History News Spring 2018 by Go Design

Making History

RELEVANT Truth or Consequences Thoughts on I AM History

History Organizations Responding to Public Tragedies

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

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Contents

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SPRING 2018 VOLUME 73, #2

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Departments

Features

3 On Doing Local History

8 A Capacity for Complexity: Thoughts on I AM History

By Carol Kammen

5 The Whole Is Greater By Erika Hirugami

7 The Value of History By Ruth S. Taylor

29 Award Winner Spotlight By Christie M. Weininger

31 Book Reviews By Samira R. Chambers and Donna J. Baker

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ON THE COVER Volunteers, church members, and staff from history organizations retrieve memorabilia left in front of

By Darren Walker and Dina A. Bailey

Charleston’s

14 The Personal and the Professional: History Organizations Responding to Public Tragedies By George W. McDaniel

Mother Emanuel AME Church, June 24, 2015, one week after a domestic terrorist attack left nine parishioners dead.

Photo George W. McDaniel

21 Truth or Consequences

INSIDE: TECHNICAL LEAFLET

By Tim Grove

Inclusive Interpretation Tips

25 Making History Relevant

By Seema Rao

By John R. Dichtl

34 AASLH News

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

History News (ISSN0363-7492) is published quarterly by American Association for State and Local History, 2021 21st Avenue S., Suite 320, Nashville, TN 37212. Periodicals Postage Paid at Nashville, Tennessee. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to History News, 2021 21st Avenue S., Suite 320, Nashville, TN 37212. 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 ©2018 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 2

he relevance thread weaves throughout every issue of History News, as well as most discussions when we get together in person. The ideal is one of the foundations of our work and has spawned a movement within the community of history organizations and public history. This edition is no exception. All four feature articles address relevance. Three tackle a specific element of the relevance equation: the challenge of presenting complex issues at a time when the public typically consumes information in simple soundbites. In their discussion at the 2017 AASLH Annual Meeting, Dina A. Bailey and Darren Walker grappled with the importance of confronting the less-attractive aspects of the American past as we attempt to create a more just society. The two discussed a call to action for leaders at all levels to exhibit courage as we share history’s complexity. Tim Grove returns to these pages as AASLH Program Chair with an essay on Truth or Consequences, the 2018 Annual Meeting theme. Grove urges us all not only to consider our important role as trusted community institutions, but to embrace this responsibility. He, too, encourages us to revel in the complexity of our discipline. AASLH President and CEO John R. Dichtl offers suggestions for how history organizations might put these ideas in motion. Building on Grove’s thesis about the ultimate consequences of eschewing truth, Dichtl posits our institutions as places where the public could have sustained engagement with information and new ideas. George W. McDaniel discusses some specific ways history organizations have worked with communities in

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the aftermath of incidents of terrorism and violence, an all-too-common occurrence. McDaniel and colleagues share lessons from “It Could Happen to You: Collecting in the Face of Tragedy,” a presentation at the 2017 American Alliance of Museums conference session. Our regular columns—”On Doing Local History,” “The Whole Is Greater,” and “The Value of History”—also all bring to the fore elements of the relevance equation. Collectively, the contents within meet one of the goals of the History Relevance initiative: “We support history organizations that encourage the public to use historical thinking skills to actively engage with and address contemporary issues and to value history for its relevance to modern life.” Finally, on a personal note, this is my forty-eighth and final issue as History News editor. I have thoroughly enjoyed working on this esteemed publication and am grateful to the many authors and contributors with whom I have worked over the last twelve years. I leave encouraged by how each of you embodies one of my favorite quotes: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” (Margaret Mead). Thank you all so much for all you do to fulfill this charge. Bob Beatty

AASLH

On Doing Local History

By Carol Kammen

Clio Will Have the Last Laugh

have wondered what my personal reaction to these difficult times should be. Whatever one’s politics, the past two years have seemed to me to be vastly different from difficulties our country has faced in the past. I shudder to think of the attacks on our governmental structure, the very tone coming from the White House, the rancor in Congress and across the states. I am old enough to have lived through a number of times that I considered a crisis, yet during those times—the Cold War, the violent responses to the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War and the divisions in the country about it, the abuses of the Nixon era, the Pentagon Papers, and, more recently, the Snowden revelations, among others—I never worried as much as I do today about our basic governmental structure. I want to be friends with those who do not agree with me so that we can talk with each other. I want to understand the other side. I want to see our country as compassionate to those in need, as it has often tried to be—and so often failed. I believe that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, and I would like to see it bend more quickly and with all of us pushing together. You might have different reactions to what is going on in Washington and to the image of our country across the world, but I believe that we can talk about those differences and better understand each other, if not agree. Here is where history comes into the picture. As I see it, this country has weathered many trials. We historians look to them to search for understanding and (sometimes) answers. We use various sources in this quest. I find our digitized local newspapers wonderfully important, but so are organizational records and letters and diaries. One person’s voice does not necessarily tell the whole story, but that voice often illuminates an era. In wondering what our response to our own times might be, I thought first of Mary Chesnut’s diary account of the American Civil War and how she humanized some characters, spoke about the terror, and saw the complexities of the

situation. On December 21, 1860, she wrote, “Mrs. Charles Lowndes was sitting with us to-day, when Mrs. Kirkland brought in a copy of the Secession Ordinance. I wonder if my face grew as white as hers. She said after a moment: ‘God help us. As our day, so shall our strength be.’ How grateful we were for this pious ejaculation of hers! They say I had better take my last look at this beautiful place, Combahee. It is on the coast, open to gunboats.”1

For two years or so, I HAVE BEEN KEEPING ALMOST

daily journal entries of my reactions TO WHAT IS GOING ON IN MY LIFE, IN THE LIVES OF MY FRIENDS, AND OF MY REACTIONS TO NATIONAL EVENTS.

Chesnut witnessed an incredibly fraught time in history closer than most of us are today (or maybe ever will be). I am not really on the frontlines of anything, except as a consumer of local, regional, and national newspapers, journals, and television coverage. I react to the fight against fracking, the problem of gerrymandering, and the discord and terror of our times. I witness also the ravages of old age that overtake some of my friends and relations, the growth or decline of places I love. I observe the dissolution of an era (which I understand as well as any), and that times change even as I watch. This is the way I have been responding to current events. For two years or so, I have been keeping almost daily journal entries of my reactions to what is going on in my life, in the lives of my friends, and of my reactions to national events. It is my action of protest and of witness. I

don’t sign Internet petitions, I have lost faith in sending letters, even polite letters, to politicians I like or to those of whom I disapprove. Money talks, but I cannot support everyone. So I turned, as Mary Chesnut did, to writing. This also inspired me to look for some historical examples of others’ diaries. I came upon the Wisconsin Historical Society’s simply wonderful offering of a different daily diary entry, with an excerpt and a facsimile of the diary along with a short biography of the writer. What a treasure this is! Today, February 1, as I began writing this editorial, the site features the 1834 diary of Jackson Kemper, an Episcopal bishop writing about his trip to Green Bay and discussing the conditions of children attending a local school. It includes his observations, and there are actual pages from his small notebooks.2 I see also the diary of Addie Tripp, probably a domestic servant living in the home of others. Far from the thick of anything, Addie Tripp on January 5, 1864, noted that, “Deborah comes this morning and spends the day [break] in the evening David & Frank McClintock come & Mr. Mrs. Dunham. We all go over the hill to a debating School.” The accompanying text notes that there is little mention of the Civil War. She is far from the frontlines and absorbed in her own life. I wish I had found these wonderful contributions earlier; they are so rich. I would like to sign up for daily doses of these Wisconsin entries. My world would be so much more complete.3 I’ve since discovered numerous other diaries online. Of course there’s that of Martha Ballard, the Maine midwife, who wrote every day from 1785 to 1812, nearly 10,000 entries. I’ve also found a number of first-person accounts from the American South and the Iowa Digital Library’s Civil War Diaries and Letters, with at least fifty entries—and I would bet this could be expanded tenfold, as there is so much material from that conflict. There are Overland Trail diaries and those from the Mormon Trail. Diary Junction has 500 diaries, including that of Charles Lindbergh.4 HISTORY NEWS

Woodward won a Pulitzer Prize for Mary Chesnut’s Civil War, his annotated version of Chesnut’s diary! We all must be, I think, a John Hus, that brave and stubborn fourteenthcentury Bohemian priest and philosopher who believed in the primacy of the

On Doing Local History > I think of Ed Ayers, who bases his work on the demographic conditions of the places he looks at in his studies of slavery and black life and women’s lives at the crossroads of the nineteenth century. His books sing with the words of the participants embroiled in larger events. Small players, they, but they can stand for us, as Everyperson coping with events that touch their lives, and at the same time events that must have seemed larger than themselves. Quoting from a review in The New York Times, “Ayers avoids traditional surveys…instead inviting readers into the private lives along a borderland, telling stories in real time through diaries, letters, photographs, military records, and newspapers. We follow the ebb and flow of beliefs and emotions, hopes and fears.”5 All this leads me to believe there is value to what I have been doing, and I believe we should encourage others to do likewise, by showing them the value of their experience, of their opinion, of their time. From Samuel Pepys on, diaries have been treasured. They need not be the uncontaminated document never before seen, for there is much to learn from material already written, and even known. After all, in 1981 historian C. Vann

I ALWAYS TRY TO REMEMBER THAT

events happen to real people: THAT THERE IS

There behind Del, the owner, was a sign that read “Buy a Gun. Annoy a Liberal.” I stood as long as I could without saying anything then I pointed to the sign and said, “Del, not all liberals oppose gun owning. I am not against hunting or even those who need pistols for personal protection. But the repeating…”

DRAMA EVERYWHERE.

scriptures over the embroidered administrative, religious, and competitive organizational and hierarchal web—academic hectoring, process over observation, administrative twisting—that Hus saw standing between the individual and the Word of God. We can all see the effectiveness of words. We bring it to people in different ways, some in print, others, like Lorraine McConaghy in Seattle, in the form of readers’ theater. When I see

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2016–2018 Katherine Kane, Chair; Harriet Beecher Stowe Center John Fleming, Vice Chair; National Museum of African American Music

Julie Rose, Immediate Past Chair; Homewood Museum Norman Burns, II, Treasurer; Conner Prairie Linnea Grim, Secretary; Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Erin Carlson Mast, Council’s Representative; President Lincoln’s Cottage

And before I could say another word, Del said, “They only belong in the Army—should I take it down?” When I paused to answer, he said, “I will put in ‘some’ liberals.”

It was a small moment where two sides came together, agreed, and, I hope, saw the other as a human being, not an opponent. It is, after all, the small moments that count. In the human comedy, if we do our jobs well and contribute to the events of our own time by keeping watch and marking our tablets, Clio will have the last laugh. 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.

STAFF

COUNCIL

Aja Bain

Bill Adair, Class of 2018

Jennifer Kilmer, Class of 2019

Melanie Adams, Class of 2020

Stacy Klingler, Class of 2021

Dina A. Bailey, Class of 2018

Nicola Longford, Class of 2018

1 Mary Boykin Chesnut, A Diary from Dixie (1905) available on the Internet at docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/ chesnut/maryches.html.

Marian Carpenter, Class of 2019

Kyle McKoy, Class of 2020

2 See wisconsinhistory.org/turningpoints/search. asp?id=78.

Program and Publications Coordinator

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Senior Program Manager

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Education and Service Coordinator

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announcements of online courses of state or local history, I always hope students will get original documents along with texts and argumentative reviews. I always try to remember that events happen to real people: that there is drama everywhere. In my hometown, on North Tioga Street, at that house with the gilt piano, and at the fourth district voting place where in 1917 the husband of the leader of the local Equal Rights crusade “forgot” to vote for the suffrage amendment. Would that she had written a diary entry about that! Here’s something from my own diary. It is an account of having a tire fixed in Benson, Arizona, a few months ago:

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Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Minnesota Historical Society Mountain Top Vision, LLC

John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art

Lisa Eriksen, Class of 2021 Lisa Eriksen Consulting

Kim Fortney, Class of 2020

Washington State Historical Society William Butterworth Foundation The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza Mercer Museum and Fonthill Castle

Brent Ott, Class of 2021 The Henry Ford

Sarah Pharaon, Class of 2019

National History Day

International Coalition of Sites of Conscience

Leigh A. Grinstead, Class of 2018

Trina Nelson Thomas, Class of 2021

LYRASIS

Stark Art & History Venues

Scott Wands, Class of 2020 Connecticut Humanties

See Diary of Addie Tripp, 1864.

See dohistory.org/diary/index.html; Trails of Hope: Overland Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 at contentdm.lib. byu.edu/cdm/search/collections/Diaries; and thediaryjunction.co.uk. In 1990, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich published Ballard’s diaries as A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812. 4

5 Ronald C. White, “From the Ground Up: The Civil War as Seen by Ordinary People,” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 2018.

The Whole Is Greater

By Erika Hirugami

Reinventing the Wheel: Museum Diversity and Inclusion for All

n 2017, I sat on the executive board of a cultural organization, became the founding president of a museum council, sat on the board of advisors for yet another museum, was a panelist for the California Arts Council, and in my daily life, ran CuratorLove, a small global organization. CuratorLove partners with museums, institutions, galleries, alternative art spaces, art councils, startups, art professionals, art publishers, art organizations, corporations, nonprofits, and a myriad of artists from across the globe to create innovative curatorial projects that are socially driven. All of which roughly translates to constantly meeting artists and arts professionals from all over the globe, while serving to better inform multiple arts-based institutions. As a Woman of Color (I am Jaxican— Japanese and Mexican), curator, and CEO, I understand the privilege bestowed upon me through my practice and absolutely love what I do. I am happy to bring a voice to my community. As a young art professional and WOC (woman of color), diversity and inclusion are concepts that exist at the forefront of my practice; these concepts I battle with almost every single day. Some days I win, some days, not so much. I have learned that language is power, and that is at the core of diversity and inclusion. So as you read on, I encourage you to pay particular attention to the terminology I am articulating. At the largest scale of the conversation, diversity and inclusion appear to be predominantly racial and ethnic in discussion. The statistics are mostly based on the number of People of Color (POC) hired and what agency, if any, they have within traditionally “white” spaces. At museums, however, this is a very current and unique exchange. As more POC seek equity in the workforce, museums appear to react by providing equality and tokenism, which in turn, perpetuates a larger problem. The current reality in our field is that race- and heritage-based museums chiefly employ people within the muse-

um’s focus (African American museums employ African Americans, Latino museums employ Latinos, and so on). Beyond those institutions, the POC ratio is minimal at best. Given that most museums are not race- or heritage-based, this leaves the majority of museums lacking diversity. That’s a harsh reality, I know, and begs the questions: How

Innovation

happens outside of one’s comfort zone; so let’s include others and allow to thrive.

diversity

do we include and who do we include? If the staff lacks POC, should we just hire a Person of Color and call it a day? Well no, that’s not really how that should work. By all means, hire more People of Color, but not just to fill a quota. The sad reality is that our field lacks a basic understanding of what it means to have diversity and inclusion; simultaneously, we seem to be battling a confusion of the concept of equity versus equality. Why does it even matter? That’s simple. As we seek sustainability through engagement with an ever-changing hybrid, multicultural audience, as museums push to become (and stay) relevant and compete with new sources of information, we no longer have the luxury to speak from the dominant cultural narrative alone. As demographic trends report an evergrowing population of POC, museums need to stay current and respond to the changing interests and needs of these communities. “Ok, so let’s hire a few POC, place them in the right places, and voila: POC

magic!” Well, again, no! This might provide equality, but not equity, not inclusion, and certainly not diversity. So then what do we do? We include them everywhere! This might sound scary, but bear with me here. I’ve sat on a few executive councils and I have yet to encounter anyone younger than me (or with darker hair for that matter) at any of them. This means they are comprised of predominantly Caucasian, financially wealthy individuals, in the later stages of life. This is the makeup of the majority of museum executive boards today. Diversifying these ranks is critical. As these individuals are the volunteer leadership for the organization on behalf of the community, boards are a great place to start to provide equity for members of the community. If the buy-in is too large an investment for stakeholders, then you must get creative. Diversity also extends well beyond racial or ethnic inclusion. It means allowing people from all financial backgrounds an equal place at the table. It means having different age groups represented and opening the doors of museum leadership to people who will create new types of sustainability for the organization. People with new perspectives will help the institution to grow in transcendental ways. Granted, it also means taking risks, but the potential payout is enormous. Innovation happens outside of one’s comfort zone. So let’s include others and allow diversity to thrive. Maybe this idealized scenario is still a few years away from reality. But what is stopping you from taking baby steps? A few weeks ago, I was brought in to a museum whose audience is stagnant. My team and I were asked to analyze the reality of the organization and strategize how to bring in new audiences. Sounds simple, yes? Grab some data here, analyze some numbers there, and presto—change happens! I started by asking a few questions to familiarize myself with the organization’s staff and HISTORY NEWS

The Whole is Greater > exhibition roster. Looking ahead, while all of its exhibitions had an African American focus, the staff (at first glance) was entirely Caucasian. Although I know better than to assume they were incapable of appropriately presenting these exhibits, it was a concern. Then again, I thought, “Maybe these are incredibly woke individuals!” I asked what kind of audience they sought. Every single one agreed on millennials. More millennial engagement coming right up! I inquired about programming for POC millennials. None existed. Furthermore, it was clear the institution didn’t target millennial People of Color, they just sought millennials (you know, the non-POC kind). Okay, heartbreak. Statistically speaking, this organization lies within a community comprised of more than 60 percent POC in its immediate surroundings, yet its entire administrative ranks lacked any racial or ethnic diversity (most were not even local to the city). They were thus at risk of missing engagement potential with more than 60

Ask what can diversity do for your institution? What

inclusion

does mean to your museum?

percent of their entire immediate potential patron base! I use this as an example, to encourage you to ask what diversity can do for your institution. What does inclusion mean to your museum? It means having people within the organization who can easily point to flaws in design. It means having extra voices that raise issues predominant narratives have rarely, if ever, been concerned about. It means other intersectionalities can help make you become relevant. It means different languages come through administrative

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doors—and I don’t mean just Spanish versus English. It means linguistic agency for the museum by association. It means the institution has the potential to harvest this soft power and use it to surpass its reality, and that of the community is serves. It means diversity and inclusion. It means transcendence at an institutional level. I’ve discussed the diversity in age, finances, race, ethnicity, intersectionality, and language. What else is diversity? What else can we include? Oh yeah, gender! Now, I don’t mean female to male ratios, I mean getting serious and including the entire LGBTQ range: trans, queer, and every other type of non-binary. Everybody now! As museums fight to stay relevant, as they aim to rise above existing concerns, as the population shifts, our communication methods speed up, and our attention spans diminish, the only true reality we are left with is this: Museums are falling behind. Museums today are not diverse. They lack inclusivity for all; they barely understand equity. Our primary focus as professionals and within our museums is to steward culture and to provide intriguing ways to disseminate information to our communities. If we fail to acknowledge our shortcomings as organizations, if we don’t allow everyone a say at our table, if we refuse to include the diverse population hybridity that is currently alive and thriving, then we, too, will disappear the way of ancient technologies. Can we really afford to ostracize this core audience by not speaking its language? By not providing inclusive spaces for all? By not allowing every single intersectionality to be welcomed through our doors? I am not encouraging us to reinvent the wheel here, I just believe everyone needs the chance to play with it! t Erika Hirugami is founder and CEO of CuratorLove. As a Getty and Kress Foundation Fellow, she has formed a part of various curatorial teams at museums and galleries across the U.S. and Mexico. She is currently Curatorial Director for Ronald McDonald House of Charities. Hirugami holds an M.A.A.B. from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art, as well as various B.A. degrees from UCLA. Learn more about Hirugami at CuratorLove.com or reach her at curatorlove@gmail.com.

The Value of History

By Ruth S. Taylor

Our Definitions Shape the Conversation All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. —Edward Said (1981)

here can be no doubt that 2017 was a year infused with history. Yes, historic things happened (they always do). But more interestingly, we spent some considerable time reflecting on, facing, and resisting our national historic legacy. And why that matters was also highlighted—we watched on a national stage how much we are influenced in our thinking and our actions by how we think about the past. But neither the we nor the past are fixed points. Our definitions shape the conversation, and differences among us—both recognized and unspoken—define our national discourse. One of the biggest spotlights shone on the debate about Confederate monuments. Here the differences in how we think about the past, its legacy, and our place in history were in obvious relief. These are not subtle differences in historical interpretation, nor is there much dispute among historians about the actual evidence of history. In short, here are basic facts that current academic history gives us: The American Civil War was fought over slavery and the South’s desire to continue it. Yes, state’s rights, economic issues, and political jockeying between North and South all played a role. But the primary dispute, well-articulated at the time, was slavery. And the Confederacy was a secessionist government, set up in opposition to the United States. Those of you who read the above paragraph and felt uncomfortable (or even angry) are demonstrating the task at hand. The facts are in conflict with how many of us perceive the past: through

a lens constructed by family memories, national myth, and a sense of our heritage. The fact that we celebrate any part of the Confederacy has much to do with Reconstruction and a desire by the federal government to reunite the country by avoiding the most inflammatory aspects of the recent past. It was a deliberate gloss on the historical facts, meant to serve the country best based on what was understood at the time. But with the perspective of time, it seems clear that this policy has had long-lasting and negative consequences. As we see, our current understanding is also not a fixed point. As each group of us, however defined, will “see” the past differently, all of us will also understand the past based on current perceptions and conditions. And this puts aside the fact that we are, in this day and age, bombarded with partisan propaganda at every turn, which muddies the waters more. Learning to deal with this is imperative if we wish to retain any of our national integrity and unity. How can we examine the ways we construct our sense of the past, and how does that sense influence our perceptions and actions today? Doing so requires some shared assumptions about the facts and how we understand them. Starting with the past, and learning to create a shared sense of reality as we know it, should also help us to evaluate and assess the present.

Basically all democratic theory is built around the idea people have a roughly accurate and shared view of what’s going on. What if they don’t? —Ezra Klein (2017) It seems that as a people, we are, at this moment in time, impatient with complexity. But we are certainly capable of it. And this is a topic that deserves some complicated thinking. Why this is an issue of concern for our field and the Newport Historical Society, which I serve as execu-

tive director, is two-fold. First, we are (as a field and as an organization) dedicated to presenting historical information to the public, but we are also determined to demonstrate why it is both interesting and important to know our history. This large issue, which encompasses politics, civics, sociology, as well as history, is still in our wheelhouse. History matters. And while it is easy to suggest we need more history and historical thinking in school—and we do—this is also a hereand-now concern. As communities wrestle with the tangible markers of what they believe to be their heritage, as individuals seek to evaluate the news, and as people reflect on how current events fit into the continuum of the American story, history matters. As history organizations, we have a role to play. We cannot tell people what to think, but we can do two things. We can present the historical facts as assembled, evaluated, and interpreted by those trained to do this work: historians. And we can help to show how those interpretations are made, guided, and influenced by societal and temporal factors (and how they sometimes go awry). Because all interpretations are not, in fact, equally valid: Some need to change when new facts come to light, and some are just based on false logic and unvetted data. Myth, memory, heritage, and history entwine to create our sense of who we are, what is important, and why we are driven to act in one way or another. While the mix may be intoxicating, it is important to tease out the threads. We need to be able to agree on some basic information about the past and the present. Nationally and individually, I have to believe we are served best when we make our decisions based on what we know to be true. In addition, like Rhode Island’s founder Roger Williams, I am interested in the shared civic space as a way of transcending our differences. t Ruth S. Taylor is Executive Director of the Newport (RI) Historical Society. She can be reached at rtaylor@newporthistorical.org. HISTORY NEWS

A Capacity for Complexity:

Thoughts on I AM History

By Darren Walker and Dina A. Bailey

Editor’s note: This is an edited version of the keynote address delivered at the 2017 AASLH Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. For full audio of the talk, visit our website.

Dina Bailey: Darren Walker is president of the

Ford Foundation. For two decades, he has been a leader in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. He led the philanthropy committee that helped bring a resolution to the city of Detroit’s historic bankruptcy and chairs the U.S. Impact Investing Alliance. Prior to joining Ford, he was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation where he managed the Rebuild New Orleans initiative after Hurricane Katrina. In the 1990s, as COO of Harlem’s largest community development organization, he oversaw a comprehensive revitalization program of central Harlem, including over 1,000 new units of housing. Educated exclusively in public schools, Darren received the Distinguished Alumnus Award, the highest honor given by his alma mater the University of Texas at Austin. In 2016 Time magazine named him to its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the recipient of thirteen honorary degrees and university awards.

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In 1965, James Baldwin said, “History does not refer merely to the past; history is literally present in all that we do,” which I think goes along with our meeting theme, I AM History. How does the quote and what’s happening in the United States today make you mindful of the fact that we are caught between the history from which we emerged and the history that we aspire to?

Darren Walker:

Thank you, Dina. Good morning, everyone. I am so excited to be back in Austin! Because for me this city transformed my life. And this university gave me a window into the world for a boy from a little town in Southeast Texas, between Houston and Beaumont, to have this great chance in 1978 to turn up on this campus for what was for me an absolutely transformational experience. And the doors of the world opened to me as a result of my coming to this great university. So I’m always filled with gratitude whenever I return to Austin. But, also, overwhelmed by the change of things; it’s remarkable. The question that you asked is a particularly challenging one, because I think it goes to the heart of who we are as a people. We Americans are very proud people. We have tremendous pride because we have been perceived, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville, as an exceptional society in many

Scott Mason

ways. And that exceptionalism has generated narratives about our exceptionalism, and about how special we are as a people and how unique the actual American experiment is. And that American experiment, of course, continues to be a work in progress. But that narrative has necessitated this notion of exceptionalism. And it’s very hard for a people who believe that there is something really exceptional about them and their journey as a nation to make room for painful, challenging counternarratives that are also a part of that history. I am tremendously proud of being an American, and I know that my story and my journey could only happen in this country. For that reason, I actually believe in this idea that there is something special about this country. What is special is our ability to continue to broaden the circle of opportunity, of justice. That is a struggle because of the imperfections of the narrative. Reconciling those two narratives, the narrative of exceptionalism, perfection, and this notion that there is something so uniquely imbued in our culture, with the flaws that were baked in from the beginning, and the contradictions that were articulated in our very founding documents, is really hard for us to do. I was speaking in Germany at a conference, and we were talking about racial issues in the United States. And this person said, “In Germany, we completely embrace the injustices that we perpetrated as Germans, what we did to Jews, what we did to other minorities, and marginalized people in German society. And there isn’t a city in Germany where there isn’t a marker that the German people have placed in recognition of the wrongs that they committed against other Germans.” It’s really hard for Americans, white Americans, to embrace the idea that we should be marking injustice, that we should seek to call attention to injustices perpetrated by Americans against other Americans. And that is the core challenge from a standpoint of history and heritage. How do we reconcile those two narratives? They are reconcilable, and they don’t, together, diminish how special we are. I actually believe it makes us special. I believe our ability to reconcile our history is a part of what is unique and special, because our history is unique, and the particular features of our culture and our history are unique. And the solution to reconciling is also unique. I regret that, after countless attempts, it was not until 2008 that the United States House of Representatives could muster the votes to apologize for slavery. 2008? There were hundreds of resolutions and attempts since the ending of slavery to introduce just a resolution to Congress, where Congress would simply, as a body, say, “This was wrong. And we apologize.” We could not muster the will as a Congress, as a nation, to do that, until 2008. So I think that is a profound manifestation of this challenge of reconciling our history.

Bailey: Here we are in 2017, and with our meeting

theme I AM History, it would be disingenuous if we don’t talk about things that will surely be in our history books 100 years from now. The discussion of Charlottesville, the discussion of Confederate monuments, this will be a part of our history, and we are all living it right now. And I know for many of us, people, either our colleagues or those in the community, come and they say, “How did we get here? How did we get to this moment right now?” It’s been hard for a lot of us to say, “Well, you know, there was this fact and then that fact, and this is how we got here.” How would you answer? The climate that we’re in right now, how did we get here?

Walker: Well, you all are historians and professionals.

I’m merely an amateur in all of this. But from my perspective, so much about who we are is about our identity. No matter where we are in society and whatever unit of society we talk about, we want to have pride in our history. We mythologize a lot of things. We do it in our families. I remember growing up and there was a particular family member who was really problematic. But a couple of years ago, we were at a family reunion, and my grandmother was waxing eloquently about this family member. It was this whole sort of thing that was just completely devoid of reality. But it was very important in that moment for her as the matriarch to speak pridefully about her family, even though it was populated with some people who were pretty problematic. It was very important to her. And we all do that. We all romanticize and mythologize our histories and our narratives because we need that, and that makes sense to me. I remember in college, I had a friend who was in a fraternity, and every year he would dress up in a Confederate uniform to go to their party. I thought that was problematic. But he wasn’t a racist. That organization, that fraternity, was about his identity, and belonging, and his need, the need that we all have, for community. So how do we talk about how we got here without acknowledging that or demonizing people for particular narratives? I understand why a white southerner whose ancestor fought in the Confederacy would, on the face of that, have pride because the narrative about the Lost Cause is a very romantic narrative in some ways. And it’s been propagated to actually be even more romantic than it actually was. When you talk to people about, for example, that issue of the Confederacy, it is really difficult. As an American, I would not see any effort to destroy the United States of America as a noble cause, which was the objective of the Confederacy. It was to destroy the United States of America. And so it’s difficult for me to romanticize that, because it was seeking to destroy the United States

I am tremendously proud of being an American and I know that my story and my journey could only happen in this country.

HISTORY NEWS

Great leadership today is about how we build those bridges.

Bailey:

It is complicated and it is difficult to talk about and it does make us as individuals uncomfortable, but it also makes us as professionals sometimes uncomfortable. But your writings seem to emphasize leadership and empowerment. To all of us as individuals, to us as a group of history and museum professionals, to you as a foundation—what is needed in terms of leadership?

Walker: I think courage is needed. It is very difficult to

lead with courage today, because all of you are leaders, but for many of you, you are actually disincentivized to lead with courage. The systems, the structures, around us constrain our capacity to actually speak up, speak out, be bold. Because there is greater risk today, I believe, for leaders. It is far more difficult to lead today. I think about my partner’s father who was chairman of the board of Colonial Williamsburg. He was CEO of a big company in the heyday of white men from Harvard Business School ruling the world. So I know that Colonial Williamsburg was a less complicated place to manage twenty-five years ago than it is today. And he would be challenged, profoundly challenged, and incapable of reconciling the complexity of leadership in the kinds of institutions that all of you manage, because it requires a capacity for complexity. You are a coach, a community outreach worker, you are a fundraiser, you are a professional, a credentialed professional, because so much of the American narrative is owned by people like you. It’s why all of you have education programs, it’s why all of you speak to the public in your own communities, it’s why all of you are prominent in your own communities, because you are carriers of that American narrative. And the carriers of that particular American narrative were advancing a narrative that was far more straightforward, far less complicated, far less honest and real. And so for all of you and for people who are today the writers, the people who are propagating and telling our story, it’s much

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more difficult because the narrative, rather than integrated, gets framed as oppositional: that if you are for this, you must be against that. And that is a very difficult paradigm in which to lead because you are constantly being challenged by people who want you to take their road. Really great leadership today is about how we build those bridges. It’s much harder to build a bridge than it is to build a wall. Building walls is the easy way out. To lead today and to understand how we build bridges in our communities, between people in our own communities themselves who don’t have bridges, is really difficult. But we have to speak up and speak out, as my good friend Congressman John Lewis reminds me. Progress won’t be made unless we get uncomfortable. I can only project my own experience where I am constantly with my board pushing the line. It’s because I feel like our boards can be very comfortable with the privilege that we have, with the privilege of service on the board, with the prestige and status that comes from that. With the preservation mentality that most boards bring, which is good. We want them to think about our institutions and how to ensure that we are there for the next generation. But what we need from our boards are people who want us to be bold and want our institutions to use our voices. And to be comfortable crafting a new paradigm that brings together our traditional notions of history and heritage and culture and art and all of those ideas, with our contemporary notions of justice and equity and fairness and opportunity. That’s kind of hard to do, as all of you know.

Bailey: I think you’re right, that ten years ago, museums were very different places. Twenty years ago, very different places. So, in the past, we have said “Museums are neutral spaces. They are a platform for this discussion. We don’t

“You are a coach, a you are a fundraiser, Scott Mason

of America in order to create another country that would expand and sustain the bondage of other Americans. And so I find it really challenging to come away from those facts feeling a sense of pride. Now, I’m not a white man who has forebears who fought. But in order for us to reconcile and get from where we are now to a better place, we have to be willing to engage. And we, and I will use myself, we African Americans, for example, who have very strong views about that, have to also not demonize white people as racists necessarily because they have bought into the Lost Cause narrative. And so all of us should try to understand what we need in order to get from here and that each of us has a role to play in doing that. And each of us has a role in creating the space, and the responsibility for that lies with all of us. It doesn’t just lie with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It lies with all of us.

have an opinion.” Today, do you think that museums should be neutral? Do you think that museums can be neutral?

Darren Walker: That’s a really interesting question,

Dina. You are right in saying that institutions like museums have said, “We are neutral places.” I was challenged at a conference when a person in a Q&A asked, “Why is the Ford Foundation supporting all of these artists who politicize artwork? Our museums should not be politicized by artists.” The big critique was of the Ford Foundation and our identity politics. I said to this gentleman, “Do you think with Picasso, that there’s no political message? Do you think in those Gainsborough portraits, there isn’t a message about class and whiteness and politics? Do you think that in Sargent’s portraits, in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, that it’s just neutral and beautiful?” Again, this is the challenge of the narrative. Because we have not been honest when we say that museums have been neutral spaces and now we have to become something else. Museums have always been political spaces. It may not be the kind of Kara Walker, Carrie Mae Weems, in-your-face kind of art, but it’s naïve and not honest when I hear a museum professional or a trustee say this because often what we are coming up against is the voice of privilege, because we all are privileged. I am incredibly privileged. And privileged people and privileged institutions really don’t like change, we really don’t, particularly in our own lives. I have lived without privilege, and I have lived with a lot of privilege. It is really good to have a lot of privilege—and all of the incentives offered me to just think about how I compound that privilege. So when I hear things from foundation people, including in my own institution, which is a very privileged foundation, you just see the manifestation of privilege and when you try to engage this notion that to

community outreach worker, you are a professional…”

the most privileged of us, our privilege is most invisible to us. So if you have a lot of privilege, it’s likely that you don’t even think about it. Your privilege is invisible to you because you live with it every day. And yes, it’s true, you say to your children, “You are very privileged,” but we really, in terms of how we think about the world, we kind of like our privilege. And so when you say to institutions, “You need to change,” which is part of the message, it is disruptive. It makes people feel vulnerable, and privileged people do not like feeling vulnerable. We don’t like it. We have earned a way in which we can insulate our lives to be less vulnerable, and we like that. And so privileged institutions, museums, don’t want to be vulnerable. We’re having a situation in New York City now where our Commissioner of Cultural Affairs has issued a policy to all of the organizations, and in a city like New York where our Department of Cultural Affairs— just in New York City—gives away more money than the NEA does nationally, almost every institution in New York receives money from the Department of Cultural Affairs. So he has said to these institutions, through this new policy, basically, “You have to change.” At most museums, most of the people of color are in operations and the guards. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is not a single African American curator, and in the history of the Met, there’s only been one. To overcome that, these institutions have to truly interrogate themselves. And it’s really hard to get the board to do it, because boards of these institutions are usually pretty privileged themselves. And that privilege then is made into a collective around a board table.

Bailey: And that takes courage. This idea of courage,

this need for change, what is your call to action to all of us as history and museum professionals and your call to action as a foundation?

Walker: I think the call to action is a positive vision.

We are bombarded with this idea in this political moment that something is being taken from us in terms of our heritage. And that is backward-looking. That, to me, is almost un-American. Because we have always been a forwardlooking society. We have always thought about the future as something to embrace. We as leaders have to harness that American ideal of embracing the future. And the future will be different, but that shouldn’t scare us or make us feel less positive about our country. Part of that reality is our sense of identity and what is America. I was reading a public opinion survey recently where I was surprised that a significant number of people surveyed, a significant number of Americans, said they weren’t comfortable with the notion that American identity was changing. They weren’t comfortable with the idea that American identity in the future was going to be browner, was going to be more diverse. And I think we have to speak to that and not necessarily to people who just simply don’t want change. I believe the idea that our nation will continue to evolve is a uniquely American idea. Nowhere in the world does that exist, where the ethos of the nation is that we’re going to continue to evolve and there are going to be people from around HISTORY NEWS

the world coming to our country, as we always have. The fact that more of those people are not whites with European ancestry is not a reason not to look forward to our future. We as leaders have to have that kind of conversation, because we have a responsibility and a fidelity to those very ideas and those challenging, flawed, yet beautiful and inspiring founding documents of this nation. To continue to be positive and optimistic about the changing America, the evolving America, the expanding circle of America. That is something that we as historians, as museum professionals, as the carriers of our culture, should be advancing with enthusiasm, recognizing, again, that there are people who don’t really want to embrace that. So I don’t mean to be naïve, but I mean to say we should actually in this moment, during this particularly challenging time, be emboldened to advance that idea.

Bailey:

I am going to try to summarize what we’ve talked about this morning. The first is that history is complicated. Second, change is hard. The third is that the time is now to show courage and to be courageous leaders. My final thought is that as people living this history at this moment, we have a responsibility. As people who are in the history and museum field, we have a mission to not only understand for ourselves the importance of what’s happening today, but to help others understand that as well, to meet them where they are, help them reflect on self-identity, and then think about who we are as a nation, who we are as Americans, and who we want to be.

Our call to action for this conference is to remember all of those things. This is the kickoff, so we want to go into this conference opening ourselves up to think about how we can tell deeper stories. How we can understand that change is hard but do it anyway. How we can, as individuals and as organizations, be courageous in this particular moment. Thank you, Darren, for helping us kick off this conference. We appreciate you being here in Texas. We appreciate you being candid and speaking truth to power. And hopefully everyone is leaving as inspired by what you said as I am.

Walker: Thank you. Thank you all very much. t Darren Walker (@darrenwalker on Twitter) is President of the Ford Foundation, the nation’s second largest philanthropic organization, and for two decades has been a leader in the nonprofit and philanthropic sectors. In 2016, Time magazine named him to its annual list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Dina A. Bailey is the CEO of Mountain Top Vision. She was the 2017 AASLH Annual Meeting Program Chair and serves as a member of the AASLH Council. Dina can be reached at dina@mountaintopvisionllc.com and @DinaABailey.

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HISTORY NEWS

The Vigil on the one month anniversary of the Pulse attack at the Orange County Regional History Center.

Personal and the Professional: HISTORY ORGANIZATIONS

Responding to Public Tragedies BY GEORGE W. MCDANIEL

n June 11, 2016, Adam Ware, historian with the Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando, was on a staycation at Walt Disney World. It had been an entirely normal weekend for him, riding his favorite rides, getting angry about changes to the park, and staying at a hotel on site. When he awoke the next morning, ten text messages appeared on his phone, asking “Are you okay?” He had no idea what they were talking about. Going online, he learned a man in a nightclub about ten blocks from his downtown apartment had gunned down forty-nine people, with scores wounded, physically and mentally. Terror had struck. In fact, his community had become the scene of what was then the largest public mass shooting in American history. History was now at his doorstep. He recalled, “If you work in a history museum, on paper that sounds like your dream come true. It’s far from that, far more

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Orange County Regional History Center

This is a story about the mixing of the personal and the professional in the face of public tragedy. It is derived from numerous discussions and specifically from a session at the American Alliance of Museums conference in May 2017 with presenters representing different types of organizations and responding to different tragedies at different times. With comments paraphrased into a conversational format, their experiences may have been different, but together they form a pattern informative for us all. In addition to Ware, who served as moderator, and me, they were: Amy Weinstein – Director of Collections and Senior Oral Historian at the 9/11 Memorial, who served as a fieldwork curator for the New-York Historical Society in its collecting endeavor after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001.

Pam Schwartz – Chief Curator at Orange County Regional History Center in Orlando, who spearheaded the collecting efforts after the 2016 shooting at Pulse Nightclub. The History Center collected and preserved memorial artifacts to document this difficult history in progress and to help transform the outpouring of public support and grief into a permanent collection for interpretation and healing.

complicated. As a historian, you know your responsibility is to collect, preserve, and interpret history, but how do you do that after your community has suffered a trauma completely unexpected? What do you do that Monday? That Tuesday? What do you do six Mondays from then? Your responsibilities change, and they change in ways not immediately clear.” 1 Unfortunately, those questions and others like them are increasingly becoming what we in the history profession need to plan for, as we do for disasters. Of course, each disaster is different—a fire, a flood, an earthquake, or a hurricane—and as history organizations, we still plan and prepare for them. So too with mass murders. The question is not if it will happen, but when and where, as events in Las Vegas, Texas, New York, and, most recently, Parkland, Florida, have shown. What these mass murders all have in common is that the perpetrator had come to see ordinary people—men, women, or children—as “the Other.” They became so different in the perpetrators’ minds that they should be killed. As historians, we know this warped perspective is not new. It is as old as the genocide against Native Americans, the destruction of African societies, the pogroms and the slaughter of Jews in the name of racial purity in Europe, the killing sprees in the Trojan War, and in the Bible itself. We in the history profession are not standing idly by. The “Value of History” statement provides a foundation. In keeping with its rationale, organizations are using history both to bring healing after a tragedy and to promote cross-cultural understanding and empathy before it happens. They are trying to use public tragedies as teachable moments and engage their communities. Their staffs are responding in ways both professional and personal, and in so doing, are themselves touched and changed.

Tamara Kennelly – University Archivist and Associate Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who coordinated the collecting efforts after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech. While questions could fill long lists, these three focus on personal and professional responses to tragedy. Readers are urged to contact the participants for more information and, looking forward, to keep in mind both the personal and the professional nature of our lives.

Could you give the personal side of the story? What were you doing at the time of the tragedy, how did you respond, and how were you affected as a person? AMY WEINSTEIN:

In 2001, I was a new junior curator at the New-York Historical Society. We had no TV, no radio, a little bit of Internet, and we heard something horrible had happened. Our response: paralysis, shock, wanting to help but not knowing where to help or what to do, and having to get home. As Adam Ware was speaking to the audience, I made eye contact with his curatorial staff, and they were in tears, as was I. I also made eye contact with my director and a former intern, and we immediately went back to that moment. So it’s a combination of personal and professional. No matter the tragedy, you will respond using both your profession and who you are. We were lucky at the New-York Historical Society because our president was a historian, and he wisely advised us: “I know you want to help, but you cannot fight that fire or move those steel beams, but you can be historians and think about how you can help as historians.” That is what we did—and more. PAM SCHWARTZ: I was hired a few months before Pulse happened for a very specific purpose: to be the project lead for our multimillion-dollar, full-scale museum exhibition renovation. I woke up on Sunday morning, June 12, and was sitting lazily on the couch with my dog when I got the news. At first, it was just shocking. We didn’t know how

HISTORY NEWS

George W. McDaniel

shrines sprang up all around campus. Like many others, I was in shock. I wandered out to the Drillfield and looked at the shrines. The following day, I received an email from Ed Galvin, director of archives and records management at Syracuse University, who offered condolences and told me that Syracuse had gone through a campus tragedy in 1988, when they lost thirty-five students in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103. He said they had established a major archives devoted to the victims and their families, and offered advice and assistance. His email put things into focus, and I began thinking how we were going to build the collection.

GEORGE MCDANIEL: On June 17, 2015, I was still the executive director of Drayton Hall and was at home that evening. When I woke up the next morning, I saw the news of the murders at Mother Emanuel AME Church. I felt connected because I had Visitors sign a memorial banner outside Mother Emanuel AME Church on June 20, 2015. been to services there and had friends who went there, such as Elizabeth Alston, a former member of our board and a church leader, and some of the African many were dead. It was twenty at that hour. The night American descendants of Drayton Hall. before, we had experienced the murder of the young singer On June 19 and 20, I went to pay my respects and was Christina Grimmie, shot dead in a venue five minutes from struck by the throngs of people coming to voice their my house. The nightclub was ten minutes away. sympathy, grief, and hope and expressing their sentiments I first started to panic. “What do I do? Should I go give through conversations, prayer, and song and also with artiblood? Well, I just gave blood last week, so I can’t do that facts—crosses, teddy bears, flowers, rosaries, balloons, as right now.” They’re probably going to have enough water. well as makeshift signs and banners signed in every inch You start hearing the news. Police are out investigating. available. Just as the murderer and virulent racists over time Doctors in the trauma ward are doing countless surgeries have represented our worst, these expressions testified to our within hours, trying either to save or patch up as many better angels. I thought, “This moment will vanish. What people as they can. So, for me as a historian and a curator, I can I do so it doesn’t?” tried to think of what I should be doing. I called Elizabeth Alston and asked if the church had a TAMARA KENNELLY: On April 16, 2007, at about 7 a.m., plan for preserving the memorabilia. It did not, so we agreed Seung-Hui Cho shot freshman Emily Hilscher in her dorm to call and meet with representatives from history organizaroom. Resident adviser Ryan Clark went to investigate and tions in Charleston. A week after the shootings, we met in was shot too. Two hours later, Cho went across campus to the same fellowship hall where the massacre had taken place. Norris Hall, chained shut the three main entrances, and Bullet holes were still in the ceiling. It was a sad time, but gunned down and killed thirty more students and professors also uplifting to see the life of the church going on and to in the classrooms and hallways. He wounded many more. see so many people from Charleston and across the nation He shot himself in one of the classrooms. coming to express their sympathies. I was home sick that day. My son came bursting in with his Keeping in mind that other sites of tragedy like Sandy friend and yelled, “Mom, turn on the TV.” His friend was on Hook decided not to preserve artifacts, we asked the church, his cell phone and declared, “They’re jumping out of the win“What do you want to do?” The church replied that it dows.” I was a lucky one. I knew where my son was that day. wanted to preserve the memorabilia, so we teamed with The next day stones painted with the names of each victim parishioners and began retrieving artifacts that afternoon, appeared as shrines on the Drillfield along with a large plystoring them in a side room of the fellowship hall. Since it wood board painted white for people to sign. Spontaneous

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had not rained since June 17, all the memorabilia was still in front of the church and in good condition. (Later that night, it rained.) Racial prejudice runs deep in the South, including Charleston, so I think on a personal level, I and other history professionals wanted to use this moment to help bridge racial divides. We were deeply affected by the response of family and church members and by the thousands in Charleston and across the nation declaring that hate would not prevail. Personally touched, we were asking ourselves and one another: “What can we do so this moment is not just a flash in the pan?”

How did you respond as a museum professional? AMY WEINSTEIN: For me, I think it was almost immediate. I remembered I had worked as a professional in the World Trade Center. I didn’t remember exactly which tower, but I was back in that tower in my mind, which was frightening because then you start thinking about where those fire escape stairs were. Where was the exit? What was my office like? I should remember this. I can’t remember this. What would I do? What if it was my floor? I walked home. Since the subways weren’t working, I walked from the Upper West Side to Brooklyn with two colleagues. It was a long walk. To illustrate how freaked out we were, we made a wrong turn, walked over the wrong bridge, and ended up in the wrong part of Brooklyn. Eventually we got home. I couldn’t get the Twin Towers out of my mind: Where was the bookstore? Where did I buy a coffee? I knew only one thing: I can save my photo IDs from the World Trade Center. I got home and made sure my boyfriend was okay and that people knew I was alive. I found my photo IDs and went back to work two days later. I brought my ID and business card to my boss. Other people had already done something similar. We’d already collected a

Jim Stroup

dust mask from somebody who lived downtown. It can be immediate, or it could take a couple of years, but I had no doubt. We just wanted to help. PAM SCHWARTZ: My immediate response that morning was that I needed to figure out how to begin preserving the memory of this event for the education of those in the future who aren’t here living it. Within minutes, I was sitting on the couch writing a five-page plan on how we needed to collect to preserve the story of this event and who to work with. What permissions do we need? What do we do to preserve these unique items out in the Florida sun and rain and getting destroyed? How are we going to mitigate the damage? How do we use this to help our community? That was step one. On Monday, I went into the office and handed this plan to my director. He just looked at me and said, “Nobody’s thinking about this but you.” I replied, “Well, it’s the only thing I know how to do. It is something I can do.” It wasn’t until about two weeks later that we officially got through all the questions and approvals to begin collecting. My questions were: Who do we need to talk to? Who do we get permission from? Can we collect these things? How are we going to collect them? Since then, we have professionally conducted more than 30 oral histories, collected over 5,000 items, and preserved terabytes of photography. Every individual we’ve dealt with is in a different place in their healing. Even five years later, people may be in different stages: mad, sad, happy, thankful, or any other. For individuals worried about dealing with community members who are still raw from an event, you need to be prepared and remember you never know who’s walking in and what their story is. I don’t treat Pulse stories and donations any differently from those of other people because it isn’t necessarily less emotional for them than it is for those affected by Pulse. That tragedy is just more recent, and that’s what makes it seem like it’s going to be harder. We

Tamara Kennelly, university archivist, with items from the April 16 condolence collection, and speaking to a Virginia Tech University Museum Ethics class about the April 16 Condolence Archives.

Rachel Farmer

HISTORY NEWS

TAMARA KENNELLY: The Virginia Tech shooting received intense media coverage, and people around the world responded. We received over 90,000 items from all 50 states and from 800 different countries. Our Student Union was papered with things people sent. I spoke with the Dean of Libraries about developing an archives, and she invited a team from the Library of Congress (LOC) to meet with us. They suggested we build a representative collection because we weren’t able to keep everything. They thought there was a sameness in the materials we received. Since a lot of them mentioned thoughts and prayers, the LOC team said we were getting all those prayers because we were in the South. Actually, the thoughts and prayers came from people all over the country. It wasn’t a southern thing. They also suggested that we keep the weird because that’s part of the response to tragedy. We wrote an initial proposal to create a new archives with project archivists and new computers, but never got an administrative response. Greg Beecher from University Unions and Student Activities and I made a bare-bones proposal, which got accepted. We found a site in the university’s Corporate Research Center, got cheap tables and old computers from our IT department, and hired six students to work with me. Since we could not keep everything, I decided to also make a digital collection. We didn’t have equipment for photography. I asked a university photographer to evaluate our setup, and he laughed and said I had chicken lights for the lighting. He didn’t offer to help us. Eventually a colleague loaned us lights. We hired local photographers who wanted to help. As we considered the items, I thought of them first as comfort to the families and the community. I indicated on the finding aid if a particular person was mentioned, so their family and loved ones could find the items we had honoring them. In the longer term, I thought of the collection as a research collection. How do we respond to death? What do people talk about in their writings? Why do people send things? The more I read the banners and posters, the more I saw that many people addressed big issues: gun control, mental health, war, racism, politics, bullying, school safety. We noted these references for future researchers. After reading so many messages from beyond our community, it seemed important to hear the voices of our own community. Colleagues in the Oral History Association told me, “You need to start an oral history project.” One of the LOC team was an oral historian, so that made it easier for me to suggest beginning an oral history pilot project. GEORGE MCDANIEL:

My professionalism came in quickly because, as a historian, I know that what separates history from fiction is evidence. Like many others, I’ve wanted to produce histories in exhibits, tours, or publications, but the evidence has not been preserved, so the history cannot be

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Amy Weinstein

also need to be open-minded and compassionate. We should remember that though we are doing a professional job, you and the person you’re interacting with are both just people, so treat them as you would a sister, a friend, or a neighbor who is crying.

Amy told. Since the memWeinstein orabilia at Mother of the Emanuel constituted New-York evidence, it warranted Historical preservation. My Society professionalism also salvaging told me of my limits, large so I called on other objects professionals for taken from help. We formed the the scene memorabilia comof 9/11 in spring mittee, consisting of 2002. church members and representatives from Charleston’s historical and preservation organizations, the College of Charleston, and the city of Charleston. Crucial was the work of the Charleston Archives, Libraries, and Museums Council. Working with the church and volunteers, we developed a systematic retrieval process and reviewed and organized memorabilia, including numerous Bibles, letters, quilts, art, and works on paper, mailed to the church. My professionalism also helped with commemoration. For the first anniversary of the attack, Mother Emanuel requested an exhibit and turned to us for help. With the church’s input and approval throughout, we selected the theme of healing, because healing is something we all need. For the exhibit, the city loaned a small building across the street. In light of limited space and lack of funds, we chose to display samples from the more than 400 colorful quilts sent from all over the world, many bearing messages on them, along with a case of representative artifacts. Also featured was a video of an online tribute to Mother Emanuel produced by the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, which had preserved a digital archives of television recordings, photography, and social media. A local museum design firm, HW Exhibits, donated its time and talents to help us. To generate both empathy and action, we asked visitors to reflect on what they had seen in the exhibit and to think of one issue or person that needed healing, and then to write on an index card how they might help with that healing. That card they placed in a box with all the others. With no follow-up from us, it was simply a pledge to themselves. All of these steps were informed by my professional training, and through this process, my own professionalism and that of others have been enhanced.

What were the unexpected things that happened, and how did you handle them? AMY WEINSTEIN: That’s a difficult question. I guess what surprised me was the sheer number of people who wanted to participate and share their stories. It’s been more than fifteen years, and what’s been unexpected has been the number of first responders who wanted to talk, those who saved something or made something from the steel

PAM SCHWARTZ:

or picked up something they had seen at Ground Zero; the number of people who saved a little bit of dust and ash they saw; the artists who took the ash and incorporated it into the paint as they were trying to process their feelings, because putting the ash onto the canvas somehow meant something to them. While it should not have been surprising, it was a nice surprise. It’s the depth and compassion of the human spirit that comes out. I wanted to respond to something said earlier. The collecting is not only about the aftermath and the response. Our collecting has been about the act itself. It’s about more than 3,000 lives lost, the buildings lost, and 343 firefighters and 37 Port Authority police officers lost. There were tons of steel. We had to make decisions about which piece of steel to save, which fire engine, which police car.

Every single thing that happened after the Pulse shooting was unexpected and almost more painful than that initial moment, because we had had time to think and reflect. For me, the hardest part was dealing with people’s motives—p ersonal, pro fessional, or political. Everybody had one, and you rarely recognized it at first. Was it to give blood? To leave an artifact? To create a new artwork? To allow us as an institution to go out and collect? Because we are county-governed, we confronted a lot of unfortunate political motives. Somebody could come in and say, “I’d like to do an oral history. I have a story to tell related to Pulse.” What is their motive for doing that oral history? Do they think it’s going to be put in an exhibit? Is it because they want to contribute to their healing, such as a trauma surgeon who can’t tell the media exactly what he went through that night but can tell us? Or is it about the mother who simply wants her son’s story to be remembered and wants him to be greater than the one 2:02 a.m. moment when he was massacred? To deal with the unexpected, we, as a field, need to create an entire toolkit to help other institutions responding to mass casualty events. What’s extraordinary are the differences

From our discussions, the following questions provide a sample in order to help historical organizations move forward:  What is the mission of the organization? How does responding to tragedy fit into it?

 What partnerships might be formed? What is the chain of command?

 Who decides whether memorabilia and other evidence should be collected? When?

 What are sources of funding for staff, collecting, cataloging, storing, or conservation?

 What and how much should one collect (artifacts, art, oral histories, photographs, video, social media)? What should one not collect but document digitally?

D oes the organization have the resources to do this? What will it need for collecting temporary memorials or ephemeral memorabilia?

 What collection policies best suit different types of material (artifacts, art, photographs, video, documents, digital and social media)? Where might these items be stored?

W hat is the nature of the place where the tragedy occurred? Is it public or private? Who is in charge of that place and of what happens to it? Who owns the memorabilia? Legally, can the organization collect from the site?

W ho manages communications and public relations? How should the organization communicate what it is doing and aspires to do?

W ho manages volunteers and ensures professional protocols, including security, are followed?

W hat are the goals of commemoration, and who decides? How does commemoration connect back to the victims and survivors and to families and friends?

W hat can history organizations do to promote cross-cultural understanding and prevent people from stigmatizing people different from themselves as the “Other?”

T hroughout the process, how will the organization respect the fact that each individual on staff is a combination of the professional and the personal?

HISTORY NEWS

amongst the tragedies, the different governance structures, and communities. We need to think about that and decide how we as a profession should respond.

Moving Forward In the face of public tragedies, which will inevitably happen, community-based history organizations in those communities will have to ask themselves a range of difficult questions. While the five of us followed our hearts and our professional training, if we had to do it again, we would have initiated long-range planning much earlier. In fact, we all agree, as do others, that a local, state, or national professional association or alliance, including universities, should produce a plan for preparing for and responding to public tragedies. In Boston and elsewhere, organizations are using strategies dealing with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorders. Disaster preparedness and recovery plans could serve as models, for they cover different types of disasters and provide templates which can be tailored by individual organizations to their specific needs and capabilities. Orange County Regional History Center

TAMARA KENNELLY: What was unexpected for me was that we archivists need the perspective of museum professionals, for we have a different approach for handling materials. We box things up and make finding aids and inventories. Our work is geared to bringing things to researchers in the reading room or to digitizing and making them available online. At first I didn’t realize how important the exhibit component would be. But for the last five years, I’ve worked with the art director of Virginia Tech’s Perspective Gallery, who’s curated our exhibits, and that has made all the difference. I had been thinking like an archivist, but I needed to think like a museum professional. For example, I took pictures out of their frames because that’s what archivists do. I didn’t realize that it’s so much better and easier to show things that are in their frames. You hang them up. I just didn’t know. Another example of Epilogue my learning from a curator pertains Another unexpected to a paper banner with paper daisies outcome for me has on it. I thought it was really cute. We been my involvement rolled it up. But when I unrolled it in the Charleston and wanted to display it, the curator Illumination Project, exclaimed, “You can’t show that! It’s a multiracial program, all crumpled. People will think you grounded in the orgadon’t care.” I still thought of it as nizational strategy of nice, but realized she was right. An emergency kit for conservationists includes tools polarity thinking. A If mass tragedy happens in your for quick onsite work. product of the tragedy, community, even if you’re not the project’s goal is charged with responding, you might to build a healthy community by enhancing relationships consider offering your help, because we archivists need the between police and communities and between communities perspectives of museum professionals and vice versa. traditionally separated by race. Working with churches, schools, and neighborhood associations, we’ve used history GEORGE MCDANIEL: Public tragedies are inherently and artifacts to encourage participants to voice their indiunexpected. None of us knows when or where the next vidual points of view and explore how history both haunts one will happen. Also unexpected are the consequences for us and helps us. The results have enhanced dialogue and preservation of memorabilia. While we in the history field understanding and suggested a means to prevent further are used to working with trained professionals, a church, a public tragedies. t school, a nightclub, an airport, or office building is not a history organization. Education is needed all the way around. 1 Responses paraphrased from the session, “It Could Happen to You: Respect, candor, and diplomacy are critical. How does one Collecting in the Face of Tragedy,” May 7, 2017, American Alliance of Museums tactfully but effectively ask such basic questions as: What are Annual Meeting, St. Louis, MO. your goals? Where’s your funding? What is the plan? Who’s going to pay for the supplies, storage space, staff, or exhibit George W. McDaniel is President of McDaniel Consulting, you want? Who will manage volunteers and ensure protoLLC and serves as vice chairman of Mother Emanuel cols are followed? AME’s Memorabilia Subcommittee. A native of Atlanta, While professionalism is critical, there are times one he earned his Ph.D. in history from Duke and recently has to let go. For example, there may be procedures an retired as Executive Director of Drayton Hall in Charleston, South archivist or curator believes in doing, but there is no more Carolina. He continues to devote his career to building bridges across time or funding. They can’t put documents or artifacts in cultural and racial divides through history, education, and strategic proper boxes, or there may be too many items to catalog. planning and through the Charleston Illumination Project. A frequent Relinquishing control is made all the more difficult because writer, speaker, and facilitator about such issues, he can be reached as a professional, you know the eventual outcome. at gmcdaniel4444@gmail.com or www.mcdanielconsulting.net.

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consequences B y T i m G r ove EDITOR’S

NOTE:

The 2018 AASLH Annual Meeting conference theme Truth or Consequences emanates from today’s headlines. The topic is not new for our history institutions, but its resonance seems more powerful today than at times in the past. AASLH invites you to come to Kansas City this September, where we will ask big

questions, ponder our responsibilities, and learn from each other.

liveden, a historic house property in Philadelphia, is actively changing the stories it tells. Built as the country home of the Chews, one of Pennsylvania’s largest slaveowning families, the property was an important battle site in the American Revolution. While the site long focused its interpretation on the family’s stories and the Battle of Germantown, the potential to tell a wider array of the property’s rich history remained. Deeper study of the family records in recent years has revealed new stories of enslaved people who lived and worked on the property. David Young, Cliveden’s executive director, tells of a board meeting where slavery was the topic. One board member asked, “Why are we talking about slavery all of a sudden?” Family descendant John Chew spoke up and said, “If this is the truth, then we need to be the place that tells it.” Since then, Cliveden has become a place that embraces its whole story. An introduction video to the site proclaims, “Cliveden is a place that tells the truth, that American history is difficult.” On the face of it, telling the truth may sound easy. But, when it comes to history, what is truth?1 Truth is the foundation for trust. If you want someone to trust you, you must earn that trust by being truthful. This goes for any person, organization, business, or group. The degree to which someone trusts you changes with the degree to which you tell the truth. Museums and historic sites consistently rank among America’s most trusted institutions in an age where trust in public institutions and leaders continues to erode and truth sometimes becomes murky. According to a 2018 poll, as a

source for information, history museums and sites are more trusted than the Internet, teachers, textbooks, and nonfiction books. One study showed that 80 percent of survey respondents ranked history museums as being trustworthy, higher than family members, eyewitnesses, college professors, and movies and TV. Another ranked museums highest “The truth.” on the trust scale compared with other public Dumbledore institutions.2 sighed. “It is a When you think about beautiful and the various purveyors of history, you realize that terrible thing, and museums and history should therefore sites share company with be treated with a range of history tellers. They each have a format great caution.” for conveying facts about —J.K. Rowling, the past. All of them priHarry Potter and the oritize truth to various Sorcerer’s Stone degrees. With limited time, classroom teachers and professors usually follow a more structured approach and often focus on hard facts and discussion of why events happened. Truth may be important, but context and nuance are often lacking. Parents and family members naturally talk about their memories of the past during the course of everyday life. Memories are very personal and can be shaped by any number of things. They are also fallible. Popular culture HISTORY NEWS

competes in a revenue-driven market and usually goes for the dramatic, with story as the focus. Truth may not be a priority, especially if it gets in the way of a good story. Journalist Peggy Noonan recently reflected about truth in the TV series The Crown and in the movie The Post. Both took dramatic license to make a good story just a bit better. Noonan wrote, “When people care enough about history to study and read it, it’s a small sin to lie and mislead in dramas. But when people get their history through entertainment, when they absorb the story of their times only through screens, then the tendency to fabricate is more damaging. Those who make movies and television dramas should start caring about this. It is wrong in an age of lies to add to their sum total. It’s not right. It will do harm.” Moviegoers and television watchers may not research the historical accuracy of a story they’ve just watched, but they are perceiving what they see to be a degree of truth. And that’s the consequence of straying from fact.3

History’s Changing Truths

If we continue to tell the truth, history organizations will maintain trust. But what is truth when our work is based on interpretation of the historical evidence and interpretations change? How do people know what to believe? Then again, do our audiences understand how we arrive at our conclusions? Do they care? Should they? Of course! Some of this boils down to a lack of understanding about the historical process. In Who Owns History?, historian Eric Foner writes, “The basic difference between what historians think of their task and what much of the broader public thinks the writing of history entails [is that] historians view the constant search for new perspectives as the lifeblood of historical understanding. Outside the academy, however, the act of reinterpretation is often viewed with suspicion, and ‘revisionist’ is invoked as a term of abuse.” A Few Good Men He adds, “The most difficult Lt. Daniel Kaffee truth for those outside the (Tom Cruise), ranks of professional historians “I want the to accept is there often exists truth!” more than one legitimate way of recounting past events.”4 Col. Nathan R. Jessep Truth is often stranger than (Jack Nicholson), fiction, as the saying goes, “You can’t and definitely more complex handle the and nuanced. History is not truth!” just what happened in the past. As historians know, truth comes from careful analysis of evidence. What evidence backs up the story? We in the history field know that truth is based on an underlying complexity, on multiple perspectives and sources. It is our responsibility to help our audiences see that complexity and to understand how we reach our conclusions based on solid historical research.

The Need for Transparency

This is why transparency is so important. Truth demands transparency and an explaination of how we arrived at our conclusions. In scholarly works, this includes the endnotes

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and the bibliography. Exhibitions and programs don’t utilize those formats. But shouldn’t we still find ways to explain how we’ve arrived at our conclusions? Or better yet, encourage our visitors to look closely at the evidence and help them draw some of their own conclusions? All writers know the maxim, “Show, don’t tell.” This creates more engaging writing. All too often, our history institutions only do the latter. Tours and exhibitions typically tell what our researchers have concluded. They don’t ask questions, offer contrasting perspectives, show conflicting evidence. They don’t challenge visitors to draw their own conclusions. This passive approach leaves out the very actions that attract many of us to history: the digging into historical sources. When we direct visitors to look at our sources and to ask questions, we draw them into the historical process. We not only make the learning more active, but we begin to teach the skill of critical thinking. One of the values of history, as outlined in the History Relevance initiative’s “Value of History” statement, is critical thinking: History teaches critical twenty-first-century skills and independent thinking. “The practice of history teaches research, judgment of the accuracy and reliability of sources, validation of facts, awareness of multiple perspectives and biases, analysis of conflicting evidence, sequencing to discern causes, synthesis to present a coherent interpretation, clear and persuasive written and oral communication, and other skills that have been identified as critical to a successful and productive life in the twenty-first century.”5 Years ago I worked on the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition that traveled the nation. One of the development team’s challenges was how to approach the story of Sacagawea, the young Indian woman who accompanied the explorers on their expedition. Her story is well known—or at least people think they know her. Visitors expected to see her story in the exhibition. (After all, an artist’s guess of her likeness is currently on a U.S. dollar coin.) But, the truth is that very little historical evidence exists about her. Her real story is murky. Though she is mentioned various times in the explorers’ journals, she didn’t serve as a guide to the explorers (a common misconception); two tribes claim her heritage. In the end, we acknowledged the lack of historical evidence and presented a variety of source materials—a baptismal certificate, various letters, oral tradition. We challenged visitors to draw their own conclusions about Sacagawea and posited questions to guide them. Visitors could then compare their conclusions with our historian’s conclusions. We wanted visitors to understand the need to look critically at a story they thought they knew. The more we challenge preconceived ideas, the more people will question our motives and our sources. At some point our audiences will ask themselves, “Can I trust the teller?” With family history, it may be a case of blind trust: we believe Grandma is telling the truth; we don’t have a reason to question Dad’s recollections. With a history institution, trust may or may not be as easily earned. This questioning is vital to society. Stanford professor Sam Wineburg argues that “We need to raise citizens who ask themselves, ‘Is this true? Who is saying so? What’s the nature of the evidence?’” Taught in this way, he says, “History is a training ground for democracy.”6

The history process shouldn’t be a mystery; it’s a quest for truth. We need to include the public in this quest. When we don’t have all of the answers, which is most of the time, we need to acknowledge it. In Telling the Truth about History, historians Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob write, “If the public is perplexed about the meaning of history and how it is interpreted, then historians are at least partly to blame. It is time historians took responsibility for explaining what we do, how we do it, and why it is worth doing.” Explaining the process needs to be intentional and has costs. In exhibitions, for example, this requires setting aside precious real estate. It may mean you will not have room to tell all of the content you wanted to. But, in the end, isn’t it worth it to educate people about critical thinking?7

Telling the Whole Story

Another side to truth is in what’s not told. Our visitors may not think about the fact that we make decisions all the time about what stories to tell. Whose story gets told and whose story doesn’t? Do we share with our public how we decided to tell the stories we tell? What is the whole story? For many years, visitors to historic plantations in the South did not hear much about the enslaved communities who lived and worked on them. In Colonial Williamsburg, one of America’s premier history destinations, the discussion of African American history has evolved over the years. In the eighteenth century, at least half of the city’s residents were people of color, many of them enslaved. Yet in the organization’s early years, historical interpretation focused almost exclusively on its white story. Today, visitors hear multiple perspectives and are challenged to put themselves into the shoes of many types of historic characters. They hear enslaved characters talking about hard decisions they confront related to the desire for freedom. The concept of freedom becomes richer and more meaningful with the added context. There are various reasons why stories have not been told in the past: sometimes it is intentional, sometimes it’s due to lack of evidence, and sometimes we simply do not know. Telling the truth might mean acknowledging the stories that weren’t told and explaining why. In 2004, the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Exhibition took a vastly different interpretive approach to the expedition than in previous exhibitions. The expedition’s story had usually been told in the context of the natural world. The explorers were once identified as the first people to see a grand world of new animals and plants as they traversed an exotic, unpeopled landscape. The bicentennial exhibition instead examined the cultural landscape. Working with tribal advisors, the development team attempted to show various tribal perspectives and the vast trade networks Lewis and Clark traversed. The team worked to present a view from the river and from the riverbank. Lewis and Clark made many assumptions based on the lens through which they looked. Their assumptions were often wrong. It is a universal truth that we all make assumptions and get it wrong at times. It was a step closer to the whole truth. Staff members at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s home in Virginia, are making changes in the stories they tell as they restore the site’s slavery landscape. The man who wrote “all

men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence held hundreds of people in bondage over his lifetime. For many years, Monticello has offered dedicated tours about the plantation’s enslaved population. But the organization made national news recently when it announced its intentions to restore one of the quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman with whom Jefferson fathered at least six children. The restoration allows staff to more completely tell this complex story. This is an example of building on truths. If Monticello chose to ignore recent scholarship, it would simply not be telling the whole story.

Challenges to truth

Clearly, a part of the past can include baggage. Historian John Fea writes that the past can shame us. “The story of human history is filled with accounts of slavery, violence, scientific backwardness, injustice, genocide, racism, and other dark episodes that might make us embarrassed to be part of the human race. If “Whoever is our fellow human beings can careless with the engage in such sad, wrong, or truth in small disgraceful acts, then what is stopping us from doing the matters cannot same?” As part of our job, be trusted with public historians need to help important the public navigate the complex reactions that come with matters.” telling and processing truth. —Albert Einstein Fea writes of a certain humility that comes with studying the past. History done well helps people to be empathetic with people from the past, an attempt to step into their shoes and try to look at the world as they did. According to historian John Lewis Gaddis, “Getting into other people’s minds requires that your own mind be open to their impressions—their hopes and fears, their beliefs and dreams, their sense of right and wrong, their perceptions of the world and where they fit within it.”8 As we attempt to understand another person’s world, we gain empathy for them. Empathy, of course, is not the same as sympathy. Sympathy is feeling compassion or sadness for someone’s hardship. Empathy is an understanding of a person’s motivations for a decision or action—not necessarily an agreement with their motivations. It is striving to understand their point of view. Part of the complexity of the past is the multiple ways to look at a person or event. By widening perspective, we can help encourage visitors to stretch their thinking. As Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob write, “Even in a democracy, history involves power and exclusion, for any history is always someone’s history, told by that someone from their partial point of view…. The effort to establish historical truths itself fosters civility. Since no one can be certain that his or her explanations are definitely right, everyone must listen to others. All human histories are provisional; none will have the last word.” We start to gain empathy when other perspectives make sense to us and we can understand why someone acted in a certain way.9 HISTORY NEWS

Consequences of Not Telling the Truth

Are there consequences to avoiding the complexity of the past? What do they look like? How is society impacted when we fail to show multiple perspectives and the gray areas of history? What are specific challenges to showing complexity? Are there costs? A risk of telling the truth is that some truth is ugly and may not be something easy to hear. But if education is at the core of our mission, then we must find ways to speak about tough topics in ways that are thought-provoking but not offensive or condescending. In the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, an exhibition panel reads: “Five hundred years ago a new form of slavery transformed Africa, Europe, and the Americas. For the first time people saw other human beings as commodities—things to be bought, sold, and exploited to make enormous profits. This system changed the world.” Just to the right of this text is a lone quote: “We’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth”—John Hope Franklin. The museum’s founding director, Lonnie Bunch, often recalls Franklin’s full quote: “If you tell the unvarnished truth, people will be changed.” The truth is that humanity has potential for good and bad. If a historian’s job is to ask questions and to uncover truth, then the questions we ask must include why. Historian Tony Judt writes, “The historian’s task is not to disrupt for the sake of it, but to tell what is almost always an uncomfortable story and explain why the discomfort is part of the truth we need to live well and live properly.” He argues, “A well-organized society is one in which we “In a democracy, know the truth about ourselves collectively, not one history thrives in which we tell pleasant lies on a passion for about ourselves.” Museum knowing the exhibitions in the future will most likely interpret difficult truth.” recent events that horrified —Telling the Truth our nation. They will look at about History the event, the impact on the community, the response, and ponder the question of why. We cannot avoid asking why. Museums of the Holocaust, of civil rights, and of slavery are willing to ask the tough questions.10 So, what are the consequences of not telling the truth? Several come to mind: •T rust can erode. An institution can’t assume that just because it enjoys a great deal of trust from the public in a given time, this trust will remain high. The trust relationship, based on truth, must be maintained and nurtured. •H istory becomes one dimensional. The richness and complexity is lost along with the nuances that provide insight into humanity’s motives and secrets. The diversity of life is stifled. • Society is dumbed down. By only presenting an easy story, the public is not encouraged to think critically and to ask hard questions. Society fails to understand connections between past and present and the possibilities to end dan-

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gerous established thought patterns. Both the accomplishments and failures of the past must be studied. • The ugliness of the past is ignored. When this happens, society loses out and fails to have an understanding of how it got to the present point. • Community ties fray. An imbalance of trust results if there is a perception that some communities receive different treatment than others, that some community stories are more important than others. It’s a given that “You shall know our history instituthe truth and the tions must tell the truth will set you truth. But the nature of that truth is up to free.” us. As educational —Jesus, John 8:32 institutions, our goal is to help the public better understand the past and learn its lessons. “The making of history is a dynamic process,” writes Sam Wineburg. “What happened in the past wasn’t fated or meant to be. It occurred because human actors shaped their destinies by the choices they made, just as people today shape their futures by the choices they make.”11 Our responsibility to truth extends beyond the obvious. If we want history to be relevant, we must tell the whole story in all its complexity (to the degree that we can), ask tough questions of the past, and help the public understand why we reach the conclusions we do. And teach some empathy along the way. By teaching people to take a closer, critical look, we are contributing to the health of our democratic society. t For more than twenty years, Tim Grove has worked at the most popular history museums in the United States, helping millions of people get acquainted with the past. In addition to serving as the chair of the 2018 AASLH Program Committee, Tim is also author of A Grizzly in the Mail and Other Adventures in American History, and co-author of The Museum Educator’s Manual. He also originated and wrote the “History Bytes” column in History News. He can be reached at authortimgrove@ gmail.com. 1

Email to the author from David Young, January 18, 2018.

AASLH 2018 broader population sampling, conducted by Wilkening Consulting; Bob Beatty, An American Association for State and Local History Guide to Making Public History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), 227. 2

3 Peggy Noonan, “The Lies of The Crown and The Post,” Wall Street Journal, December 28, 2017. 4 Eric Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002), xvi-xvii. 5

See historyrelevance.com/value-history-statement/.

Beatty, 112.

Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1995), 9. 7

8 John Fea, Why Study History? (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 61; John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 124. 9

Appleby, et al., 10.

Tony Judt, “Postwar: An Interview with Tony Judt,” Historically Speaking: The Bulletin of the Historical Society, VII, no. 3 (January/February 2006). 10

11 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 160-61.

Making History Relevant By John R. Dichtl Editor’s Note: This article is adapted from a speech delivered at the Mountain-Plains Museums Association Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, in October 2017.

One morning when I was a history graduate student, about twenty years ago this past fall, I had crossed a busy street on my university’s campus to take a break from studying in the main library. I wanted to see if the grass was greener in the business school library, away from the liberal arts and sciences. On that crisp fall morning I got to the business library reading room and began to find my way around, browsing across many shelves of attractively displayed magazines and journals. Skimming reports on investing, articles about marketing, publications by economists, and perspectives on entire industries that I had never heard of before, I was enjoying the break from my studies. And then I saw this odd thing. A glossy magazine about history. As far as I could tell, it was the only history-related journal or magazine in the room. Looking around, I wondered what it was doing in a business library. Sure enough, there were several back issues stacked beneath the current issue facing me, the one with the cover story, “Were the Pharaohs Blond?”… What? Another article listed on the cover was about Adolph Hitler as master military strategist, and there were articles about Anglo-Saxon artifacts in Britain. I looked at the several back issues stacked there, and each and every one seemed to have an article about World War II Germany on the cover and included a couple of articles that were borderline eugenical or racist. So I investigated, using the early Web—and I mean the early Web. These were the days of Mosaic, I think. Although I couldn’t find this strange magazine mentioned, I did find that someone in 1996 had already started tracking white supremacy groups. The editor and editorial board members of this magazine had connections that would indicate this wasn’t a harmless history publication. After a few days of research, I was convinced that this was a neo-Nazi publication. I approached the head business

school librarian and asked him why this publication was in his collection. He answered, “Why not?” and refused to do anything. I pointed out that this magazine was about the only history publication I could find in his library, and that across the street at the main library’s periodicals room there were maybe a couple hundred history journals and magazines. Over the next several days I took the matter up with a couple of professors, who didn’t seem to care. One told me he didn’t believe in the kind of censorship I was suggesting and that these publications were better off in the light of day. That didn’t sit right with me. The really pernicious effect, the thing that worried me most, was the idea of someone else in that business school library wandering by and thinking that that history magazine was normal and acceptable. What were the ramifications of future business leaders considering this magazine a typical model for historical inquiry and interpretation? After taking the matter up with an associate dean of the library system, I was able to get the magazine moved to the main library’s periodicals room where it would appear alongside all the other history publications. I suppose that might imply another kind of legitimacy, but let the reader beware. At least there would be other current, verifiable, evidence-based, debated history journals and magazines to which a reader could make comparisons and contrasts. What I want to emphasize is the role our museums and historic sites and history organizations have had and will have as places of authenticity and critical thinking, where we use actual facts and evidence in our collections to offer interpretations and arguments—and to present ideas IN CONTEXT. Our historical institutions are places where audiences experience not the lone fact or object in isolation, but in a very rich context of other objects, documents, landscapes, arguments, and interpretations. 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.1 HISTORY NEWS

David Knapp

Teach students

Sam Wineburg

delivering the keynote address at the 2015 AASLH Annual Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky.

We should talk with our visitors about how it is that we do our work. We have to show, now and then, that our authority is earned. Museums and other history organizations need to play a more visible and active part in what is increasingly an information war. We can’t afford to miss the opportunities for demonstrating why we are voices of authority—and part of the effort to seek truth. When receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 National Book Awards, Annie Proulx told the crowd, “We are living through a massive shift from representative democracy to something called viral direct democracy, now cascading over us in a garbage-laden tsunami of raw data.”2 If you think back to the immediate aftermath of the mass shooting in Las Vegas last year, alternative news networks and various malicious media disruptors were jamming Facebook and Google News feeds immediately. Within a few hours of the killing, more than the usual crackpot conspiracy theorists were spreading toxic, false news about the supposed political leanings of the shooter, linking him incorrectly to people he wasn’t really linked to, and reporting that the FBI had already identified him as connected to Islamic terrorists. All of this caused real harm, echoed around the Internet, and probably found permanent life in corners of some servers and some heads. Of course the same cycle occurred after the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. With massive connectivity, instantaneous sharing of information, lots of people across the globe have a back door into our heads and into our neighbors’ minds. Laura Galante, a cybersecurity expert in Washington, D.C., has said: We must recognize that this place where we’re increasingly living, which we’ve quaintly termed cyberspace, isn’t defined by ones and zeroes, but by information and the people behind it. This is far more than a network of computers and devices. This is a network composed of minds interacting with computers and devices.” “And for this network there’s no encryption, no firewall, no two-factor authentication, no password complex enough to protect you. What you have for defense is far stronger, it’s more adaptable, it’s always running the latest version. It’s the ability to think critically, [to] call out falsehoods.3

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Now, developing and honing that ability, training people to think a bit more skeptically but in an informed way, that’s what schools and colleges and universities are doing. But formal education for 67 percent of Americans stops after high school. We have the entire rest of our lives to go through with new things like Facebook, Google’s search algorithms, and Twitter to figure out, and to understand how they are affecting our politics, news, cultural debates, and workspaces.4 As places of informal education, history museums, historical societies, and historic sites have a vital role to play in helping people to continually refine their abilities to think critically. This is the most relevant thing we can do! Sam Wineburg, a Stanford University historian of education has talked a lot about history educators helping people become better thinkers and citizens. You may know him for his book Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. In that book, Wineburg closely observed students, teachers, parents, and historians, and concluded that it really is an unnatural thing to think historically. Historical thinking involves a choreography of contextualizing and “sourcing” documents, images, and other materials to determine who created them, how, and why. Historians also corroborate their primary sources, drawing linkages between them and related materials, making comparisons or contrasts as well to the interpretations offered by other historians. Wineburg was the keynote speaker at the 2015 AASLH Annual Meeting, and he described a pretty grim situation. He talked about the Internet having destroyed authority and called on us all to become better fact-checkers, better consumers of information, and to teach students how to discern fact from fiction on websites. In an article last fall, “The Challenge That’s Bigger than Fake News,” Wineburg and three colleagues really sounded the alarm. Students are not just pretty much unable to distinguish fact from fiction, Wineburg’s new study shows, students—like most of the reading public—are getting absolutely LOST in the gray areas of the Internet.5 The problem is not so much determining which information in the media and online is true vs. false, but navigating through the multitudes of grayness. There’s bias, there’s skew to information, “half-true headlines,” “partisan agendas,” and efforts to “manipulate data.” Unfortunately we are all really bad at three things, according to Wineburg and his colleagues: 1) identifying who’s behind the information presented; 2) evaluating the evidence presented; and 3) investigating what other sources say. All of us, not just students, continue to be too credulous of information on the Internet and shared through social media. What the article concludes is that we should be teaching a couple of things—and I am suggesting that history organizations have a role to play here, too.

to use Wikipedia wisely…to read laterally.

Eastern State Penitentiary

and inclusion.” It has united around the statement: “Mass First, teach students to use Wikipedia wisely. Wikipedia Incarceration Isn’t Working,” and shows the history of U.S. has high standards of verifiability, flags contentious issues incarceration and the fact that our rate of locking people up and the debates that happen over them, and offers links is dramatically higher than any other nation on earth.6 outward. That is, we have to teach students and other Kelley and his colleagues are finding that “many leireaders not to expect isolated authoritative voices but the sure travelers really will engage with difficult subjects.” sound of conversation, reasoned debate, and consensus Attendance at their history museum is up 40 percent since forming among individuals and institutions that agree to they began addressing thorny issues, and it grew by 12 peradhere to basic rules of evidence-based knowledge creation. cent in the past year alone. While 4 percent complain that Wikipedia makes visible the steps taken to verify the inforcontemporary content detracted from their visit, 91 percent mation it presents. of their visitors acknowledge that they learned something Second, we need to teach students—or, really, any thought provoking.7 informal learner who enters our institutions—“to read This brings me to my concluding thought. The vast laterally.” Spend more time “hopping off an unfamiliar majority of museum and historic site visitors want to be site almost immediately, opening new tabs, investigating deeply engaged—whether or not that was on their mind outside the site itself” to learn more about it, to see which when they chose to visit our institutions. There’s a potential sites link to it and what other sites say about it. This lateral for informal learning here that far exceeds what’s possible on reading is a form of contextualizing. It is similar to putting Facebook or in what most people could construct for theman unfamiliar history magazine alongside dozens of other selves jumping from website to website. history magazines and journals to be able to compare how it Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused is making its arguments, presenting its evidence, its authors, Success in a Distracted World, a recent business bestseller, and their other work. argues that our work culture’s shift toward the shallow, the My point here in this time of information war is that histechnologically over-enhanced drive to stay connected and tory organizations offer help with contextualizing. This is a therefore constantly preoccupied with emails, tweets, and fundamental way that history is relevant. texts, creates an economic and personal opportunity for This brings me to a related point, which I have borrowed people who prioritize depth and creativity instead. That is from a friend, Robert Weyeneth, of the University of South an opportunity, too, for institutions, such as museums, that Carolina and past president of the National Council on prioritize depth and creativity. Depth, Newport says, is the Public History. Weyeneth argued that public historians and ability to focus without distraction for long periods of time museums should pull back the curtain on our interpretive on a cognitively demanding task. In other words, doing a process and be more transparent about what we do. kind of cognitive craftsmanship.8 Our exhibit labels should sometimes explain why a particCultivating a deep work ethic, one able ular object was used to make a point and why not a different to decouple from distraction, will proone from the collection. Why we have this painting or are duce crucial personal and economic bentelling this story and not another one, how this letter surefits because, according to Newport, the vived but why it was that hundreds of other letters did not. ability to perform deep work is becomWe should explain how our evidence is cared for, selected, ing increasingly rare at exactly the same preserved, and marshalled to make an argument, and what it time it is becoming increasingly valuable means in the context of other evidence. We can model conin our economy. In other words, helptextualization and investigation and even healthy, educated ing students and visitors become critical skepticism for our audiences. users of information in the civic sphere Now another step that museums are taking, as you all not only will help save our republic— know, is to move beyond neutrality. It is okay to present an but will make those individuals more argument—as long as we are up front about doing so. As Sean valuable on the job market. 9 Kelley, director of interpretation at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site in Philadelphia, noted in a recent issue of History News, the ideal of being neutral is holding back museums and historic sites. For his own institution, attempting to not take sides on an issue “Provided us an excuse,” he says, “for simply avoiding thorny issues of race, poverty, and policy that we weren’t ready to address.” Taking a neutral stand also meant an acceptance of the status quo, or silence about the power relationships and dominance that determined how that status quo came to be. Eastern State therefore is trying to “shift [its] focus from neutrality to critical thinking Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration at Eastern State Penitentiary Historic Site.

HISTORY NEWS

People can, step by step, retrain themselves… Museums and historic sites are places that can cultivate this deep, focused attention as well as wide, contextualized, lateral thinking. As Cal Newport spends most of the book explaining, the regimen for doing deep, focused work is difficult and takes time. But people can, step by step, retrain themselves to once again focus on deep, creative, analytical tasks. Museums and history institutions are places where visitors can benefit from delving into sustained engagement with information and new ideas. With context and interpretive assistance, visitors can practice discerning black and white from gray. In Deep Work, Newport highlights something that science writer Winifred Gallagher pointed out in her 2009 book Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life—our brains construct our worldview based on what we choose to pay attention to, rather than on what our circumstances happen to be. People who want enriching, fulfilling experiences, people who want to escape the algorithm-induced bubbles of information on the Internet, will pay attention to historic sites and museums for challenging, beyond-neutral exhibits and programs. Places that challenge their thinking and unveil methods of reasoning. In this great struggle over information and knowledge, history organizations and history leaders have an absolutely crucial role to play. The stakes are high. As AASLH’s 2018 Annual Meeting theme points out, there will be Truth or there will be Consequences. t

John R. Dichtl is AASLH President and CEO and previously was the Executive Director of the National Council on Public History. He can be reached at dichtl@aaslh.org. 1 See AASLH 2018 broader population sampling, conducted by Wilkening Consulting, February 2018, at http://blogs.aaslh.org/most-trust-museums/. AAM “Museum Facts” website still lists this 2001 study, “Lake, Snell, Perry public opinion survey commissioned by the American Alliance of Museums (2001)” at http:// www.aam-us.org/about-museums/museum-facts. It and many in the field still refer to David Thelen and Roy Rosezweig’s Presence of the Past: The Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998); and also to Reacher Advisors’ Museum R+D, “Museums and Trust,” Monthly Memo 1, no. 8 (June 2015): 2. 2 Lynn Neary, “National Book Awards, the Industry’s Oscars, Awarded in New York,” National Public Radio, November 16, 2017. 3 Laura Galante, “How (and Why) Russia Hacked the U.S. Election,” Ted Talks, April 2017. 4 U.S. Census Bureau, “Highest Educational Levels Reached by Adults in the U.S. since 1940,” March 30, 2017. 5 Sarah McGrew, Teresa Ortega, Joel Breakstone, and Sam Wineburg, “The Challenge That’s Bigger than Fake News: Civic Reasoning in a Social Media Environment,” American Educator (Fall 2017). All quotes in the next three paragraphs cite this article as well. 6

Sean Kelley, “Beyond Neutrality,” History News 72, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 23-27.

Ibid.

Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016), 89-91. 8

Ibid., 71.

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Award Winner Spotlight

By Christie M. Weininger

Centennial Is Catalyst for Change

“Y

would be part of the new exhibits. We designed all capital campaign materials in-house. By the end of the campaign, we raised $1.8 million, the largest amount in our organizational history. With those funds, we redesigned 8,000 square feet of core exhibit space on two floors. The new exhibits tell a more compelling story about President Rutherford and First Lady Lucy Hayes and the America in which they lived. We installed a lift to an exhibit gallery previously inaccessible to people with mobility issues and built a new handicapped-accessible main entrance to the museum with a unique design, the first of its kind in Ohio. (The previous handicapped entrance had been a lift at the back of the museum that brought guests into a storage closet and, from there, into the museum.) We replaced cracked and shifting pathways around the rose garden and the president and first lady’s tombs, supplanted rotted wayfinding signs around the grounds with beautiful new ones, repaired a large water stain in the museum’s rotunda, and painted and made repairs to the exterior of the Hayes home. Operating budget growth in 2015 and 2016 provided funds for the reinstatement of staff to full-time hours and compensation, the filling of three long-vacant staff positions, and the addition of two new positions. We also enhanced our relationships with partners such as the City of Fremont. City workers installed new citywide directional signs to our site and also Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums

our exhibits look like they We had a long list of items that needed were designed by high schoolattention. We needed an ambitious straters.” That was a comment we egy to help us envision and become the received on a survey in 2013 as we began type of organization we wanted to be a new strategic planning process. Ouch! in three years’ time. Our strategic plan Other comments indicated that while helped us organize and prioritize tasks people loved and appreciated much about and decide where to strike first. While our organization, we were losing releone group of staff started dreaming big vance in some key areas. And no wonder, in terms of exhibit design, solving accesthe exhibits the commenter sibility issues, improvwas referring to were foring infrastructure, and ty-five years old! addressing deferred The Great Recession maintenance, other staff, had been tough for the along with our board, Hayes Presidential Library began to work on fundand Museums. And even ing. In order to complete before that, significant cuts the most critical work, we in state funds had dealt a needed to raise at least tremendous blow. From $1.3 million. We tapped This project received a 2017 Leadership in History Award. 2002 to 2012 we experienced into our endowment reductions in hours of operfund to hire a consulting ation, staff size, and salaries. company to perform a Deferred maintenance expenses kept capital campaign feasibility study. They growing, though, into the hundreds of recommended we set a campaign goal of thousands of dollars. Yet the staff soldiered $1 million, less than the minimum amount on. Its dedication and passion for the job, we needed. After some organizational plus the tenacity they and organizational soul-searching, the board decided to take a leadership showed during the “dark risk and launched a $1.3 million campaign. decade” gave me, as its new executive Staff worked hard to develop plans for director, hope. exciting, relevant, high-impact projects. We would celebrate the centennial anniWe obtained bids and set a project priversary of our founding in 2016, and we ority order. As funds were secured, we wanted it to be brilliant. That milestone authorized the next project on the priorbecame the catalyst for transformational itized list. Our staff developed creative change in our organization. Our new straways to raise funds, including a “white tegic plan would outline the path forward. glove” event where donor prospects were We had three years to plan something big. able to don white curator gloves and hold The clock was ticking. artifacts that had been in storage and

Above: The largest Hayes Family Reunion ever hosted descendants from twenty-two states and Canada. Right: OSU and local high school bands

play for a crowd at the grand reopening event.

HISTORY NEWS

Award Winner Spotlight > Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums

repaved downtown streets in anticipation of high attendance for centennial events. Budget growth in 2015 and 2016 provided funds for the reinstatement of staff to full-time hours and compensation, the filling of three long-vacant staff positions, and the addition of two new positions. Our public image needed an upgrade as well. A study revealed that “center” was ambiguous to potential visitors, so we changed our name from “Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center” to “Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library and Museums.” We designed a new logo that incorporated elements unique to the life of Rutherford Hayes. Approximately 6,000 people visited our site for the grand reopening of the museum during our centennial weekend celebration in May 2016. It featured performances by members of The Ohio State University Marching and Athletic Bands (Hayes helped found OSU), “The President’s Own” United States Marine Band quartet, keynote speakers Cokie Roberts and the Ambassador of Paraguay (Hayes settled a boundary dispute in

The grand reopening event drew approximately 6,000 visitors to the museum.

Paraguay’s favor), and the largest Hayes family reunion ever, with nearly 200 descendants from twenty-two states and Canada. Throughout 2016, life-sized cutouts of Rutherford and Lucy Hayes embarked on a nationwide goodwill tour, visiting the home or library of every U.S. president in numerical order. This prompted Facebook interactions between our organization, each host site, and the many people who followed the journey. To conclude the tour, staff members and Hayes descendants took the cutouts to Washington, D.C., where we participated in behind-

the-scenes experiences at sites connected to President Hayes: the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, and South Mountain Battlefield. We handled presidential artifacts and stood where Hayes stood, which has helped the staff better understand and share with the public the story of Rutherford B. Hayes and his era. As a result, we have become more relevant to the public we serve and strengthened connections with local and national organizations and the Hayes family. And, perhaps most importantly, we gained confidence in ourselves and our ability to take risks. And now we’re ready for the next big thing. t Christie M. Weininger is executive director of the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library & Museums in Fremont, Ohio. She can be reached at cweininger@rbhayes.org.

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Book Reviews > The Stages of Memory: Reflections on Memorial Art, Loss, and the Space Between By James E. Young (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016), xvi + 209 pp. Reviewed by Samira R. Chambers

n the midst of our country’s discord over Civil War monuments, James E. Young’s study of memorials is relevant. While Young solely focuses on memorials remembering the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers; the Holocaust; and the Utøya, Norway massacre, his discussion of the stages of memory provides insight into how individuals and collective communities remember and process history. By expounding on creative processes, selection procedures, and community dialogue surrounding memorials, Young reveals the multiple narratives and experiences a memorial must honor. While reading the book in its entirety provides a fuller understanding of the significance of memorial art, its chapters can be read out of order and still be impactful. Each asks readers how to articulate loss and which memories of an event a community should recognize. Furthermore, chapters serve as case studies that consider the issue museums, artists, and educators are battling: Whose story are our institutions stealing and retelling? As Young illustrates, this authoritarian mindset has been the precedent for monuments around the world that aim to dictate and perpetuate a single narrative of an event, despite dissonant memories associated with the tragedy. Those interested in history, current political issues, architecture, and even tourists will find this book thought provoking. Young’s study is also beneficial for those wishing to learn more about the Holocaust, as he dedicates five chapters to memorial art informed by and created to remember and articulate the massive loss of lives it caused. Topics in his book are painful as they require readers to remember, relive, or learn about tragedies across the globe, yet Young treats the material in a caring, informed manner. Young’s voice is that of a thoughtful postmodernist who genuinely sees

memorials as actively healing but unable to be completely redemptive. His argument further communicates that some voids cannot be repaired by our own efforts. Astute to the variety of purposes monuments must serve, Young admits no one-sizefits-all. Following Maya Lin’s example with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he argues we must learn to better articulate loss, allow for absence and silence to breathe, and accept that a memorial is neither designed, nor able, to fix or heal all wounds. All a memorial can hope to accomplish, he posits, is to provide a necessary and inclusive space for individuals to remember, process, and heal in a way appropriate for each person. t Samira R. Chambers graduated from the University of Chattanooga in 2015 with a Bachelor’s degree in English education. Currently, she is pursuing her Master’s in art history and a certificate in museum studies at the University of Memphis. She can be reached at srahbe@memphis.edu.

Digital Preservation Essentials By Erin O’Meara and Kate Stratton (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2016), 135 pp. Reviewed by Donna J. Baker

he Trends in Archival Practice series extends core archival knowledge and promotes best practices by providing specific instruction and advice for subjects too complex to address in general archive fundamentals texts. A subject as complex and intimidating as digital preservation demands such a module. Digital objects are an everyday part of the archivist’s work, and they must receive appropriate levels of appraisal, description, arrangement, and preservation as any other acquisition. Digital Preservation Essentials places the processing of digital material squarely within everyday practice, not as an afterthought. Erin O’Meara and Kate Stratton are the authors for Digital Preservation Essentials, comprised of “Module 12: Preserving Digital Objects” and “Module 13: Digital

Preservation Storage.” Each lays out best practices, demonstrates the application of accepted practice, and recommends workflows and other requirements for archivists. Each module has its own glossary, allowing readers to have vocabulary support and the ability to enhance knowledge without completely disengaging from the material to look up words or concepts. The modules also feature appendices for further reading and case studies to demonstrate how archivists might move to implementation in their repositories. The authors use diagrams and charts sparingly, but effectively. Altogether, this text is only 135 pages, suggesting that the focus is truly on practical information and not on theoretical concepts. The takeaway of these modules is how essential it is that archivists take immediate, proactive, systematic action to preserve digital objects. Archivists and public historians know data is lost by obsolescence and poor application of preservation standards. Those tasked with managing archives must create meaningful workflows now and stop postponing digital preservation. While I recommend this book to archivists with a bit of training and experience in digital preservation, I do not recommend it as a means to gain digital preservation expertise for those who have had the archivist title thrust upon them. These modules are neither designed for, nor directed to, novices. That stated, the recommended readings sections are useful to anyone wanting to know more about digital preservation. They are excellent core resources on theory and practice, and also provide novices with limited resources the vocabulary required to reach out to the experts and form collaborative digital projects. t Donna J. Baker is the University Archivist for Middle Tennessee State University. She received her M.A. in history from Eastern Illinois University and her M.S.L.S. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She can be reached at donna.baker@mtsu.edu. HISTORY NEWS

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

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 contâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;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 Museum of Historical & Culture

Portsmouth, NH

Rochester, NY

Nashville, TN

Richmond, VA

Harrisburg, PA

Wisconsin Historical Society Madison, WI

Thank you for your contributions as we continue to grow!

Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources Cheyenne, WY

Patron Members Ellsworth Brown

Linnea Marie Grim

Trevor Jones

Jean Svadlenak

Georgianna Contiguglia

Leigh A. Grinstead

Katherine Kane

Richard E. Turley

John R. Dichtl

John Herbst

Russell Lewis

Bev Tyler

Stephen Elliott

Nicholas J. Hoffman

Thomas A. Mason

Tobi Voigt

Bob Forrant

Lynne Ireland

Kyle L. McKoy

Robert Wolz

Karen Goering

David Janssen

Rebecca Merwin

Madison, WI Denver, CO

Nashville, TN St. Paul, MN Lowell, MA

St. Louis, MO

Charlottesville, VA Denver, CO

Indianapolis, IN St. Louis, MO Lincoln, NE

Cedar Rapids, IA

Lincoln, NE

West Hartford, CT Chicago, IL

Indianapolis, IN

Doylestown, PA

Kansas City, MO

Salt Lake City, UT Setauket, NY Detroit, MI

Key West, FL

St. Croix, VI

HISTORY NEWS

AASLH News >

AASLH News > AASLH News

> AASLH News

2018 Workshop Season Kicks Off in Charlotte

Browse upcoming workshops at learn. aaslh.org/calendar. Participants from across the nation and a wide spectrum of museum types worked together to identify common challenges in their work and get ideas from each other and from case studies presented by the instructors. As a crash course in exhibit development, the class covered organizational schemes, aesthetic design, storytelling, accessibility, learning styles, and interpretive strategies for appealing to diverse audiences. Whether revamping existing interpretation or starting entirely from scratch, knowledge of how successful exhibits educate, interest, and involve their visitors is key. An essential lesson from this workshop is that no matter the budget, staff size, or focus of the institution, exhibits must be creative, engaging, and inclusive if they are to reach their goals of presenting stories that resonate with their communities.

SPRING 2018

Workshop participants try out exhibit evaluation techniques at the Charlotte Museum of History.

Museums Advocacy Day

n February, AASLH President and CEO John Dichtl and External Relations Coordinator John Marks traveled to Washington, D.C., joining hundreds of museum leaders and professionals from around the country to participate in Museums Advocacy Day, a two-day advocacy event organized by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). Like last year, there was a sense of urgency surrounding advocacy day, as the President’s proposed budget would have eliminated funding for the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), agencies that crucially support museum work generally and history museums in particular. Dichtl and Marks joined Susan H. Edwards, Executive Director and CEO of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in meeting with legislators representing our home state of Tennessee. They shared with senators and representatives an AAM public opinion poll that 96 percent of Americans want federal funding for museums to be maintained or increased. They urged our Congress to fund the abovementioned agencies, emphasizing that museums contribute billions of dollars to the national economy each year and create hundreds of thousands of jobs all over the country. Thankfully, history and museums have bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. And thanks in part to these advocacy efforts, Congress in March passed a spending bill that increased funding for IMLS, NEH, and NEA!

Aja Bain

he 2018 onsite workshop season kicked off March 5-6 with “Exhibit Makeovers,” hosted by the Charlotte Museum of History in Charlotte, North Carolina. Course instructors Alice Parman and Ann Craig, who also co-authored the book Exhibit Makeovers: A Do-ItYourself Workbook for Small Museums, Second Edition, led a class of thirty through discussions and hands-on exercises designed to cover the nuts and bolts of exhibit design as well as the theories and goals of object-based learning.

Marks attended the National Council on Public History conference in Las Vegas, April 18-21. Education and Service Coordinator Natalie Flammia attended the Latinos in Heritage Conservation conference in Providence, Rhode Island, April 26-28. John Dichtl and Program and Publications Coordinator Aja Bain attended the American Alliance of Museums conference in Phoenix, May 6-9. Bain and Chief of Operations Bethany Hawkins will both present at the Association for Living History, Farm, and Agricultural Museums conference in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, June 1-5. Bethany is leading a workshop on “Who Is Your Community?” and Aja will present “Many People, Many Pasts: Lessons from AASLH Award Winners.” Aja will also present “More Than a Gold Star: The Power of State, Regional, and National Awards” with AASLH Council member Melanie Adams at the Association of Midwest Museums/Illinois Association of Museums conference in Chicago, July 18-21.

Headed to a Spring or Summer Conference? We’ll See You There! AASLH staff are preparing for a busy conference season of sessions and exhibiting. If you’re attending any of these upcoming conferences, please say hello! President and CEO John Dichtl and External Relations Coordinator John

Hands-on learning at the Charlotte Museum of History.

John Marks

> AASLH News > AASLH News >

John Dichtl speaking with congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis at Museums Advocacy Day.

Introducing the History Leadership Institute AASLH recently announced that the Seminar for Historical Administration, or SHA, would hereafter be known as the History Leadership Institute. This new vision and identity more effectively conveys the purpose of the program: helping both established and emerging history leaders to sharpen the skills, networks, and habits of mind that the history community requires of its leaders. AASLH has been a supporter and organizer for SHA since its beginning in 1959 at Colonial Williamsburg. Since that time, the program has represented one of the premier profes-

sional development opportunities for individuals in the public history field, and we are excited to be opening this exciting new chapter in the program’s history. The program takes place each November at the Indiana Historical Society in Indianapolis. Moving forward under Director Max van Balgooy, the History Leadership Institute will challenge its cohorts to ask not “Are we doing things right?” but rather to ask “Are we doing the right things?” This shift in focus will challenge history leaders to think about the big questions—decolonization, strategic planning, community engagement, mission and vision, deaccessioning, and much, much more—to help ensure the next generation of history leadership is prepared not just to solve the problems of the present, but those of the future. In addition, AASLH has formally adopted the History Leadership Institute as a program of the association. Although we have long played a central role in administering the program, taking this extra step will provide it the stability and resources required for growth. We continue to evaluate all aspects of the program and are looking forward to welcoming our first class of History Leadership Institute Associates this fall!

New Project Management Instructor AASLH welcomes Gina Minks as the new instructor for the “Project Management for History Professionals” online course. For the past five years, Gina has had her own consulting business and taught project management classes for the University of North Texas. She has also taught for the Library Information Technology Association and the Society of American Archivists. Prior to that, she served as the Imaging and Preservation service manager for Amigos Library Services, where she managed NEH grants. Gina is active in professional associations including her current service as a board member for the Society of American Archivists Foundation. She is also a member of the National Heritage Responders and has been part of disaster recovery after Hurricane Ike, Hurricane Wilma, and Super Storm Sandy. The next cycle of the online course began April 9 and focuses on how to implement internationally recognized project management principles in a history context.

Aja Bain

What do you call…Commen s’appelle-t’il...? AASLH’s Nomenclature Task Force, the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), and Parks Canada have collaborated to produce a new bilingual, illustrated online version of Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging. Coming in fall 2018, this resource will offer free access to search and browse through the classification hierarchy in English or French. The Nomenclature website will be the most up-to-date version of the standard and will include: the entire Nomenclature 4.0, as published in 2015 by Rowman & Littlefield; a complete French version, with terms provided by Parks Canada and CHIN; terminology, definitions, and illustrations added through a harmonization process with a complementary standard, the Parks Canada Descriptive and Visual Dictionary of Objects (Parks DVD); a bibliography to help museums find additional resources to help with cataloging specific types of objects; and

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

HISTORY NEWS

New Dues Structure for Institutional Memberships

AASLH News > guidelines and tips on how to use the Nomenclature system. The Nomenclature Task Force (which includes representatives from many organizations, including Parks Canada and CHIN) will continue to develop and maintain the Nomenclature standard, in consultation with museums that use it. Updates will be included on a routine basis in the online resource, allowing organizations to stay current with the standard in a more timely fashion. CHIN plans to release the Nomenclature data as linked open data under an Open Data Commons license in 2020, which will mean that Nomenclature data will be free to download and use at that time. Please contact Paul Bourcier (pbourcier@ themosh.org) at the AASLH Nomenclature Task Force, Heather Dunn (heather. dunn@canada.ca) or Madeleine Lafaille (madeleine.lafaille@ canada.ca) at CHIN, or Jean-Luc Vincent (jean-luc. vincent@pc.gc.ca) at Parks Canada for more information.

eginning July 1, 2018, AASLH will change its dues structure for institutional memberships, moving to a progressive scale based on institutional budget size. One of the primary motivations for this change is our desire to better serve small history organizations. Under this new structure, institutions with the smallest budgets—less than $50,000, which make up about 25 percent of AASLH membership, will see their annual dues decrease by more than 15 percent. Those with budgets between $50,000 and $250,000— another 25 percent of our members—will see their rates stay the same. After being set in 1995, dues for all levels of membership fell below inflation long ago. Restructuring dues for the first time in more than twenty years will enable AASLH to better meet the needs of a diverse and dynamic field and provide expanded professional development and other resources to member institutions and their staffs.

AASLH Annual Fund Campaign

his spring, your contribution to AASLH will go twice as far. Longtime members and champions Denny O’Toole, Sandra Clark, and Carl R. Nold have generously agreed to match up to $17,000 in donations to the AASLH spring campaign. Your

donations will allow us to expand our offerings and do the essential work of advocating for history and supporting history workers. Additionally, to thank you for your support and to help you grow with us, donors will receive access to 101 Ideas for New Revenue at History Organizations, a compilation of some of the best revenue-generating ideas from across the field. We hope that these ideas will allow you to continue your essential work, connect more deeply with your community, and strengthen your organization for the future. While there is no minimum donation to receive the publication, we hope that you’ll consider your donation an investment in the ongoing quest to make the past more meaningful to all people. What you do is important, and AASLH is here to connect you to the field and to provide you with resources and support at all stages of your career. AASLH is your colleague, your advisor, and your ally. Our growth depends on your growth.

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

SPRING 2018

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

PERIODICAL

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No Deadline. No Application. No Eligibility Requirements. SIGN UP TODAY! aaslh.org/steps