored by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and by the historic preservation programs at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Pennsylvania. Other essays were solicited from colleagues whose work we knew and admired, as well as from practitioners recommended by both colleagues and contributors.

The resulting collection includes preservation practitioners like landscape architect and consultant Everett Fly, California State Historic Preservation Officer Julianne Polanco, National Park Service historian John Sprinkle, and archaeologists Kurt Dongoske and Theresa Pasqual; historians and educators like Daniel Bluestone and Gail DuBrow; community activists like Ana Edwards and Graciela Sanchez; and preservation advocates like Tom Mayes (Deputy General Counsel at the National Trust for Historic Preservation) and Susan West Montgomery (Vice President, NTHP). We recognize that the collective shape of the contributions reflects the voices given space there; we could easily name another fifty colleagues whose perspectives would be equally provocative and valuable, and we hope the collection will prompt conversations in a wide range of venues.

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I

s t a h W

w o h , g n i l l e t e w e tories ar

n his 2014 account of the evolution of preservation criteria, John Sprinkle posits that “from time to time—say every fifty years or so—it is prudent and reasonable to take a look backward; to try to understand ‘why we do what we do’ in historic preservation.” We agreed, and the book’s introduction, as well as many of the essays contained there, draws quite consciously on the past to understand how we got to this present and to envision possible futures. But we also wanted to “think forward,” with a desire to shape the future of preservation in some small way. We asked our contributors to think “prudently and reasonably”—but also argumentatively and radically—about the history of preservation in the fifty years since the 1966 act, and to offer significant proposals for the next fifty years.6 With humility, we took our title from a phrase first invoked by the Massachusetts abolitionist Theodore Parker in the 1850s and made famous by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a century later. “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” said Parker. “The arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience.

And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” 7 Social justice was not an overt aim of the preservation community in 1966. But today, is a priority for many practitioners, who desperately hope to connect preservation practice with the broader work of building a more just society.

This volume was conceived at a time when citizen outrage at class inequality was erupting across the country in the form of minimum wage struggles and progressive tax campaigns, and took shape in the wake of racial unrest and uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland; the first draft was finished in the weeks following the shooting of nine churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015.

Our contributors also watched those events unfold, and urged us to see preservation’s role both in creating social conditions and as a means to address them. Ana Edwards, a founding member of the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project, a Richmond, Virginia-based activist organization working to preserve and interpret the hidden former slave market in Shockoe Bottom (in size second only to that of New Orleans), writes in her essay that her organization has “insisted that Richmond’s invisible and devalued black history must now be made public, understood, and honored.” How can we understand our present-day society, these essayists ask, if we don’t know all that it took to create it? How can we know what not to repeat? And remember that which had to be overcome?8

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We gathered a diverse group of some of the most compelling voices in preservation today. It is our hope that readers will find their views as inspiring and provocative as we do, and that audiences find in them specific ideas that they can use to advance their work, as well as new ways of looking at preservation’s goals and methods. The essays show how, in the five decades since its passage, the National Historic Preservation Act has evolved, matured, and expanded, and how the effects of that tremendous growth can sometimes be surprising. As contributor Erica Avrami writes, “Through legislation at the national, state, and local levels, tax incentives, zoning overlays, listing mechanisms, and other tools, preservation has matured from a grassroots movement [or, as the National Trust’s David Brown likewise observes, an ‘outsider movement’] to an integral part of governance structures for the built environment.” Today, the preservation field shaped by the NHPA encompasses a massive infrastructure of local, state, and federal offices employing thousands of historians, preservation professionals, landscape architects, archaeologists, attorneys, and administrators— not to mention developers and investors who have found ways to profit from the uniquely American system whereby most preservation is undertaken by property owners. But how well has that past, robust as it certainly is, equipped us for preservation’s future? Along with Brown, our authors wonder, “Could preservationists be too attached to tools designed to fight the last war? Have we ‘won’ and yet do not know how to build on our success?” With Max van Balgooy they consider whether “we’ve confused the ends with the means and are chasing the wrong goals.” 9 In the book’s pages, some of the nation’s leading preservation professionals, historians, scholars, activists, and journalists offer fifty distinct visions for the future. We urged them to avoid essays that were overly theoretical or technical. Instead, we invited provocations, editorial-like essays that would prompt readers to reconsider received wisdom about historic preservation. The contributions coalesced around a series of core questions facing the movement: How can the preservation establishment become more diverse and the preservation community more inclusive? Now that preservation has been so soundly established as a profession and an academic discipline, do we need to nourish once more preservation as a grassroots movement?

What is the fundamental purpose of preservation: is it an essentially archival effort to document the history of the built environment, or must we hold social history in as high regard as architecture? Should preservationists be more focused on the social impact of our work than we have been? What stories are we telling, how are we telling them,

, and to

whom

?

Max Page

are we telling them

The essays show how, in the five decades since its passage, the National Historic Preservation Act has evolved, matured, and expanded, and how the effects of that tremendous growth can sometimes be surprising.

Landscape at Kykuit, the Rockefeller family estate in the Hudson Valley owned by the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

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e w n a c w o H

society, y a d t n e s e r p r ou d n a t s r u n de and to whom? In the face of gentrification and rising inequality, one of the most confounding questions is: how can preservation help create more economically vibrant and just communities? And, finally, one of the most existentially important: can preservation play a role in stemming climate change and help us live more sustainably?

Some of the essays overlap in agreement on a particular issue; at other times readers will find the authors disagree dramatically.

We ourselves, as coeditors and as individuals, don’t always agree with the proposals our contributors submitted, but will consider our job done if some sparks fly off those pages.

THE FUTURE BEYOND THE BEND: TOWARD 2066

There are no simple solutions, no magic bullets, and no detailed blueprints in our volume’s pages. There are, instead, ideas that we hope will energize the next half century of preservation practice for those who call themselves preservationists as well as those who don’t but who in fact do the lion’s share of the work of saving and telling the stories of important places.

Our contributors offer provocations, not prescriptions. Nonetheless, we hope and expect to see evidence of the influence of our contributors’ ideas everywhere in the preservation world in the future: in preservation education, which will focus on a far broader range of preservation sites and practices, including oral history, storytelling, and digital history; in preservation practice, with “place” replacing “building” as the heart of our work and the term “paint police” no longer being applied; and in public life, where preservation will be not an afterthought but a starting point for discussions about spreading historical knowledge and cultural understanding, building equitable cities, and protecting a sustainable planet. t

The site of a prison for enslaved people, named Lumpkin's Jail or Devil's Half Acre, in what was once the slave-trading district in Richmond.

Max Page

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, if we don’t know all

that it to ok

Max Page is professor of Architecture and Director of Historic Preservation Initiatives at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He runs the master’s in historic preservation program and writes and teaches about the history and future of historic preservation. He can be reached at mpage@umass.edu.

Marla Miller directs the Public History Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches courses in material culture, museum and historic site interpretation, and history communication. She also edits the University of Massachusetts Press Series Public History in Historical Perspective. She can be reached at mmiller@history. umass.edu.

1 Quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “Restore a Gateway to Dignity,” New York Times, February 8, 2012, p. AR1.

2 United States Conference of Mayors, Special Committee on Historic Preservation, With Heritage So Rich (1966; repr., Washington, DC: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 1999), 17; Ada Louise Huxtable, “Program of Legislation and Financial Aid to Save Historic Sites is Urged in Report,” New York Times, January 30, 1966.

On the history of historic preservation in the United States and particularly the NHPA, good points of entry include Charles B. Hosmer, Presence of the Past: A History of the Preservation Movement in the United States before Williamsburg (New York: Putnam, 1965); William H. Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America (Pittstown, NJ: Main Street Press, 1908); Barry Mackintosh, The NHPA and the NPS: A History (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 1986); Michael A. Tomlan, ed., Preservation of What, for Whom? A Critical Look at Significance (Ithaca, NY: The National Council for Preservation Education, 1998); Norman Tyler, Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and 3

to crea t e it?

Practice (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Max Page and Randall Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004); Robert E. Stipe, ed., A Richer Heritage: Historic Preservation in the Twenty-First Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and John H. Sprinkle Jr., Crafting Preservation Criteria: The National Register of Historic Place and American Historic Preservation (New York: Routledge, 2014). The fifty-nine State Historic Preservation Offices include one for each state as well as offices representing the District of Columbia, American Samoa, Guam, the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Republic of Palau, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. By 1969, these preservationists were united in the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, which lobbied Congress for funds and discussed common concerns.

4 Sprinkle, Crafting Preservation Criteria, 27, passim. This language found its way into the act itself, in which Congress declares, “The historical and cultural foundations of the Nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the American people”; National Historic Preservation Act (Public Law 89-665; 16 U.S.C. 470 et seq.) discussed in Diane Lea, “America’s Preservation Ethos,” in Stipe, Richer Heritage, 11.

5 The story of the failed 1848 effort to preserve Deerfield’s “Old Indian House” is recounted in Michael C. Batinski, Pastkeepers in a Small Place: Five Centuries in Deerfield, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

6

Sprinkle, Crafting Preservation Criteria, 5.

Theodore Parker, Ten Sermons of Religion (Boston: Crosby, Nichols and Co., 1853), 84–85. King first invoked the phrase in the 1958 article “Out of the Long Night,” Gospel Messenger 107, no. 6 (February 8, 1958): 13. He went on to use it in several other sermons and speeches.

7

8 Max Page and Marla Miller, eds., Bending the Future: Fifty Ideas for the Next Fifty Years of Historic Preservation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), 79.

9

Ibid., 49, 246.

Historic Boston Inc.’s August 2014 ribbon-cutting celebration at the Alvah Kittredge House (1834) in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, with Mayor Martin J. Walsh. In the work of Historic Boston Inc., a nonproft developer of historic buildings, preservationists include architectural historians, contractors, small business owners, community members, nonproft partners, public offcials, and others.

Historic Boston Inc

HISTORY NEWS

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A

America:

HISTORY

OF

Philanthropy Although most Americans participate in giving in some way, the history of voluntary giving for the public good is not generally well known. Besides being a defining tradition in American life, philanthropy is also critical to the operation of museums, historic sites, historical societies, and other cultural institutions.

Why and how should curators and historians at these public institutions explore this topic with our visitors? And can understanding American philanthropy benefit those in the public history field today who work with fundraising and development?

The new Philanthropy Initiative of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History aims to expand public understanding of the history of giving and help visitors bring historical perspectives to contemporary issues in philanthropy. Launched in 2015, the initiative is a longterm project to collect, research, document, and display

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By Amanda B. Moniz

materials relating to the history and impact of American giving, broadly defined. A new exhibition, Giving in America, explores the collaborative power of giving in all forms and at all levels across a wide spectrum of issues and movements.

Through the exhibition and related programming, we encourage visitors to make connections between historic and contemporary giving.

By drawing connections between past and present, we ask visitors to think about their role in making history. The exhibit encourages visitors to appreciate that their time, talent, and financial support are all part of giving in America. It features objects ranging from a collection box from the early 1800s to a Habitat for Humanity toolbelt to a mop bucket used in the ALS Ice Bucket challenge. In addition to engaging visitors, exploring the history of giving also allows those of us who work in institutions supported by philanthropy to be reflective about the role of giving in our own institutions.

Here is a look at five periods in American giving organized by each era’s prevailing thrust, along with thoughts on how examining this history can inform thinking about giving and fundraising today.

National Museum of American History, Giving in America exhibition

GIVING IN

T

he oldest object in Giving in America belongs to the story of giving inspired by Americans’ growing wealth and refinement as trade in the late colonial era tightened imperial bonds. Thomas Hancock, who made a fortune during King George’s War (1739-48), gave a silver communion plate to his church around 1764. Gifts such as his helped establish donors as prominent members of the community.

The story of American philanthropy begins with the story of European empires. As the Spanish, French, and English (from 1707, British) empires expanded to North America in the 1500s, Europeans established missions to bring religious outsiders into their folds.

Catholics in the French and Spanish territories were the first to pursue missionary activity. Anxious about Catholic success, Protestants soon established missionary organizations (such as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts and the Bray Associates) in English colonies starting in the 1600s. The groups proselytized to native peoples, people of African descent, and Protestant colonists of different denominations in part due to a belief that religious disunity left colonies vulnerable to rival empires.1 Beyond missionary organizations, the expectation was that people helped their own when in need. English-speaking colonies, like the mother country, had tax-funded poor relief systems for legal residents. Aid was administered on the town level, with overseers of the poor providing eligible supplicants with money, medical care, fuel (such as wood), and more. (New research has examined Massachusetts’s public poor relief system for outsiders who met certain criteria.) Churches, ethnic groups, and occupational organizations also gave assistance to their members or compatriots, with Scottish immigrants in Boston establishing the Scot’s Charitable Society as early as 1657.2 In the mid-1700s, Americans and their British partners expanded the charitable landscape, and, as they did, they tightened the bonds between British America and Britain.

Trade and communication between the colonies and Britain grew markedly from the 1730s. With expanding trade and wartime economies came greater wealth for some and greater misery for others. Well-to-do men in the colonies followed their British counterparts in forming voluntary associations to pursue sociability and projects for the common good. The decades from 1730 to 1760 saw the founding of cultural and educational institutions, such as the Library Company of Philadelphia and new colleges. Moreover, Americans set up a range of new public and private welfare institutions including almshouses and hospitals. In Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin and associates created the Pennsylvania Hospital modeled closely on hospitals in England. Followers in one way, Franklin and his colleagues innovated in another. In an effort to secure both public and private support, Franklin suggested that the Pennsylvania government appropriate funds for the hospital if managers could raise voluntary donations. The gambit succeeded and helped establish the American tradition of public-private partnerships.3 Not only was the charitable infrastructure maturing with colonial society, but also Americans and Britons were drawing closer through benevolence. Increasingly from the 1740s, people in the British empire donated to aid each other when fires, hurricanes, and other disasters struck their communities. Similarly, clergyman George Whitefield, an Englishman who was one of the first transatlantic celebrities thanks to his emotional preaching style, raised money on both sides of the

National Museum of American History, Giving in America exhibition

IMPERIAL

People are often surprised to learn how savvy fundraising was in the 1700s.

Following the maxim of going where the money is, fundraisers for colleges and other institutions raised money in Britain. Like organizations in later generations, eighteenthcentury charities listed names of supporters in annual reports to recognize their donors—and to encourage others to follow suit. Recognizing that soliciting donations has long been sophisticated may not provide practical help for fundraisers today. It may, however, lessen the remoteness of the era and encourage people to ask how understanding the earlier era’s philanthropy can open up new ways of thinking about our own.

Atlantic to build an orphanage in the new colony of Georgia.

Other projects sought to assimilate cultural outsiders based on the belief that these efforts would strengthen the British empire. Not everyone believed members of the British empire ought to donate to distant sufferers. Throughout the eighteenth century, Americans and Britons wrestled with the nature of their moral responsibility to people outside their religious, ethnic, or local communites, with some criticizing those who gave for faraway people while local folks were in need. Nonetheless, by the 1760s, the American colonies had grown closer to Britain through philanthropy.4

UNIVERSAL The American Revolution changed the nature of charitable activity and led many Americans to embrace a universal approach. In the wake of the Revolution, citizens of the nascent republic established a range of charitable institutions. Historians have typically credited this burst of philanthropic activity to the patriotic energy and concern to define the new nation, and there is truth in that perspective. Yet Americans were also adapting to the ending of older philanthropic norms. The leading American and British philanthropists of the postwar era had been born a few decades before the American Revolution.

Growing up before the Revolutionary crisis, these men HISTORY NEWS

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The National Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

shared an imperial approach to charitable activity and belonged to a transatlantic community. American independence fractured this community.

After the Revolution, the former compatriots collaborated intensely on causes such as medical charity, antislavery efforts, prison reform, educational philanthropy, poor relief, among others. Medical men on both sides of the Atlantic were at the forefront of these developments. Because they had often met in medical school before the war, they had strong professional ties that helped them sustain relationships in spite of the Revolutionary rupture. In the decades after the Revolution, these philanthropic leaders remade relationships by taking a universal approach to philanthropy. Americans and Britons now cooperated with each other based on shared concern for the well-being of all people.

For Americans, the ideal of helping people regardless of background also mattered in another way. Charities had typically given relief based on religious, ethnic, or other personal bonds. Newcomers and other outsiders therefore lacked access to aid.

Charitable leaders, such as the managers of New York Hospital, grappled with the heterogeneity of their cities, and espoused a philosophy of “Charity for All.” By assisting people from all backgrounds, they helped white Americans forge bonds with one another as citizens of In the late 1700s the new country. At New York Hospital, and and early 1800s, Americans in other but not all, general charities, African various port Americans received care too, although they did cities established not necessarily receive equal treatment. New charities dedicated to the rescue and York Hospital’s doctors complained repeatedly resuscitation of that the institution’s “black wards” were inadedrowning victims, quately maintained.5 known as humane societies. These Other changes occurred in the early days groups embraced a of the republic. Protestant and Jewish women universal approach began to play roles in organized benevolence to philanthropy.

The Humane (as Catholic women in religious orders in Society of the Europe and in Catholic territories in America Commonwealth long had). In British American colonies, white of Massachusetts bestowed this women had donated money to support charimedal on a rescuer ties, but did not have a voice in running them. in the mid-1800s.

Now, women established and managed charities in their own right. Charities run by women typically focused on the needs of women and girls. Isabella Graham, her daughter Joanna Bethune, and friends founded the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children in New York City in 1797. As they learned more about the problems poor women and children

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faced, they created new institutions such as orphanages. Black men and women also created voluntary associations serving African Americans in the 1780s and 1790s. Yet Richard Allen, an African American minister, also donated on his church’s behalf to the Philadelphia Dispensary, a medical charity run by white men. The gift gave Allen’s church access for members to dispensary services. In a society where benevolence was a measure of civic fitness, Allen’s gift also proclaimed that African Americans merited full inclusion in American life.6

N AT I O N A L Americans embraced universal philanthropy as they adapted to their new identities as citizens of their new nation and an evolving relationship as foreigners to their former British compatriots. When the French and Haitian Revolutions again unsettled the world, many people lost faith in the expansive benevolence that had flourished after the American Revolution. After post-Revolutionary universalism waned, Americans turned to building national philanthropic institutions, a development that drew on and furthered the building of a national economy. One of the first of these organizations was the American Bible Society (ABS). The roots of the ABS lay in local Bible societies. Philadelphians had established a Bible society in 1808, and men and women in other northern and Upper South communities followed suit. In 1816, prominent men formed the ABS. With its national vision and reach, the American Bible Society coordinated the activities of the burgeoning number of auxiliaries, while the local groups raised money and distributed Bibles.

Tract, missionary, and other groups followed similar models. As religious feeling increased in the era often known as the Second Great Awakening, Americans created and joined a huge number of new charitable and reform groups. Slavery, poverty, health, family relationships, crime, children’s welfare, diet, drink, and more drew reformers’

U

sing material culture to explore the history of benevolence in the early republic offers ways to help the public think about the impact of philanthropy more fully. Objects help us get at charities’ clients’ perspectives, a problem the managers of the Philadelphia Dispensary faced.

The dispensary, established in 1786, provided free outpatient medical care to working people. Patients received medicine in custom-made glass vials that had the words “Philadelphia Dispensary” on them. After finishing the medicine, patients were supposed to return the vials.

Instead, the patients often sold the glass containers. The dispensary’s impact included providing health care and, unexpectedly, enabling working people to make money.

Exploring the history of philanthropy through objects helps us understand, among many other things, more about the give-and-take between philanthropists and their clients.

That perspective may encourage visitors to consider the interaction between museum goers—beneficiaries of giving—and donors, and, therefore, museum goers’ own role in shaping philanthropy.

M

useums and historic sites are wellpositioned to explore the local implications of a nationalizing economy and with it, national philanthropy. Giving in America features a bottle and a program from concerts performed by acclaimed singer Jenny Lind. Lind, a Swede, toured the United States in the early 1850s with P. T. Barnum as her promoter, and she often donated proceeds to local charities. A story of an international star and a national businessman, Lind’s concerts are also stories about how charitable funds flow through local communities.

National Museum of American History, Giving in America exhibition

attention. Not everyone, however, supported their compatriots’ energetic voluntarism. Many Republicans and Jacksonian Democrats charged that these groups asserted political power through undemocratic means, while Federalists and Whigs often supported them as a way to pursue their goals outside of government.7 Along with religious fervor and political jockeying, economic change drove these developments. In turn, philanthropy furthered the transition to a capitalist economy.

Voluntary organizations, such as bible, tract, and Sunday school societies, published masses of reports, books, periodicals, and other materials. In doing so, these organizations helped spur innovations in the publishing industry by featuring artwork in their publications. They also helped spur developments in marketing on a national scale. In addition, groups such as the ABS helped spread capitalist norms and practices by insisting on cash, rather than in-kind, donations, among their other contributions to the expanding market economy.8 The Civil War furthered the national, professionalizing trend in philanthropy. In 1861, the United States government set up the United States Sanitary Commission to collect money and supplies to aid Union troops. Across the North, women organized Sanitary Fairs where visitors could buy art, jewelry, books, and food to support the Sanitary Commission. Northerners also donated clothes, medical supplies, and more, with Sanitary Commission offices coordinating distribution of the material. In the North and South, African Americans, led by women such as Elizabeth Keckley—a former slave, dressmaker, and confidant to Mary Todd Lincoln—raised funds for black soldiers and for those fleeing enslavement. Southern whites likewise raised funds to aid soldiers, though the region’s weaker organizational infrastructure and the Confederacy’s poor economy hampered the groups’ effectiveness.9 In the years following the Civil War, American philanthropy reached new scales. Drawing on wartime expertise, Americans established new institutions and embraced science, expertise, and professionalism in the provision of welfare. Women continued shaping and reshaping the country by giving time to causes from missionary societies, children’s welfare, music education, and more. They also greatly expanded the number of women’s organizations, such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, with national reaches.

While women built on earlier practices, elite male philanthropy changed markedly. Industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller made extraordinary fortunes as transportation systems and industrial production grew. Carnegie articulated a new approach to giving in his essay The Gospel of Wealth. He owed his fortune to others, he explained, and would give the wealth back using a business-like approach. Like philanthropists in other periods, Carnegie and his fellow millionaires looked to their era’s dominant business form, the corporation, as a model for an innovative philanthropic vehicle, in their case, foundations.

Along with foundations, the country’s first generation of millionaires also created museums, libraries, concert halls, and universities, which showcased and furthered Americans’

Local museums and historic sites can look similarly to their own histories. Cultural institutions are not only beneficiaries of philanthropy but also often sites of fundraising, with charitable organizations holding benefit events in these spaces. Exploring this aspect of the history of philanthropy engages visitors in considering the business dimensions of philanthropy.

It also may foster greater appreciation for the economic contributions of local museums and historic sites today.

cultural and intellectual achievements. And while many of those borrowed from European models, foreigners also visited the United States to study libraries and other institutions.10

I N T E R N AT I O N A L Even as they built national networks and institutions, Americans also looked abroad with their philanthropy. It was in the early 1900s, as the United States grew into a world power, that Americans made the international arena a major focus of their philanthropy. World War I marked the first time Americans gave on a mass scale for foreign humanitarian relief. The American Red Cross led these efforts, providing relief for American troops and foreign civilians alike. Using the latest advertising and public relations know-how, the American Red Cross organized membership drives and week-long springtime fundraising campaigns. Their efforts paid off.

Over one-third of Americans joined the American Red Cross, and in 1917 and 1918 Americans donated $400 million to the Red Cross alone. This mass giving—which built on the philanthropy pioneered in the early-twentieth-century fight against tuberculosis—set the stage for the even greater focus on international philanthropy in the postWorld War II era.11 HISTORY NEWS

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O

ne of the most wellrecognized objects in Giving in America is a UNICEF trickor-treat box. The brightly colored box perhaps reminds visitors that as children, they participated in philanthropy when they knocked on doors Halloween night. Besides drawing visitors in, the box and similar artifacts from international organizations offer possibilities for exploring connections between local communities and the world stage.

Exploring the impact of international philanthropy on communities may enrich visitors’ appreciation of local history. It may also help bring historical perspectives to staff that are thinking about funder priorities and funding opportunities available to their institutions.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal eclipsed philanthropy’s role in the provision of welfare, and the building of the federal relief infrastructure disrupted the long-close relationship between government and private charities. During and after World War II, however, the philanthropic sector and the United States government came together to work overseas. Americans contributed to relief and rebuilding efforts, often in their ancestral homelands.

The federal government supervised and coordinated wartime relief fundraising, while foundations lent their expertise to the pursuit of the nation’s goals.

The Cold War led to the great expansion of Americans’ international philanthropy. The government became a major funder of humanitarian organizations. Many foundations and internationally oriented charities pursued relief, development, and cultural programs that sought to promote American strategic goals and values abroad. While by no means all giving in this era was influenced by geopolitics, the Cold War also shaped philanthropy at home. Cultural exchange programs and area studies programs at universities grew out of international imperatives and touched local communities, while some charitable organizations also linked domestic efforts such as fundraising for black colleges to concerns about strengthening the United States on the world stage.12

PERSONAL The end of the Cold War, renewed globalization, and the extraordinary fortunes some have made in recent decades are again changing philanthropic practices and priorities. Entrepreneurs and businesses are experimenting with new vehicles for giving. Individual

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benefactors and foundations are pursuing bold goals such as tackling inequality, global health needs, and education.

Americans, followers in our first centuries, are now global leaders in philanthropy. Yet in spite of the scale American philanthropy has reached in recent years, the thrust of today’s charitable activity is personal. Many Americans are giving through online platforms that let them support and get to know recipients. Indeed, the National Museum of American History launched its first online giving project in October 2016 to help raise funds to conserve Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Similarly, many donors participate in giving circles, in which they pool resources and set priorities as communities.

History organizations are often shaped by the kind of personal ties and distinctive contributions that donors favor today. By bringing this history to light, local museums and historic sites can help people locate themselves within a particular institution’s history along with a tradition that has shaped and reshaped our society for many hundreds of years. t Amanda B. Moniz is the David M. Rubenstein Curator of Philanthropy at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and held a Cassius Marcellus Clay Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Yale University. She can be reached by email at moniza@si.edu and on Twitter at @AmandaMoniz1.

1 Amanda B. Moniz, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 12-18.

2 Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger, Robert Love’s Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Conrad Edick Wright, The Transformation of Charity in Postrevolutionary New England (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).

3

Moniz, From Empire to Humanity.

Matthew Mulcahy, Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Moniz, From Empire to Humanity.

4

5

Moniz, From Empire to Humanity.

Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 17971840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008).

6

7 Kathleen McCarthy, American Creed: Philanthropy and the Rise of Civil Society, 1700-1865 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

8 McCarthy, American Creed, 54-57; Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); April Masten, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-NineteenthCentury New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

9 McCarthy, American Creed; Jordan Grant, “Elizabeth Keckley: Businesswoman and Philanthropist,” O Say Can You See, March 22, 2016.

10 Kathleen McCarthy, “Women and Political Culture” in Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (New York: Penguin Press, 2006); Ron Chernow; Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998); Olivier Zunz, Philanthropy in America: A History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Thomas Adam, Buying Respectability: Philanthropy and Urban Society in Transnational Perspective, 1840s to 1930s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

11 Ian Tyrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Julia Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); Zunz, Philanthropy in America.

12 Zunz, Philanthropy in America; Marybeth Gasman and Edward Epstein “Creating an Image for Black College Fundraising: A Visual Examination of the United Negro College Fund’s Publicity,” in Uplifting a People: African American Philanthropy and Education, Marybeth Gasman and Katherine V. Sedgwick, eds.

(New York: Peter Lang, 2005).

Book Reviews > Fostering Empathy through Museums

By Elif M. Gokcigdem, ed.

(Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 296 pp.

Reviewed by Gretchen Jennings

Museums’ inherent strengths position them to be effective “empathy engines” helping people to understand the “other” and reinforcing social bonds.

—Elizabeth Merritt, Trendswatch 2017

H

istory and museum professionals the world over eagerly await and read Trendswatch, an annual publication of the American Alliance of Museums. In this year’s edition, the first chapter highlights a focus on empathy as a major social trend. Author Elizabeth Merritt cites current research on a grow-

ing deficit in empathy in our society. And she discusses findings that connect experiences with art and visits to museums with the growth of empathy. Thus, the publication of Fostering Empathy through Museums, cited in Trendswatch, could not be more timely.

Elif Gokcigdem, a historian of Islamic art, a museum scholar, and the founder of the EmpathyBuilding through Museums initiative, has edited this collection of fifteen case studies and essays. She illustrates her thesis in a variety of ways.

“Museums and empathy are a powerful combination that can provide transformative experiences of dialogue, discovery, understanding, and contemplation to all regardless of age or background,” she writes. “Together they can plant the

seeds that nourish generations of souls” (xviii).

This review will concentrate on three strands that appear throughout: 1) the variety of museum disciplines and functions (exhibitions, programming) through which empathy can be communicated; 2) the relationship of risk and empathy; and 3) the concept of institutional empathy.

Visitors can be encouraged to be empathetic in a variety of museum disciplines and through many types of exhibition design and programming.

It’s clear that Gokcigdem took care to include a wide, diverse array of examples

access outstanding history resources

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OAH memberships start at $60 per year. Sign up at oah.org/join or call us at 812 855 7311 HISTORY NEWS

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Book Reviews > of the ways in which museums can create exhibitions and programs that encourage empathy— defined throughout as having both a cognitive element (perspective sharing) and an emotional aspect (feeling with, sharing the emotions of another).

Case studies include an art center (the Botin Foundation in Cantabria, Spain); science centers such as Jersey City’s Liberty Science Center; civil rights institutions, e.g. Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights; art museums such as the Smithsonian’s Freer-Sackler Gallery; the children’s museum in Portland, Oregon; and history museums such as the Boulder History Museum. The book also discusses traveling exhibitions such as Dialogue in the Dark, one of a series of exhibitions created by Dialogue Social Enterprise, co-founded by Europeanbased museum consultants Orna Cohen and Andreas Heinecke. The examples provide detailed discussions of intentional focus on the encouragement of empathy in visitors, and varied ways of achieving this through consultation with community, use of personal stories, and narrative approaches. Quite a few of the case studies cite summative evaluation results that support their contention that visitors did indeed leave an exhibition or program with greater understanding, insight, and compassion for the featured group or issue.

Addressing topics that require empathy can involve risk for an institution.

The chapters written by staff from the Boulder History Museum, Charlotte’s Levine Museum of the New South, the Atlanta Center for Civil and Human Rights, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute all touch on the sensitivities involved in addressing issues of race and cultural perspective. In particular, the Boulder Museum and the Levine Museum describe exhibition choices that examined sensitive histories: in Boulder, a new interpretation of the life of Arapaho Chief Niwot and the Sand Creek Massacre; in Charlotte, multiple exhibitions on both the history of black/ white relations and the impact of new immigrant communities. The results of these efforts confirmed that the museums created new opportunities for empathy, understanding, and dialogue. Success was far from assured as each institution

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began planning these exhibitions. Yet they moved ahead, and with community consultation and collaboration, produced positive civic impact.

The more empathetic an institution is at its core, the more authentic is its message of empathy to visitors.

Most of the chapters focus on methods and formats for encouraging visitors to be more empathetic. One entry, “Adopting Empathy: Why Empathy Should Be a Required Core Value for All Museums—Period,” is based on a survey that found few museums with an articulated core focus on empathy. The authors turn to examples of empathy in business practice for recommendations on how museums can achieve institutional empathy. A number of other case studies provide more practical examples of institutional empathy. They confirm that once a museum began to work on topics intended to teach empathy, staff turned to institutionally empathetic policies and practices in exhibition design, in community collaboration, in use of personal narratives, and in review of their own mission statements. As Dina Bailey observes in “Finding Inspiration Inside,” [S]uccessful institutions consistently focus on how to ensure institutional empathy not just within the exhibitions and programs, but also within the operational and strategic life of the institution….

For example, consciously focusing on building a diverse staff is something that institutions can and should do in order to develop a culture of empathy (137).

One does not have to read this volume cover-to-cover to benefit from its content. Chapters are lucidly written and can be absorbed in under an hour. Most provide details and practical examples that can be appreciated by the full range of museum professionals. I recommend it as a valuable handbook for negotiating a museum future that is sure to include ample opportunity for the fostering both of empathy in visitors and empathetic practice in museums.

Full disclosure: The Empathetic Museum group, with which I am involved, was invited to contribute to this volume. At the time we were just developing our rubric for institutional empathy, and it was not ready to be published. We thus regretfully declined involvement. t

Gretchen Jennings has worked in museums for more than thirty years. She was a project director on traveling exhibitions Invention at Play and Psychology, both of which received AAM awards of excellence. She edited the journal Exhibitionist from 2007-2014. She is a founder of the Empathetic Museum Project and can be contacted at gretchenjennings934@ gmail.com and on Twitter: @gretchjenn. .....................................

From Warm Center to Ragged Edge: The Erosion of Midwestern Literary and Historical Regionalism, 1920-1965

By Jon K. Lauck (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), 252 pp.

Reviewed by David M. Grabitske

B

ack to the Future! Jon K. Lauck is a historian on a mission to revive Midwest regional history, and is doing so by using the history of Midwest regionalism as a pattern for action. Lauck’s book, From Warm Center to Ragged Edge, suggests how on the surface midwesterners like F. Scott Fitzgerald (whose words form the title), Meridel Le Sueur, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson (among many) produced works that supposedly fit the preconceived notions of eastern elites, effectively diminishing—but not destroying—regionalism.

Lauck carefully explores the literary contexts of the early-twentieth-century Midwest as a time when remaining Civil War veterans of the worst kind of regionalism (sectionalism) still had influence. Regionalist historians and authors both supported and criticized regional contexts, but in the balance unwittingly undermined the Midwest as a region. The slippery slope from useful regional contexts to boosterish exceptionalism is clear.

The book contains front matter, three chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter details how the “Revolt from the Village” became a devoutly held myth among historians. The second discusses the counter-revolt of midwestern authors rebutting the views they supposedly held. As with not a few coun-

terrevolutions in history, this one also miserably failed. Lauck’s third chapter details collateral damage that Midwest regional historians suffered, leading to their dynamic Mississippi Valley Historical Association becoming the Organization of American Historians in 1964. Lauck rightly does not call for a return to the exact conditions prior to 1964.

He does, however, make a strong case for a return to the spirit and energy of regional historians and history work to be done by a new Midwest History Association.

While the purpose of the book is to show the literary link that dismantled the Midwest region, the story of regional demise is more complicated. The text

would benefit from brief discussions of other influences to better define the importance of the literary story. Some influences might be: more than the intellectual developments of the Roosevelt Administration in Chapter 2, the New Deal era’s judicial and legislative remaking of the United States from “competitive federalism” to “cooperative federalism” that required uniform access to programs (Vincent Barnett, 1948); beyond the New Deal, increasing federal requirements for nonprofits (which many history enter-

prises are) or elitists’ homogenization of thought in nonprofits (Peter Dobkin Hall, 1992); the role of midwesterners like Harold Stassen in creating the United Nations and furthering globalization; incorporating urban regionalism since George Henry Trabert (1914), for one, shows how urban Lutherans in St. Paul fended off eastern “Mainline” Lutheran elites from enforcing linguistic homogenization; or, discussing contemporary literary historians like AASLH award winner Tom McKay (West Fork, 2014), among many, who continue the Midwest tradition of plumbing the depths of small town life.

Despite what it lacks (and, for AASLH, an egregious typo on page 79), the work superbly advocates the value of regional contexts and a roadmap back to the future of regional history. t David M. Grabitske is Director of the West Texas regional El Paso Museum of History, a native midwesterner, and scholar of the history enterprise. He can be reached at grabitskedx@elpasotexas.gov.

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HISTORY NEWS

35

AASLH News From AASLH President & CEO

John Dichtl

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nclusivity and the relevance of history remain our two lead strategic goals.

At the Meeting of the Membership in Austin, I emphasized that in moving AASLH and the field toward greater inclusiveness of race/ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality, we are not neglecting diversity of other kinds.

AASLH has always been an association of different types of history museums, agencies, offices, companies, and sites. Most of our member institutions are quite small: half have yearly budgets under $250,000, and half of those are under $50,000.

Our members come to their work as volunteers and as paid professionals, with some training, no training, or with high levels of education and expertise. AASLH’s challenge is to bring all this variety together and to find where the differences make the whole of us greater.

What is most difficult is keeping together in conversation and in mutual learning, individuals and organizations with differing political points of view. Fortunately, most history practitioners, whatever their personal politics, are united by the methods for doing historical work: intensive research, awareness of context, adherence to the facts—even facts that don’t fit our assumptions. All of us, I hope, agree that history is relevant to modern life and that more Americans should use historical thinking skills to actively engage with and address contemporary issues.

In October, I addressed the members of the Mountain-Plains Museums Association at their conference in Denver, talking about museums playing a crucial role in the current war on facts. Museums and historic sites are places of authenticity and critical thinking, where we use actual facts and authentic pieces in our collections to build interpretations. Yet as much as we love hearing that museums are still the most trusted institutions in the country, I think we cannot just ride that wave and appear as authoritative—and then talk about other things. We have to explain to our visitors how it is that we do our historical work.

We have to show, now and then, that our authority is earned.

AASLH will continue to hone this message and strive for greater inclusiveness. Our 2018 Annual Meeting theme for Kansas City, Truth or Consequences, highlights how united we all are in our diverse approaches to teaching historical thinking.

And StEPs (Standards and Excellence Program for History Organizations) is undergoing refurbishment, with special attention to inclusivity, relevance, digital concerns, financial management, and more. We also are overhauling our continuing education offerings in these directions, thanks to an IMLS grant, and developing the exciting new Master Local Historians project. Each of these programs is meant to help history organizations of many stripes claim greater significance in their communities today.

36

AUTUMN 2017

Hurricane Cultural Relief Fund Grantees

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n October, we announced the twenty-six recipients of Hurricane Cultural Relief Fund mini-grants to aid organizations in disaster recovery from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. This fund raised $14,000 in just over a month to provide emergency funds for organizations to use for recovery supplies, restoration work, and salvage activities necessitated by the storms.

“Seeing the devastation across parts of Texas the week before the AASLH Annual Meeting in Austin spurred us to take action,” said John Dichtl, AASLH President & CEO. “We are so grateful for the generosity of the history community and are honored to be able to provide an avenue to help institutions that were affected.”

Hurricane Cultural Relief Fund mini-grants will be used by organizations in Florida, Georgia, and Texas to repair structures, preserve collections, and help organizations prepare to re-open so they can continue to serve the public with their missions of education and cultural engagement.

AASLH Receives IMLS Grant for Continuing Education

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e are excited to announce that AASLH is the recipient of a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to improve and expand our Continuing Education program. Beginning with an assessment of the association’s current continuing education and professional development programs, we will examine how the historical community’s training needs have been served, and how organizations inside and outside the history museum field have provided professional development opportunities. We will also conduct interviews about current and emerging training needs. The project deliverable will be a comprehensive Continuing Education and Professional Development Framework that augments graduate education, serves professionals at every stage of their careers, and reaches lifelong learners and avocational historians.

State Historical Administrators Meeting

O

ur annual State Historical Administrators Meeting, known by the acronym SHAM, will be held this December 15-17 in Indianapolis. SHAM was created for and is composed exclusively of the heads of the state historical societies (both public and private), state museums, state historic preservation offices, and state archives from the fifty United States. This unique gathering is designed to assist the participants in serving and leading the people of their state. Topics the group will address range from public history controversies to funding streams, the nation’s 250th anniversary to baby boomer retirements in top positions in the historical community. Indiana Historical Society is the 2017 host. Georgia Historical Society was last year’s host. The Idaho State Historical Society is next year’s host. t

ESSENTIAL NEW BOOKS FROM YOUR PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATION

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“Introduction to Public History will quickly become an essential book for undergraduate and some graduate courses, but it will also be valuable for interns and new practitioners.”—Ann McCleary, coordinator, public history and museum studies programs, University of West Georgia 200 pages 978-1-4422-7222-4 • $39.00 • Paper 978-1-4422-7221-7 • $78.00 • Cloth 978-1-4422-7223-1 • $37.00 • eBook

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“This new edition of Landscapes and Gardens for Historic Buildings is the go-to resource for anyone beginning the restoration of a historic landscape.”

—Patrick Larkin, senior vice president of gardens, Cheekwood, Nashville 184 pages 978-1-4422-6077-1 • $49.00 • Paper 978-1-4422-6076-4 • $95.00 • Cloth 978-1-4422-6078-8 • $46.00 • eBook

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