History News Spring 2015

The Power of

Possibility

Exhibition as Mitigation Is It Time for Another Revolution?

Ensuring a Vibrant Future for History

Engage More. Spend Less.

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the Power of Possibility

Contents Spring 2015 VOLUME 70, #2

Louisville, “The Possibility City,” is the ideal setting for this year’s AASLH conference.

Read how momentum is building as we see opportunities instead of obstacles.

page

17 On the Cover Museums have the potential to cross disciplines.

Here, visitors to the Oakland Museum of California explore a floor map of the Oakland Bay.

page

7

Shaun Roberts, Oakland Museum of California

Features

Departments

7 The Power of Possibility

3 On Doing Local History

By Kent Whitworth and Scott Alvey

By Carol Kammen

12 Above and Below: Exhibition as Mitigation

5 Generation Why

By Louise Pubols

17 Leading Historical Programs: Strategies for Innovation

By Bruce W. Dearstyne

22 Is It Time for Another Revolution?

By Rick Beard

inside: Technical Leaflet

By Colleen Dilenschneider

28 Award Winner Spotlight

By Lisa Anderson

30 Book Reviews

By Rikki Davenport and Jeff D. Corrigan

32 New Books from AASLH

Integrating Science at a History Museum

By Catherine Hughes, Brian Mancuso, and Allison Cosbey

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 Bethany L. Hawkins | EDITORIAL ASSISTANCE Susan Ferentinos Advertising Cherie Cook | DESIGN Go Design, LLC: Gerri Winchell Findley, Suzanne Pfeil

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 http://about.aaslh.org/history-news. History News (ISSN 03637492) is published quarterly by the American Association for State and Local History, a nonprofit educational membership organization providing leadership, service, and support for its members who preserve and interpret state and local history in order to make the past more meaningful. Annual membership dues for AASLH includes $13 applicable to a subscription in History News. Single copies are $10.

Postmaster, please send form 3579 to History News, AASLH, 1717 Church Street, Nashville, TN 37203-2921. Periodical postage paid in Nashville, Tennessee. Entire contents copyrighted ©2015 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.

1717 Church Street Nashville, Tennessee 37203-2921 615-320-3203, Fax 615-327-9013 membership@aaslh.org | advertising@aaslh.org | www.aaslh.org

Nelson Chenault

Dear Readers,

Spring brings many things beyond just the end of what this year was an interminable winter. The sun finally makes its way out more regularly, and blooms start appearing. For History News, it also means an article that presages the theme of the upcoming annual meeting—so that even those who cannot join us in person can think together about the theme that guides AASLH’s professional development efforts each year. This issue comes somewhat full circle, as Kent Whitworth and I first dreamed up the theme article idea together in 2008. Kent and Scott Alvey give us thoughts on the “Power of Possibility” as it relates to our host city of Louisville as well as to our work in state and local history. Louise Pubols looks at the creative way the Oakland Museum of California responded to the Section 106 requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act. Bruce W. Dearstyne’s “Leading Historical Programs” offers strategies that today’s history leaders use to respond to the ongoing challenges of our work.

And Rick Beard continues his series on AASLH’s history with a second discussion on interpretation asking, “Is It Time for Another Revolution?” Carol Kammen provides some great thoughts on what we can learn from fiction writers, and you’ll probably notice we’ve renamed Colleen Dilenschneider’s column “Generation Why,” as it befits her insights in reaching the Millennial audience. Lisa Anderson shares about the Gatekeeper’s Museum’s AASLH award-winning exhibit. This issue includes reviews by Rikki Davenport and Jeff D. Corrigan of Speaking for the Enslaved: Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites and Doing Oral History. In addition, we’ve added a new feature: information on new books from AASLH. Our Technical Leaflet is on integrating science into the work of history organizations by Catherine Hughes, Brian Mancuso, and Allison Cosbey.

I hope that the content in the succeeding pages provides much for you to think about.

O FF I C ER S Chair Julie Rose West Baton Rouge Museum Vice Chair Katherine Kane Harriet Beecher Stowe Center Immediate Past Chair Lynne Ireland Nebraska State Historical Society Secretary Linnea Grim Thomas Jefferson Monticello Treasurer Norman O. Burns, II Maymont Foundation

COUNCIL Bill Adair Heritage Philadelphia Laura Casey Texas Historical Commission Evelyn Figueroa Smithsonian Institution Janet Gallimore Idaho State Historical Society Leigh A. Grinstead LYRASIS Jane Lindsey Juneau-Douglas City Museum Burt Logan Ohio Historical Society

Bob Beatty

Nicola Longford Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

We’ve been Standing Still for over 50 years!

Lorraine McConaghy Museum of History & Industry Bill Peterson Arizona Historical Society Donna Sack Association of Midwest Museums Susan Tissot Humboldt Botanical Gardens Foundation

Lifelike Realistic Figures since 1957.

Conservation Forms since 1996.

Ken Turino Historic New England Jay Vogt South Dakota State Historical Society Tobi Voigt Detroit Historical Society Phyllis Waharockah-Tasi Comanche National Museum and Cultural Center

S TAFF © Birmingham Museum of Art

Aja Bain Programs Coordinator BOB BEATTY Chief Operating Officer CHERIE COOK Senior Program Manager John Dichtl President and CEO Bethany L. hawkins Program Manager TERRy JACKSON Membership and Marketing Coordinator

© Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum

800-634-4873 www.museumfigures.com

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Spring 2015

Sylvia McGhee Director of Finance

On Doing Local History >

By Carol Kammen

The Crime of Writing

E

udora Welty writes passionately about the role of place in fiction. She calls it one of the lesser angels, often taken for granted in the sweep of character, motive, plot, and feeling. Yet, she insists that place is where a writer has roots; it is a base for reference.

For Welty, fiction depends on place, even if it is one drawn from the writer’s mind.

Place has, she notes, “a more lasting identity than we have.”1 I began worrying about place some years ago when I started reading local history. But perhaps my interest in place is even older than that, for in the 1960s, when I was headed for Paris, a friend suggested that I read Georges Simenon.

This was not the author I expected from a Harvard graduate student in history (now a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago). “Read about Jules Maigret,” he said to me, “and you will understand more when you walk about the City of Light.”

I have totally forgotten the mysteries in which the inspector was involved, but I do remember Maigret going home for beautiful lunches his wife prepared.

And I learned about zincs, those working people’s neighborhood bars that feature lovely comfort foods and a homey atmosphere. I could tote the Blue Guide with me and keep the Metro-and-street guide in my pocketbook, but Simenon taught me to look at life on the street, at the way people walk, what the shop fronts could tell me, and about the aromas that filtered from doors I passed.

Donna Leon offers pictures of Venice that contain the warp of the city, as her detective follows the trail of crime: over the rooftops, on the canals, along the twisted ways that pass churches and century-old houses. Commissario Guido Brunetti brings us the many cultures that exist side by side in Venice. Leon also writes of wonderful meals to which the reader would like to be invited.

Tony Hillerman has done the same thing for the Indian reservations of the American Southwest and the highway that links them in his amazing books—though the food doesn’t sound nearly as good.

Reading Hillerman, I sense a shoe sliding on pebbly paths in the canyons, the drop of the temperature as the sun goes down beyond a peak, the smell of piñon, the grease in fast food joints. He also portrays the etiquette of different cultures.

Louise Penny has given us the town of Three Pines, outside Montreal, with her fine sense of moonlight on snow filtering through the evergreens that protect the village, and the ping of car tires on wet city streets. She shows us the warmth of a familiar gathering place and picks apart the loves and anxieties of those within the local bookstore and café. Penny, too, writes of different cultures: rural and urban, French- and English-Canadian, people of an artistic bent and those outside the legal system.

A friend encouraged me to read Julia Spencer-Fleming, who touches close to the heart of what it means to live in upstate New York. Spencer-Fleming’s heartland is not far from where I live, so the rhythms of life, the smallness of the town where you “couldn’t find a level stretch of road running more than a quarter mile,” and the weather—especially the weather—are all familiar points in my life as well as in the lives of her characters.

Listen to this: …The storms that wrack come from the west. Massive low pressure systems rumbling out of Canada, crossing five Great Lakes before breaking over the shoals of the Adirondacks. Winds that have gathered speed for a thousand miles come howling through the ancient hills. Snow crystals that may have formed over the arctic regions of Hudson Bay hurtle downward.

Spencer-Fleming notes that when a storm like this arrives, “smart people stay inside.”2 I have been over the roads her police drive, and I know the poor farm houses, large barns, and the doublewides. I have passed by but have not entered the Dew Drop Inn, and I know the parish hall, the dark houses, cold in winter until the furnace is cranked up, and the searing heat when walking across the edges of a plowed field in August. And the accent—

We have

much to learn

from these writers of

crime novels.

one character notes that an upcountry accent changed the word “worth” to “wuth.” These books are about place.

Eudora Welty believed that place, being “brought to life in the round before the reader’s eye is the readiest and gentlest and most honest and natural” way of making a story real. It is certainly true in fiction and most mystery stories—though calling them mere mystery stories strips these authors of what they are really doing: writing about the human condition in time and place, complicated by the complexities of life and love and greed and death. They are not historians, but they are keen observers. We have much to learn from these writers.3 We are not fiction writers, and we do not conjure mystery stories of murder and mayhem, but local historians definitely write about geographical places. Often, however, the very place whose history we discuss is not much evident. Early local histories featured the emerging geography of a place, its change over time, its relationship with classical places found in Homer and Ovid (actual place names in my part of the state). That, however, was more to show off a classical education than to define a place.

The lesson for us is that these fiction writers set their stories in realistic places, places we know and recognize. They use the details of place to tell their stories, to ground them in place. Welty notes that, in fiction, place is “identified, concrete, exact and exacting, and therefore credible.”4 Yet, we who write about our hometowns often write as if the events and times we describe happened just about anywhere. Our sense of history is acute, but rarely does it sing of the individuality or reality of place. Where are the streets, and what does it feel like to walk along History news

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On Doing Local History > them? Where are the shadows cast by tall buildings or the sounds of children coming from a schoolyard?

I sometimes fear that the history of my place could be as much a history of a nearby town, excepting for the different name. We are historians telling the stories of place, not nicely shaped with beginnings, middles, and ends, but with the hope of getting to the nub of things. We seek to explain how a place grew—the influence of geography, the importance of individual initiative, and the chance of finding gold or of the railroad coming through. We write about the development of charities and how state laws changed many of those volunteer efforts into welfare and then into social service offices. But do we describe the inside of the Home for Elderly Women? Or the penitentiary where the authorities sent young men who loitered on street corners? Or the smell of the hardware store?

Pardon the pun, but perhaps we should take a page from fiction writers and do just that.

One could argue these are not the details we necessarily find in the documents. But they are the things we have experienced, or can imagine into the past, and they bring that local past alive. Since we are bound to what our sources tell us, we do not have the license novelists do to say these things unequivocally. But I believe our work is enhanced when we inject some of these details as we understand them.

After the great fire—and we all have had a great fire at one time or another— there is the smell of ash and of smoldering wood that lingers in the air. Might that detail make the intensity of the fire somewhat more real for our readers?

Might it not help them imagine what the past was like and to understand that, though things change, many things remain the same? History is, after all, about the continuity of place that occurs within a context of change.

In the grocery, there was once the pull of paper from a roll, the crunch as it was folded, the zing of the string to hold the package tight. Then there was the crinkle of plastic bags that we all collected too

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many of, and now it is the thump of the cloth bag on the counter as we pick up our groceries at the cash register. (Cash registers once clanged and drawers flew open with a thwack; now they click and slide.)

The point is that fiction writers take the word writer in their title very seriously while we take the words historian or interpreter seriously and explain the past without necessarily hearing or bringing it to some sort of active state in our readers’ heads. Not all of us, of course, but some.

Fiction is shaped descriptively, using place to make the story real. But we, too, need to consider how to do the same thing.

Writing local history necessitates setting our words on streets, in rooms, at the park, along the river. Specificity can give a reader a strong sense that these events happened here. Readers will notice.

Eudora Welty thought location was a “ground conductor of all currents of emotions and belief and moral conviction” that charge out from the past. She thought those charges bring to life events, emotions, and situations. We get that charge, we who research and interpret history, and so should our audiences.5 In his latest book, Sometimes an Art, Harvard historian Bernard Bailyn writes that interpreting the past requires not only a careful search for evidence but also for “a kind of literary imagination.”

Bailyn notes that, “like a novelist,” the historian must conjure “a nonexistent, an impalpable world in all its living comprehension, and yet to do this within the constraints of verifiable facts.”6 You know, and I know, that all this is much easier for me to urge than it is for us to achieve. But we should try. t “On Doing Local History” is intended to encourage dialogue on the essential issues of local history. Carol Kammen can be reached at ckk6@cornell.edu.

1 Eudora Welty, On Writing, Modern Library ed.

(New York: Random House, 2002), 42.

2 Julia Spencer-Fleming, One Was a Soldier (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011), 98; Julia SpencerFleming, All Mortal Flesh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 267.

3 Harold L. Weatherby and George Core, editors.

Place in American Fiction: Excursions and Explorations (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 116.

4

Ibid., 7.

5

Welty, On Writing, 53.

William Anthony Hay, review of Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History, by Bernard Bailyn, Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2015.

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Generation Why >

By Colleen Dilenschneider

History Repeats Itself (Even When It Comes to Engaging Millennials)

A

n increasing portion of my work with visitor-serving organizations revolves around millennial engagement. In conversations, “millennial engagement” often predictably morphs into a discussion on “digital engagement.” This seems logical: data suggest that millennials (those of us roughly aged eighteen to thirty-five) are generally a technologically savvy and socially connected bunch.

I was recently at the table with the leadership team of a large visitor-serving organization, discussing the very topic of millennial engagement. Near the start of the conversation, one leader thoughtfully attempted to communicate where he thought the organization was falling short in terms of engaging audiences. He declared:

“We need to be better at telling this audience the importance of our institution through our use of

technology and getting more

impressions!”

I immediately understood what this leader was trying to say. I’ve heard sentences like this too many times to count.

And yet, these sentences never feel quite right. It’s like an ugly sweater made from your exact measurements with your name embroidered on it. You recognize it as made for you (and might even appreciate it)… but you’re just not going to wear it.

It seems that the emergence of new technological tools may be causing institutional leaders to second-guess themselves out of the valuable expertise that makes them leaders in the first place. While we millennials represent the first genera-

tion of “digital natives,” our wiring isn’t completely different than those who have come before us. This type of thinking (i.e., how better to engage millennials) needs a strategic refocusing on what really matters. Here are four distractions embedded within the “millennial engagement” mentality that are steering organizational leaders away from what is—and perhaps always has been—most important.

1

Distraction: Tell Focus: Show

Thanks in large part to the real-time nature of social media, potential visitors and supporters are now able to make their own immediate assessments of an organization based on how it communicates. When an organization posts on social media platforms, it builds its cumulative brand perception through the sum of these posts. In other words, what your organization posts reveals a great deal about who your organization truly is and what it actually values. In this sense, organizations are showing their values as opposed to simply telling audiences about them. An organization may post certain words related to its mission on social platforms, but if the overall essence of the posts doesn’t match that “promise,” it risks eroding perceived trust.

Organizations should aim to constantly show who they are. Audiences trust what they see more than what you tell them.

2

Distraction: Importance Focus: Relevance

Many organizations seem to believe that declaring the importance of a topic will help it rise above the noise that pollutes our in-boxes and newsfeeds.

However, if a topic isn’t relevant to your audiences, then it’s unlikely to be meaningful to your audiences. To be clear, being relevant is different than being timely or simply being present on digital platforms. Being relevant is about how an organization communicates its mission

via its content and the messages it uses to create a connection. Social media is a tool. An organization’s stories and information is the true connector. In order to attract younger audiences, it makes sense that those stories should be important to them—not just “important” as determined by the organization.

3

Distraction: Impressions Focus: Influence

“Impressions” is a word that has evolved from the concept of informing an opinion to what may be the worst sort of digital analytical jargon. Because its popular definition has become entirely quantitative, “impressions” may be tricking leaders into believing that their tried-and-true experiences don’t apply in the digital world.

What matters more than the number of millennials (or other audience members) who saw a story is how many audience members cared about that story enough for it to influence their perceptions and behavior. In other words, the sheer number of people who see an organization’s social media channels or website, for instance, is less important than the number of people who were influenced by its message and thought, “Hey, that institution interests me, and I’d like to learn more about it and perhaps pay a visit.”

This certainly isn’t a new concept for leaders. Web-based “vanity metrics” are a new concept—and they are also a new distraction.

4

Distraction: Technology Focus: People

Consider this: digital marketing and marketing are one and the same. They are both about influencing people and behavior. Likewise, digital fundraising and fundraising are synonymous in successful organizations. Again, they are both about people and behavior. “Digital” is a way of connecting via engaging content. Sure, “knowing Java” and “mastering Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm” History news

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THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR STATE AND LOCAL HISTORY Acknowledges and appreciates these Endowment Donors for their extraordinary support:

Dr. William T. Alderson Society $50,000+

Ms. Terry L. Davis Nashville, TN Mr. John & Ms. Anita Durel Baltimore, MD

Ms. Sylvia Alderson Winston–Salem, NC Anonymous

Mr. Stephen Elliott St. Paul, MN

Mr. John Frisbee (Deceased) Concord, NH

Mr. Dennis Fiori Boston, MA

National Endowment for the Humanities Washington, DC

Mr. Leslie H. Fishel (Deceased) Madison, WI

Mr. Dennis & Ms. Trudy O’Toole Monticello, NM

Ms. Barbara Franco Harrisburg, PA

AASLH President’s Society

Mr. James B. Gardner Washington, DC

$10,000 – $49,999

Historic Annapolis Foundation Annapolis, MD

Mr. Edward P. Alexander (Deceased) Washington, DC AltaMira Press Lanham, MD Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Williamsburg, VA The J. Paul Getty Trust Los Angeles, CA Mr. & Mrs. Charles F. Bryan, Jr. Richmond, VA Ms. Sandra Sageser Clark Holt, MI The History Channel New York, NY Martha-Ellen Tye Foundation Marshalltown, IA

Friends of the Endowment Society $5,000 – $9,999

Indiana Historical Society Indianapolis, IN Mr. Russell Lewis & Ms. Mary Jane jacob Chicago, IL Maryland Historical Society Baltimore, MD Missouri History Museum St. Louis, MO Ms. Candace Tangorra Matelic Pawleys Island, SC Ms. Kathleen S. & Mr. James L. Mullins Grosse Pointe Shores, MI National Heritage Museum Lexington, MA Nebraska State Historical Society Lincoln, NE Ms. Laura Roberts & Mr. Edward Belove Cambridge, MA Ms. Ruby Rogers Cincinnati, OH

Atlanta History Center Atlanta, GA

Mr. Jim & Ms. Janet Vaughan Washington, DC

Mr. Rick Beard New York, NY Mr. & Mrs. Salvatore Cilella Atlanta, GA Mr. David Crosson & Ms. Natalie Hala San Francisco, CA

Mr. George L. Vogt Portland, OR Ms. Jeanne & Mr. Bill Watson Orinda, CA

AASLH also 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

Mr. J. Kevin Graffagnino Barre, VT

Anonymous

Mr. John A. Herbst Indianapolis, IN

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 Mr. & Mrs. Salvatore Cilella Atlanta, GA Ms. Terry L. Davis Nashville, TN Mr. Stephen & Ms. Diane Elliott St. Paul, MN Mr. John Frisbee (Deceased) Concord, NH

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Spring 2015

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. George L. Vogt Portland, OR

Reaching the Next Generation(s) > have value in the digital world, but they aren’t the point of “being digital.”

Communication goals on real-time digital platforms should serve the same purpose and mission as the rest of the institution.

An online donor is still a donor. A website visitor is still a visitor (i.e., a person connecting with your brand and mission).

The difference is the platform (“connection point”); the goal is the same as “in real life.”

Indeed, we millennials have distinct data-informed characteristics that define our generation. Data suggest that we are civic-minded, socially-connected “digital natives” who (gulp!) are used to attention and believe we are special. We are different, just as members of Generation X and Baby Boomers profile differently from their respective generational predecessors.

What if, instead of thinking “We need to be better at telling this audience the importance of our institution through our use of technology and getting more impressions,” organizations posited:

“We need to be better at

showing this audience the relevance of our institution through our understanding of

people and behavior and creating more influence.”

Indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same. t Colleen Dilenschneider is Chief Market Engagement Officer for IMPACTS, a global leader in predictive market intelligence and related technologies. She is the author and publisher of the popular blog Know Your Own Bone (http://colleendilen.com), a resource for creative engagement for nonprofit and cultural organizations. She can be reached at colleendilen@gmail.com.

the Power of Possibility Willard Rouse Gillson Photograph Collection, Kentucky Geological Survey

By Kent Whitworth and Scott Alvey

L

ife in Kentucky’s early days was much like what many of us might say about the history profession today—it was not for the faint of heart. Just as the settlers endured daily hardships in their

struggle to survive, on many levels this is true of what we have faced in the history world, too. Yet after a prolonged period of financial distress and seemingly lackluster audiences, we once again see opportunities for real impact.

That’s why Kentucky, and Louisville in particular, is the ideal setting for this year’s AASLH conference.

Louisville was settled by indomitable pioneers who, when the Falls of the Ohio threw up barriers to their dreams of traveling west, found power in the possibilities presented by their new situation. Communities sprang up as these enterprising few shifted their westward thinking to settle by the falls and offer provisions, rest, trade, and help for people who followed. Life handed them lemons and they made bourbon!

The Falls of the Ohio River at Louisville show their formidable nature, circa 1920.

Left: This Louisville postcard, circa 1907, shows

the Falls of the Ohio along with an inset drawing of the fledgling river town in 1778.

History news

7

We better get out of this back seat mindset and get out of it soon, because opportunity is knocking for us in a most unpredictable way.

Left: Through its “Piecing Together History” program,

the Kentucky Historical Society takes collections out to communities and encourages people to make their own meaning from the past.

Division of Creative Services, Commonwealth of Kentucky

In fact, the entire commonwealth is defined by people who recognized new opportunities and seized the power of possibility. From Henry Clay to Hunter S. Thompson, Carrie Nation to Tori Murden McClure, and of course “the Greatest” Muhammad Ali, Kentucky consistently has produced people who were the motivators and innovators in their fields.

Louisville is a good example of how this has played out.

Perhaps Hustin Quinn, Mayor of Louisville from 1921 to 1925, said it best, “Louisville has the thrift of the East, the hustle of the North, the optimism of the West, and the hospitality of the South.” Depending on your point of view, it’s either the southernmost city in the North or the South’s northernmost city. Louisvillians don’t mind being called either because they know that both reflect how their city is an amalgamation of ideas, people, and interests.1 The same can be said of the history world. That’s why the impetus for this year’s conference theme—the number of challenges we all are facing and, depending on our perspective, how we react to them—is so perfect. Most people address new challenges by tackling them head on or by circumventing them altogether. If we look to history and take the lead of Louisville’s founders, however, the best approach is to not think in terms of challenges, but in terms of new areas of possibilities and opportunities. Rather than spend our days debating issues such as why does STEM get all of the public’s attention and how to get people through

8

Spring 2015

our doors—saying the same things over and over again, just louder—we should instead be examining what we can do differently and more creatively so people see and understand our value.

Where are the areas of possibility and opportunity that exist within what we’re trying to accomplish through the study of history?

Look again at Louisville. It doesn’t have the advantage of being either East Coast or West Coast—it’s a landlocked city in a landlocked state in the center of the nation. But the city leaders long ago decided the location had the real opportunity, the real possibility, to become a logistical center. And that’s just what Louisville became. And that’s what we want people within our profession to learn to do—to see ourselves through the eyes of someone else and discover the opportunities that are there for the taking.

One of the things that makes the Power of Possibility theme so relevant is what we’ve endured the past several years while riding the financial freefall. Many of us have been fighting for our existence, but in the midst of that challenge there is real clarity. As Wendell Berry, renowned Kentucky novelist, essayist, and plenary speaker at this year’s conference, wrote, “The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

It is the impeded stream that sings.”2 There is more innovation now than ever because just maybe we were a little too comfortable in the past. Back then, we didn’t have to ask if we truly were meeting real

Above: Farming was at the heart of the Shaker community, and

experimentation and resiliency made their farms models of innovation and efficiency. Today, Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill encourages visitors to “discover backyard sustainability.”

Division of Creative Services, Commonwealth of Kentucky

needs. We didn’t have to think about, for instance, what the state is going to miss if the Kentucky Historical Society goes away.

Those are gut-wrenching questions, but they certainly bring clarity! Now the entire history field is trying to get these enormous issues right, and in the midst of that is unprecedented possibility. This topic is absolutely appropriate right now. In fact, it’s essential, because as the economy gets better we may get a little more comfortable again and we’d better learn these lessons while we can.

We have an opportunity to transform the profession if, collectively, we examine the impact that we could and should have on society. How we react or don’t react to this opportunity can tell us a lot.

We know something about that in Kentucky. Looking back at the commonwealth in its pre-Civil War era, we were a leader in every sense of the word, from a business standpoint, an intellectual standpoint, and a political standpoint.

Then we found ourselves in the back seat, got comfortable, and stayed there. Kentucky state historian and plenary speaker Jim Klotter consistently challenges Kentuckians to rise above the lost opportunities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And, now momentum is building on multiple fronts.

The history field is guilty of the exact same thing. We better get out of this back seat mindset and get out of it soon, because opportunity is knocking for us in a most unpredict-

able way. Who would have dreamed that yanking the rug out from under us financially would be the best thing that could ever happen? Yet we weren’t going to come to grips with who we were and what we were really about until we were fighting for our lives and extinction was a real possibility.

This annual meeting ought to be part collective kick in the pants and part pep rally to say, “Come on now, we’ve got to quit being our own worst enemies!”

So what does this mean to someone from Iowa or Maine or Texas? How can they take the lessons we’re learning in Kentucky and transfer them to their particular place and needs? Kentucky’s lessons aren’t geographically bound. As a field we lost track of who we were trying to serve. The shifting of the financial rug didn’t really tell us we must chop programs and activities. What it told us, emphatically, is that we need to concentrate on doing the right things. This is a challenge the entire field faces, not just folks in certain regions of the country.

This is where our keynote speaker and Stanford University professor Sam Wineburg’s book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, can be a great guide.

He says our work isn’t just about telling history, it’s about teaching history. It’s about how we want to interact with our intended audiences. How do we want to see ourselves, and what is the real value that we bring to a particular need or situation? That’s what each and every one of us in the history profession needs to do. We must stop and ponder, “What do I want to accomplish?”

For the Kentucky Historical Society, this opportunity is about learning. It’s about helping people be engaged with history and putting learning opportunities in their hands.

Before the recent financial shakeup we were fairly passive in the way we wanted people to interact with us. But look at Louisville’s example once again. What really sets the tone is a focus on service. The city talks about how Louisville’s citizens collectively make the difference, not just city government or certain individuals alone.

What about us in the history field? It’s time we collectively begin asking our users, our visitors, our researchers, “What can we do for you? How can you participate in this learning environment?” We should not be dictating what that learning environment looks like and what we think people need to learn.

Most significantly, we have got to quit doing what we have often done—hope and wait for others to find us. Instead, we need to listen and to pay attention to the fundamental needs within our communities then figure out what history organizations, with our suite of assets and expertise, can do to help resolve them.

In a 2001 interview Sam Wineburg said, “We need to raise ctitizens who ask themselves, ‘Is this true? Who is saying so? What’s the nature of the evidence?’ Taught this way, history is a training ground for democracy.” History could be poised to take its rightful place after all, but it will not come without its challenges.3 Several school systems nationwide are attempting, quite frankly, to dilute history by rewriting the AP courses to focus only on the positive points of our nation’s history and omit the accounts of civil unrest. But of course civil unrest is how History news

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“Louisville has the thrift of the East, the hustle of the North, the optimism of the West, and the hospitality of the South.”

— Hustin Quinn, Mayor of Louisville, 1921–1925

PoP AASLH

Louisville, KY 2015

our nation came about in the first place. This is where skillsbased learning comes in, yet we’ve strayed from that. We deliver content, certainly, but teaching should not be about how you look up things in the stacks or how you write out notecards. Instead, it’s about inquiry. How do we encourage people who want to better understand the news or the environment so they can ask the questions Wineburg raises?

That’s the skills-based process history research teaches. But as historical organizations, how do we get to the kinds of activities that allow this to naturally happen?

The real irony of the situation is that while certain school systems are saying we’ve got to contain this content or it’s

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going to get away from us, they also are acknowledging the power of history.

As Wendell Berry wrote in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays, “All good human work remembers its history.” Our challenge is to refocus these school systems from trying to control history’s content to instead seeing the great advantage of a next generation for which history has sparked curiosity and encouraged an inquisitive nature, one enhanced by the skills embedded in the historical process.4 Wineburg is right. That is the core of American democracy, and yet we’re totally missing the point. We’re afraid of tackling the controversial—and potentially polarizing—conversations.

How do we overcome this? We can start by creating dialogue around good information and solid research and by informing people. These conversations are tough, but they lead to constructive change. Research over the last fifteen to twenty years makes it clear that people trust museums when it comes to providing what they should know about the past.

There’s this unbelievable high ground just sitting there for the taking, yet many of us continue to play it safe. We’re still reeling from budget cuts, and all the while we’re often deaf to opportunity pounding on our doors.

The 2015 Louisville AASLH annual meeting speakers will address issues and opportunities with both candor and conviction. After all, Professor Wineburg challenged the status quo of history education with his award-winning book, and author and farmer Wendell Berry is described by the New York Times as “the prophet of rural America.” And Awards Banquet speaker, Carol Kammen, wound up writing the “On Doing Local History” column after sending

Rich Hoyer

an irate letter” (her words) challenging AASLH to include more history in History News.

Possibilities come in all shapes and sizes, and there is not a segment of our field that won’t be directly impacted by this broader conversation that’s taking place. As Carol Kammen writes in her introduction of Zen and the Art of Local History, “People come to local history from many different positions.

Some just liked history, some wanted to understand place.

Others came from an interest in architectural preservation, genealogy, or civic engagement—from other hobbies or pursuits. Some become interested because of a connection with community. There is no single path into local history.”

Hopefully you will find someone or something that resonates with you and you’ll be inspired by that insight.5 That’s part of what the History Relevance Campaign is addressing, which is something we’ll discuss at the conference, as well. We’re developing a common vocabulary that helps us explain who and what we are. We’re also developing a common voice that tells people history is not just a body of knowledge, but that there is value to it for them personally, for their community, and for the future. If you would like to know more, please check out www.historyrelevance.com.

In many respects, our role really hasn’t changed that much over the years. It’s just that we no longer can be so rooted in old behaviors that we lose sight of who we’re trying to serve.

Museums have always been places that gathered artifacts and information, and we talked about how to make it all accessible for people to use and make knowledge from. No, our roles have not really changed that much. But our audiences have changed: from the way they want to use what we provide them and the way they want to make meaning out of

things, to how they want us to interact with them. So rather than existing in the traditional realm and hoping that maybe if we keep doing what we’ve always done one of these needs will intersect with our audiences, we should disengage from all of that and figure out what the needs truly are and plant the flag there. That’s the Power of Possibility.

Kentucky is a great backdrop to explore how that is happening here and, in some cases, how it hasn’t. Once again we’re a microcosm for the field as a whole. None of us has a crystal ball, but we’re all learning important lessons and we’re having a greater impact collectively than ever before.

We hope our colleagues will come and experience organizations of all shapes and sizes across the commonwealth and beyond that are working hard to help address the needs of our communities. We believe you will leave inspired and invigorated by the possibilities! t Kent Whitworth is Executive Director and Scott Alvey is Assistant Director of the Kentucky Historical Society. They are coHost Chairs of the 2015 AASLH annual meeting in Louisville. They can be reached at kent.whitworth@ky.gov and scott.alvey@ky.gov.

1

Quoted in The News-Herald, Franklin, Pennsylvania, 12 October 1926.

2

Wendell Berry, “The Real Work,” http://on.aaslh.org/BerryRealWork.

Judy Lightfoot, review of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, http:// on.aaslh.org/LightfootWineburg.

3

4 Wendell Berry, “Feminism, the Body, and the Machine,” in The Achievement of Wendell Berry: The Hard History of Love, by Fritz Oehlschlaeger (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 13.

5 Carol Kammen and Bob Beatty, eds., Zen and the Art of Local History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), xiii-xiv.

History news

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Above and Below: Exhibition as Mitigation

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rom August 31, 2013, through February 23, 2014, the Oakland Museum of California presented Above and Below: Stories From Our Changing Bay. This project served as a model for the museum. Using the story of San Francisco Bay, we integrated art, history, and natural science to connect a broad audience to the human history of our shared natural environment. The project also served as a model of another sort: an example of how museums can partner successfully with federal and state agencies to respond to the cultural mitigation demands of the National Historic Preservation Act.

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The authors of this 1966 act based it on the premise that “the historical and cultural foundations of the Nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the American people.” Section 106 of the act requires agencies proposing to “adversely affect” historic properties to consult with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation and State Historic Preservation Offices to find ways to avoid or minimize damage to these structures. But where such effects are unavoidable, it requires the agencies to “mitigate” the destruction. Over time, “mitigation” has come to mean a number of different things, from conducting salvage archaeology to producing historical reports to designing new structures to harmonize with what remains of the old. The consultation generally results in a memorandum of agreement, which outlines agreed-upon measures that the agency will take to avoid, minimize, or mitigate the adverse effects.

Design elements, a large projection of historic footage, and iconic artifacts worked with text and graphics to convey the look and feel of the mammoth infrastructure projects of the twentieth century. For visitors who wanted to dive deeper, iPads throughout the section offered selections from new oral histories of Bay Bridge workers, commissioned for the project through the University of California, Berkeley.

Photos Shaun Roberts, Oakland Museum of California

By Louise Pubols

The Above and Below project resulted from these Section 106 mitigation requirements. After the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) decided to replace the original 1936 eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Over the next ten years, the agency drew up plans for a new bridge, while in the meantime, the old bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Shortly after the historic designation, in 2001, Caltrans approached the Oakland Museum of California to contract for a project that would satisfy the Section 106 requirements. The budget was much larger than is usual with these kinds of projects—the Bay Bridge replacement span was the largest single public works project in the state, with a total budget of $6.5 billion. Of that, $1.5 million was allocated for mitigation.

At first, Caltrans representatives from the Office of Cultural Resource Studies suggested producing a film about the old bridge, but the museum’s deputy director, Mark Medeiros, steered them toward the thing we do best: an exhibition project. With more than 100,000 square feet of gallery space on four city blocks, the Oakland Museum of California is one of the largest cultural institutions in the San Francisco Bay Area and the only museum in the nation devoted exclusively to the art, history, and natural environment of California. Given such a large budget, it was natural that the exhibition fill the museum’s “Great Hall,” nearly 13,000 square feet in total. Noah Stewart, from the Caltrans Office of Cultural Resource Studies, noted that “the scale of this project was unheard of; we’d never done anything like this.”

The size of the endeavor was not without risks for Caltrans.

“We were worried that people would think this was a boondoggle, given how much we were investing in the exhibition,” Noah remembered. “But in the end, in the context of the criticism of the new bridge, during all the construction delays, this became a good news story for us. We have [the museum] to thank for pulling us down that route.”

Beyond the sheer size of the project, the team at the museum encouraged Caltrans officials to think beyond the bridge. In part, we were looking to create something that would not just serve as a Section 106 requirement, but address the goals of the museum. The mission of the Oakland Museum of California is “to inspire all Californians to create a more vibrant future for themselves and their communities,” and a broader exploration of the relationship of people to the environment seemed like a perfect

Visitors had the chance to write a postcard to take home or leave for future visitors, reflecting on final closure of the old Bay Bridge. Many wrote about their emotional connections with the old and new bay bridges. “Old bridge: traveling thru an erector set. New bridge: tantalizing promise.” “I hope the new bridge will create fond memories for another generation.”

fit. Audience reach was also a factor. Cherie Newell, an exhibition developer at the museum and now director of the Creative Production Center, remembered: “Mark said, if your real goal is to educate people, more will come if you talk about the whole bay.” Meg Scantlebury, an architectural historian at Caltrans, agreed and pushed her office to accept this proposal. Looking back, Noah Stewart said, “it took a lot of guts and courage to do that. …In terms of the scope, we usually do something very focused on the [historic] resource. …We should do more of this kind of thing— bringing out the broader context. It resonated with people more than it would have if it had just been focused on the thing being mitigated.”

C

altrans and the Oakland Museum of California signed their memorandum of agreement in 2001… and then the lawyers stepped in. At the time, the museum was a municipal institution, so City of Oakland lawyers and Caltrans lawyers traded drafts of the contract back and forth. Ten years later, it was ready for signature. After that, Caltrans lawyers continued to be involved, at one point, for example, rejecting the museum’s standard artifact loan forms and insisting on drawing up their own language. “My advice,” says Noah Stewart, “for anyone else who takes on a project like this, is to know that the bureaucracy is going to take longer than you think! ...It takes someone in the agency who is willing to know when to take a risk to push past the reluctance to do things differently, to trust our partners, and get things done.”

The long delays posed challenges for both sides of the partnership. Twenty months from opening, the lead curaHistory news

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In a large open gallery, visitors encountered a high-resolution aerial view of the bay. The walkable floor map drew people to the places they know, their homes, their routes to work—all in the context of the bay. We also worked with the digital heritage organization, CyArk, to create a unique three-dimensional reconstruction of the landscape prior to European contact, projected on the wall to the left. tor retired, and I took over, taking the opportunity to retool the organization and approach. A few months later, the museum hired an in-house designer who then replaced the outside design firm that had begun the project. Our point person at Caltrans changed at least three times.

Cherie Newell was one of the few museum staff members to stay on the team from the start, and she remembered that “it was challenging to maintain the vision of the project over the course of many staff changes, both at Caltrans and at [the museum].”

The Oakland Museum of California has expertise in art, history, and natural sciences, so in the end we took an interdisciplinary approach to the bay, assembling a team of three curators. Being the senior curator of history and having studied environmental history, I served as project director. René de Guzman, the senior curator of art, brought in key partnerships, including the Center for Land Use Interpretation and CyArk, which created some of the more visually stunning media pieces of the exhibition. Rounding out the team was the historical ecology group at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, who served as our co-curators.

New challenges arose from the museum’s insistence on curatorial independence, and the discomfort some at Caltrans felt at letting go of the message. Throughout the process, the exhibit team met with Caltrans experts and officials, listening to ideas, getting leads on stories and artifacts, and updating them on our progress. But the museum also did visitor studies; we worked with scholarly advisors and consultants; and we partnered with local artists, native and community groups, other government agencies, and research and advocacy groups, so that the exhibition would include the voices of the widest variety of people who care about the bay and its future. This kind of sharing of authority is standard practice at the museum, but caused some worries at Caltrans. As Noah Stewart remarked: One challenge for us is that we are not used to relinquishing control. We have our own experts, who are fascinated with narrower topics, and wouldn’t have made the choices the museum did to take the broadest perspective. That’s the harder part of letting go. There were some expectations that it would be “all bridge all the time,” and it wasn’t. Sometimes I think it would have been more comfortable for us to have been more involved with developing the exhibition, but you have

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to trust that the professionals you are involved with know what they are doing. At least for me, there was a point halfway through when I got comfortable, and realized that it was going to be OK.

As a result of visitor evaluation, and from working with these advisors and partners, the team decided to emphasize the San Francisco Bay as a ‘‘hybrid’’ landscape. The exhibition themes drew on current thinking in environmental history, stressing the active role humans have taken, and will take, in shaping and stewarding the natural world. Above and Below, the exhibition and accompanying programming, told a complicated story we hoped would capture the nuances, uncertainty, multiple viewpoints, and historical contingencies of the region’s history. And the exhibition project prompted public dialogue on topics of local concern to our community partners, such as historic and cultural preservation, climate change, invasive species, wetlands restoration, and infrastructure construction. The project did not advocate for a single best future or tell people what to do; rather, it opened with the question: how might people live with the bay in the future, and who gets to decide?

I

nstead of a linear march through history, we chose to tell eight different stories, each illuminating a different aspect of the historical relationship between people and nature. One area included a more scientific approach to the sub-surface world, showing how people have changed the water, bottom surface, and species of the bay. A section on a small duck hunting community, ringing with gunshots a hundred years ago but now an abandoned ghost town, revealed the hidden history of foraging from the bay. And a look at today’s restored marshlands showed how even “natural” landscapes are created and managed by humans.

The piece that fulfilled mitigation requirements used the 1936 Bay Bridge as a way to explore how the environment of the bay shaped the work of bridge designers and engineers, as well as the experiences of bridge builders, toll takers, and tow truck drivers. As part of the mitigation contract, we partnered with the Regional Oral History Office at the University of California, Berkeley, to record the stories of such people who had worked on the bridge, and clips from these interviews made it into the gallery. Nearby, dynamic maps, courtesy of the Stanford Spatial History Lab, demonstrated how engineering projects changed land use around the bay. Video and graphics invited visitors to think about

how they experience the landscape of the bay differently when they cross it on a ferry, high on a bridge, or under the surface via Bay Area Regional Transit.

Interpretation in the exhibition took diverse forms. Our goal at the Oakland Museum of California is to create visitor experiences that are participatory, customized, and engaging. Wherever possible, commentary from historic figures or contemporary scientists was cast in first-person narratives. Visitors heard the voices of Ohlone Indians, market hunters, Chinese immigrants, bridge maintenance crews, community activists, and others. A ‘‘Land Scan’’— shot by the Center for Land Use Interpretation from a lowflying helicopter—gave a surprising, contemporary view of the entire edge of the bay, while a documentary film by Donna Graves and David Washburn examined the legacy of abandoned military sites on neighborhoods and wildlife. And throughout, we asked visitors to leave their own thoughts and stories in the gallery for others to experience.

The “Futures Lounge,” for example, offered walls strewn with historic and unrealized plans, prompting visitors to draw their own future vision of the bay. And, as the exhibition’s opening coincided with the final closing of the old eastern span, we offered blank postcards of the 1936 bridge for visitors to record their final memories of crossing it.

A

las, Above and Below was not a permanent exhibition, so it is no longer on display. As part of our agreement with Caltrans, however, several features do live on. The oral histories that were collected by the Regional Oral History Office are available to researchers, and full written transcripts and short video clips are still available on the office’s website. A printed “field guide” to the bay and the school curriculum remain available on the museum’s website. “A Geolocated Guide to the Bay” is still available on the FieldTrip app and Findery mobile site. Caltrans retains rights to much of the original content, including the media pieces, and is committed to making them available. Physical exhibition elements have found homes at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, Caltrans, and the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, as well as our own Natural Sciences Gallery, and the Exploratorium in San Francisco has shown the Land Scan video.

Our hope is that our experience with Above and Below can serve as a model for successful community partnerships and for how government agencies such as Caltrans might

creatively respond to state and federal environmental and historic preservation requirements. We also learned a thing or two. Juggling so many partnerships was a challenge, and we needed a full-time exhibition coordinator to keep all the balls in the air. Many of our partners, including Caltrans, had never worked on an exhibition development schedule before, so we had to educate them about our process, while managing their deadlines and expectations. And as is often the case when working with contemporary controversial topics, we had to be diplomatic in balancing the voices of scientists, planners, native peoples, and activists. Despite these challenges, Above and Below did get scientists, historians, and artists to reach across divides between disciplines Above and Below and practices, and the museum was one of the achieved its goal of becoming a public forum for important most popular California topics and issues. exhibitions that the Based on average daily visitation, Above and Below was one Oakland Museum of the most popular exhibitions that the Oakland Museum of of California has California has presented since presented since our our re-launch in 2010. Audience response was enthusiastically re-launch in 2010. positive, indicated both in direct staff observations and in summative evaluations. We noticed visitors watching the Land Scan video for twenty to thirty minutes, kneeling on our large floor map to find familiar landmarks, and creating colorful, imaginative drawings of the future bay. For the museum, this partnership resulted in a project that fulfilled our vision to be a “museum for the people.” And for Caltrans, it also refreshed their mission to serve the people of California.

Noah Stewart summed it up this way: We have a hard time as an agency in reaching the public. This was one of the benefits of working with you guys. I can’t say enough about that—how you work with the community, and they consider the museum “their place.” That’s who we’re working for, too. This is probably the most successful mitigation measure we’ve ever done, measured by the number of people reached, who really saw our “stuff,” and got a view of how we do what we do. And personally, the exhibition allowed me to realize what the bridge meant to people. It really worked! This is probably a once in a lifetime experience. We don’t have the resources to do projects this big on a regular basis—but I would do it again in a heartbeat. t Louise Pubols is Senior Curator of History at the Oakland Museum of California. At the Oakland Museum, she served as Lead Curator for a major reinstallation of the museum’s history galleries and is currently working on an exhibition on California food. She can be reached at lpubols@ museumca.org.

History news

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Leading Historical Programs:

Strategies for Innovation

Many progressive public history programs employ a blend of exhibits and imaginative technology applications to engage visitors and convey an understanding of the past. The Indiana Historical Society’s “Destination Indiana” program uses innovative technology, touch screens, and immersive displays of historic images to explore the state’s history.

Indiana Historical Society

By Bruce W. Dearstyne

H

istorical programs face well-known challenges these days, such as modest resources, shifting demographics and customer base, and expanding social media tools, which impact where and how people seek historical information. We need to surmount these challenges; leaven our programs with creativity and innovation; seize opportunities; and take our programs to higher levels of service, excellence, and attainment. My new book from Rowman & Littlefield’s AASLH book series, Leading the Historical Enterprise: Strategic Creativity, Planning, and Advocacy for the Digital Age, focuses on history programs that have done much more than weather the storms. Instead, the organizations profiled in the book have taken new directions; adapted models of leadership, innovation, advocacy, and digital engagement used

by the nation’s most successful businesses; and found ways to thrive in a time of uncertainty. How did they do it? This article explores five of their strategies: challenge the status quo; use strategic planning to chart new directions; encourage and manage innovation; develop broader, imaginative approaches to engagement; and put advocacy at the center of the program.

Strategy 1:

Challenge the Status Quo

The most dynamic programs have decisive, take-charge leaders who hold onto core purposes and values but tend to be dissatisfied with the status quo. They believe that their programs need to evolve in reaction to—or better yet, in anticipation of—changes in stakeholder expectations, information technology shifts, and changing resource levels. They constantly seek new insights, recognize patterns even when things are unsettled, and push past ambiguity. These leaders

History news

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The Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, is a good example of a history program that features an open, frank portrayal of controversial historical events with a view toward deepening public understanding and shedding light on current issues.

are skilled architects of organizational learning. They keep talking about the larger cause—why our programs exist, what they do, why they are important. As noted in the book: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast,’ famed management writer Peter Drucker once said. Particularly in difficult or challenging times, culture—the way people feel about their program, esprit d’corps, their working relationship with each other, their relationship with the boss, and the spirit of cooperation in getting work done and moving the program ahead—is what makes the difference. Leaders build strong cultures that encourage initiative from everyone in the program. Employees need to believe in the program; feel engaged (understand how their work benefits the organization and how they will be held accountable); energized (assignments are clear and people have plenty of leeway in how to approach them); and enabled (they have the tools they need and managers act as counselors and coaches to help people with challenges that they may encounter). This set of insights is particularly important for history programs where resources are likely to be modest, ability to promote people or provide monetary incentives is limited, and leaders need everyone’s energy and talent fully engaged every day. People know the importance of history, and leaders need to explain how that cause connects with the work of their historical program.1

Strategy 2:

Use Strategic Planning to Chart New Directions

Dynamic programs use strategic planning to ask hard questions, rebound resiliently after setbacks, revitalize programs that have been languishing, embrace new communities, and seize opportunities. They carry out the traditional analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

But they also ask hard questions—for instance, whether the program has the will and resources to continue by itself or whether it should consider alternatives such as cooperation with other programs. Some programs are seeking fresh insights and perspectives by reaching out not only to current users and customers but also to underserved groups that the program would like to engage. Planning is an intense, analytical, and consultative process.

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The Washington State Historical Society, for instance, sustained substantial budget cuts in 2008, which threatened its program. The organization entitled its 2009-2011 planning document “Reflecting the New Reality” and featured two striking goals: emerge as a more valuable organization and use the crisis as an opportunity to reset and refocus.

Imaginative strategies included leveraging its strength as the state’s flagship museum, building on its track record in women’s history, and finding new ways to tap the leadership experience and capacity of its senior staff and the creativity of its workforce. The plan called for strengthening the organization’s statewide presence through cooperation with other organizations and more imaginative promotional work. The plan focused resources on “lines of business that have the greatest strategic value”—museum exhibits, Web presence, and statewide outreach—but also committed to “keep the innovation pipeline full.”2 Planning is also a useful way to accommodate change and engage new audiences. The Valentine Richmond History Center in Richmond, Virginia, studied the region’s changing economy and demographics and developed a plan for programs to mirror the area’s evolution. The history center commits to “anticipate and engage changes in the area’s culture and economy…[become] a bridge for a museum, a community, and a society in transition…recalibrate in order to remain viable, relevant, and proactive in a dynamic environment.” For instance, one of its priorities will be connecting with a new generation of young professionals who are “active, diverse, technologically savvy, and coming into their own as emerging leaders in the Richmond region.”3

Encourage and Manage Innovation Strategy 3:

Dynamic programs stay on the move, constantly altering their services to keep them fresh, but also staying anchored in mission, their own traditions, and the practical realities of staff and resource constraints. This strategy has three features: • Staff creativity. Program directors hire people from diverse backgrounds, encourage them to be curious, seek

Develop Broader, Imaginative Approaches

to Engagement Strategy 4:

Many historical programs need to find ways to engage new communities, e.g., appealing to and convincing particular groups to visit a history museum and support its work.

This requires sensitivity to people’s interests and learning styles. Individuals want to make a personal connection, to feel something as well as learn something when they visit a historic site or view an artifact. This sort of creative engagement requires dialogue with individuals and groups that the program would like to reach. It also entails receptivity to new ideas, heeding other people’s perspectives, and being open to sharing responsibility and work on new initiatives that might be mutually beneficial. Social media is a useful way of reaching out to customers for new ideas and reactions to current offerings.

Nina Simon, director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, developed a model of systematic user involve-

ment in her book, The Participatory Museum. Museums should be places for community engagement, conversations about important issues, and catalysts for social change, she says. We should treat in-person and online visitors as partners—creators, remixers, and redistributors of content.

Every visitor who walks in the door or logs onto the website should be viewed as a potential contributor who can make the program better. Programs need to design a way for people to contribute ideas and suggestions. At Simon’s museum, for instance, visitors can write on white boards and use post-it notes to leave reactions and suggestions. Many museum programs use social media to engage audiences and solicit ideas.4 The Levine Museum of the New South in Charlotte, North Carolina, offers another example of creative engagement with visitors. Its central exhibit, Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers: Charlotte and the Carolina Piedmont in the New South, offers an interactive, hands-on experience that uses the region as a case study to illustrate the profound changes in the South since the Civil War. The Charlotte region is a rapidly growing, diversifying area, and the museum offered an exhibit entitled Changing Places: From Black and White to Technicolor, where people could both learn about demographic changes and offer their own reflections and personal narratives for inclusion in the exhibit. The museum also features a regular “New South for the New Southerner” lecture series, a monthly “Civic by Design” forum on growth issues, and an annual event called “A Woman’s Place” that explores the evolving roles and accomplishments of women in the New South. “The New South continually reinvents itself as newcomers, natives, immigrants, visitors, and residents change the composition and direction of the region,” notes the description of Changing Places on the museum’s website.5 Many progressive programs are positioning themselves as links between the past and present, connecting longtime residents and newcomers, and helping people understand economic and social changes by putting these shifts into historical context. For example, the Morrison County Historical Society in Little Falls, Minnesota, developed a project to document people’s life experiences. Participants wrote short essays on “What’s It Like to […] in Morrison County?” People could come up with their own topics (“the topics are limited only by your imagination,” says the society’s website. “Feel free to be creative!”), but the curators also provided possible suggestions—to be a teacher, to be a farmer, to be a writer—and also some more provocative Nancy Pierce, Levine Museum of the New South

Levine Museum of the New South

new information, ask probing questions, and challenge the status quo. Staff develop deep expertise but they also keep up with the literature, attend professional conferences, and consider new ideas from many sources, both in the field (for instance, AASLH and the American Alliance of Museums’ Center for the Future of Museums) and from the business sector (particularly insights for customer engagement, social media, and managing digital enterprises).

They are very customer-centric, observing how visitors and other customers interact with exhibits and talking with customers (and potential customers) about their interests. Management makes it clear that staff members are expected to speak up and offer suggestions for new approaches and programs.

• Moving from creativity to innovation. Programs need a process to consider and evaluate creative proposals, including open discussion in staff meetings (with the intention of challenging, sharpening, and sometimes altering initial ideas or blending two or more creative proposals into something more promising and far-reaching than any of the original ideas), and a process for vetting and evaluating the best proposals and selecting those that seem most promising. That in effect crystallizes creativity and prepares the best results to go to work as innovation.

• Testing, evaluating, adapting, and adjusting. Borrowing from the business methodology of “lean start-up,” which was originally developed for quick launch of new businesses and products, history programs are putting new innovations on fast-forward. Program directors shortcut long planning cycles by launching prototypes or initiatives with some features not fully developed, seek customer reaction, and continue to experiment, get feedback, and develop in an iterative fashion. Quick rounds of experimentation reveal what works and what does not. The program quickly adopts (and may scale up) what works. When implementations fail or come up short, the program learns from the process and pivots to something new.

The Cotton Fields to Skyscrapers exhibit offers an interactive, hands-on experience to help visitors understand the “New South.”

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questions, such as: to be poor, to be wealthy, to be black, to be an immigrant, and to be a crime victim. “We want to collect the histories of people who don’t have their histories collected that often—to have a representative sample that’s not just the famous people or the rich people,” explained museum manager Mary Warner. “You have to remind people, keep reaching out. …We are constantly educating people that current history is history too.”8

Strategy 5:

Put Advocacy at the Center of the Program

Dynamic programs make advocacy part of everyone’s job and a factor in everything that they do. They are determined to render excellent service, which is an essential basis for recognition and support. They constantly report on numbers of visitors but also feature testimonials and examples of the impact of research projects. They seek out news media with information on holdings and services and on the ways historical insights shed light on contemporary issues and problems. They develop robust social media programs that not only engage customers but also make the case for the program’s relevance and contribution to the community.

The director is a cheerleader for the program and an ambassador to individuals and groups whose recognition and support the program needs.

These programs build two levels of advocates. The first is an elite corps of capable supporters (including trustees and members of advisory groups) with resources, influence, or both. These advocates fully understand the program’s mission and potential and have great confidence in the program’s leadership. The programs also cultivate a second, broader circle of supporters and advocates from among the range of people interested in the program. This circle includes visitors and the network of people cultivated through the program’s engagement efforts (including social media). They can be called on to write letters, speak to public officials, and otherwise rally for the program when such support is needed.

Effective leaders craft their advocacy messages carefully.

One example is James Vaughan, executive director of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, testifying before a legislative committee in 2012 after years of budget reductions. Vaughan framed his message by noting that the commission spends most of its time doing things that serve the citizens. He summarized the economic benefits of statewide historical and preservation efforts and explained that preservation work by the commission helps cities and towns keep up property values. Attuned to the economyminded legislature, he described cutbacks, consolidation, and plans for finding cooperating partners to use space in “a number of facilities that exceed the needs of the commission.” Vaughan noted the commission was ramping up its own fundraising. He carefully answered questions from legislators about administrative practices, fiscal management, and technology. A legislator asked about visitation to Pennsbury Manor and the first female governor of a colony, Hannah Penn. Vaughan knew his history: he responded that Hannah Penn had administered the colony for four-

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teen years after William Penn had a stroke and that “she was a better administrator than William Penn and helped the colony get out of a number of financial and border issues.” There were five underlying but unstated messages in Vaughan’s impressive testimony: We’re on top of things.

We know our history. We run a tight ship. Our work helps all Pennsylvanians and communities throughout the state. If we had more resources, we could do even more public good. The testimony was a masterful blend of information sharing, engagement, and advocacy.7

Our Mission is Critical, and Therefore Robust Programs are Essential Conclusion:

There is much at stake in the future of state and local history institutions, because they preserve, interpret, and present the histories of thousands of communities and connect local events and individuals to larger national and international historical developments. They are animated by a deep sense of pride and mission and a tradition of service. “The real stuff of history is found in your community and your institutions such as the local archives, libraries, museums, and historic buildings and places,” explains the Ohio Historical Society’s Citizen’s Guide. “These are where you find…original diaries, birth certificates, buried artifacts, buildings and histories. …History promotes educational achievement, stimulates our economy, and contributes significantly to our quality of life.”8 t Bruce W. Dearstyne holds a Ph.D. in history from Syracuse University. He was a staff member at the Office of State History in New York and a program director at the New York State Archives. He served as a professor at the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, where he continues as an adjunct professor, teaching courses in management. He is the author of numerous articles, three AASLH technical leaflets, two books published by AASLH, and the new book Leading the Historical Enterprise: Strategic Creativity, Planning, and Advocacy for the Digital Age, published by Rowman & Littlefield in its AASLH book series. He can be reached at dearstyne@verizon.net.

1 Bruce W. Dearstyne, Leading the Historical Enterprise: Strategic Creativity, Planning, and Advocacy for the Digital Age (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 35.

2 Washington State Historical Society, 2009-2011 Budget: Reflecting the New Reality (2009), Performance Measures (2013), and 2013-2017 Strategic Plan (2013), 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, www.washingtonhistory.org.

3 William Martin, “Practical Futurism: A Case Study,” Center for the Future of Museums (Blog), June 14, 2011, http://futureofmuseums.blogspot.com/2011/06/ practical-futurism-case-study.html; and Valentine Richmond History Center, Strategic Plan 2010, www.richmondhistorycenter.com/sites/richmondhistorycenter.com/files/pictures/VRHCSP10StrategicPlanFINALdesigned.pdf. Quotation from Valentine Richmond History Center, Strategic Plan 2010, 2, 3.

4 Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010); Simon, “Twelve Ways We Made Our Santa Cruz Collects Exhibition Participatory,” Museum 2.0 (blog), September 12, 2012, http://museumtwo. blogspot.com/2012/09/12-ways-we-made-our-santa-cruz-collect.html; and Simon, “Museum 2.0 Rerun: Answers to the Ten Questions I am Most Commonly Asked,” Museum 2.0 (blog), September 18, 2013, http://museumtwo.blogspot. com/2013/09/museum-20-rerun-answers-to-ten.html.

5 Information on the programs and exhibits of the Levine Museum of the New South is available at www.museumofthenewsouth.org. See also, Betty Farrell and Maria Medvedeva,“Case Study: Cultivating Cross-Racial and Ethnic Experiences

6 “What’s It Like […] in Morrison County, Minnesota?,” Morrison County Historical Society (website), http://morrisoncountyhistory.org/whatsitlike; and Simon, “Developing a Participatory, Provocative History Project at a Small Museum in Minnesota: Interview With Mary Warner,” Museum 2.0 (blog), January 30, 2013, http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2013/01/developing-participatory-provocative.html.

7

Minnesota Historical Society

and Understanding,” Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, Center for the Future of Museums, 2010), 21, www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-of-museums/ demotransaam2010.pdf.

Dearstyne, Leading the Historical Enterprise, 119-20.

Dearstyne, Leading the Historical Enterprise, 5; and Ohio Historical Society, 2012-2013 Citizen’s Guide (online), 2012, 5, www.ohiohistory.org/about-us/ citizens-guide.

8

Searching for Innovative Ideas History programs look to their own staff members, peer programs, and professional associations, especially the American Association for State and Local History, for inspiration and new ideas. But sometimes looking beyond our field can help bring fresh perspectives that can, with some adaption, help energize our programs.

A few recent books that may be of interest: Ackerson, Anne W. and Joan H. Baldwin. Leadership Matters. Lanham, MD: Alta Mira, 2014.

Bergeron, Anne and Beth Tuttle. Magnetic: The Art and Science of Engagement. Washington, DC: American Alliance of Museums, 2013.

Catmull, Ed. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. New York: Random House, 2014. deBrabandere, Luc and Alan Ivy. Thinking in New Boxes: A New Paradigm for Business Creativity. New York: Random House, 2013.

Hamm, John. Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2011.

Kelley, Tom and David Kelley. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential within Us All. New York: Crown Business, 2013.

Krupp, Steven and Paul J. H. Schoemaker. Winning the Long Game: How Strategic Leaders Shape the Future.

New York: Public Affairs, 2014.

Mellon, Liz. Inside the Leader’s Mind: Five Ways to Act Like a Leader. New York: Prentice Hall, 2011.

Norris, Linda and Rainey Tisdale. Creativity in Museum Practice. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2014.

Nussbaum, Bruce. Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire. New York: Harper Business, 2013.

Schrage, Michael. The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More Than Good Ideas.

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

Trautlein, Barbara A. Change Intelligence: Using the Power of CQ to Lead Change That Sticks. New York: Greenleaf, 2013.

Many progressive history programs are developing new uses for historic houses. The Minnesota Historical Society transformed the home of the first territorial governor and the state’s second governor, Alexander Ramsey, from a traditional historic house museum with static period pieces into a site that is versatile and user-friendly. It hosts history presentations, social gatherings, and special events including a monthly “History Happy Hour” (ages 21+ only), shown here.

Some other potentially interesting sources: American Alliance of Museums. Center for the Future of Museums (website). www.aam-us.org/resources/ center-for-the-future-of-museums. Monitors cultural, economic, and technological trends.

The D School at Stanford (website). http://dschool. stanford.edu. Formally named the Hassno Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, the school is a leading proponent of design thinking to address a variety of problems.

EmcArts (website). www.emcarts.org. Innovative practices in the area of arts, including collaboration and audience engagement.

IBM Institute for Business Value (website). www-935.ibm. com/services/us/gbs/thoughtleadership. Reports on emerging trends and business innovations.

IDEO (website). www.ideo.com. Design firm known for its innovation in design thinking.

Inc (website). www.inc.com. Innovative ideas from the nation’s fastest growing companies.

Museum 2.0 (blog). http://museumtwo.blogspot.com.

The blog of Nina Simon, a constant source of new ideas about reinventing museum programs and customer engagement.

TED: Ideas Worth Spreading (website). www.ted.com/ talks. Videos and transcripts of talks on innovation, media, technology, entertainment, and other topics.

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Is It Time for

By Rick Beard

“Now is the time for the next great agenda of museum development in America…the design and delivery of experiences that have the power to inspire and change the way people see both the world and the possibility of their own lives.”

1

— Harold Skramstad Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century

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T

he twentieth century ended on a high note for history museum leaders, who were reassured by the evidence in The Presence of the Past that their institutions were Americans’ most trusted source of historical information. Still, the men and women at the helms of these institutions could be excused if they appeared somewhat uncertain about the future role their organizations were to play in the nation’s cultural life. The explosive growth of the previous two decades had largely run its course, and many institutions now hunkered down to try to figure out how to get more people through their front doors.

Questions of historical interpretation and content that had dominated professional conversations for many years were slowly making way for discussions focused on sharing authority and dramatically rethinking the entire museum experience. And all this transpired in the shadow of several unnerving challenges to the interpretive revolution in which so many had heavily invested.2

A Little Controversy Never Hurts, Right?

I

n April 1992, just in time for the annual conference of the American Association of Museums in Baltimore, the Maryland Historical Society opened

Mining the Museum, a collaboration with the city’s Contemporary Museum. Fred Wilson, a New York-based artist best known for his “mock museum” installations, was given free rein to “mine” the historical society’s collections.

Using manuscripts, prints, paintings, and objects, he created visually and intellectually jarring combinations of objects.

While presented in traditional museum fashion, complete with interpretive labeling, Wilson’s juxtaposed artifacts and images challenged visitors to view objects in contexts that

Another Revolution? ran counter to widely accepted historical narratives. A Ku Klux Klan hood accessorized an early twentieth-century baby carriage, a section titled “Metalwork” displayed iron slave shackles next to several pieces of nineteenth-century silver, and in “Cabinetmaking, 1820-1960,” a whipping post accompanied a display of Victorian-era chairs.3 The public response to Mining the Museum was visceral.

While some visitors responded positively to Wilson’s emotional and intellectual provocations, others were uncomprehending or outraged. “How can the person responsible for this be stopped or redirected?” asked one patron. Another characterized it as “the worst and most racist display I have ever seen in a museum!” Such controversy guarantees attention, and by the end of its run the exhibition had attracted more than 55,000 visitors, more than any other exhibition presented before or since at the Maryland Historical Society.4 For many history professionals, Wilson’s exhibit was (and remains) a watershed moment. In “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars,” an insightful analysis written almost two decades later, exhibit developer Ken Yellis voiced the excitement that many had felt. “At the time [1992] it looked as if Wilson might help museums figure out ways of helping people fight about the past more productively and, more importantly, help make museums themselves both more self-reflexive and more transparent about the exhibition-making process.” But it was not to be so easy.

A decade and a half later, Yellis concluded that “Americans’ historical disputation skills seem little enhanced. And museums, damaged by Enola Gay and other controversies, maintain an ambivalent relationship with Mining the Museum.” 5 Fred Wilson’s skewering of many of the interpretive pretensions of history museums, while provocative, posed no existential threat to the institutions themselves. The same could not be said for the aforementioned contretemps surrounding the National Air and Space Museum’s effort to mount The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II. Six years in the planning, the exhibition was to feature the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima. But well before the exhibit was to go up on the museum’s walls, it ran into a buzz saw of criticism from veterans’ groups and politicians. Members of the United States Senate took the lead, unanimously deeming the draft exhibit script “revisionist and offensive to many World War II veterans.” The controversy played out over the course of

The shockwaves from the Enola Gay controversy rippled throughout the history museum world for years afterward, leading to what Ken Yellis characterized as “a case of professional Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

a year, during which neither side in the dispute established a firm hold on the moral high ground.6 The denouement came in late January 1995, when Secretary I. Michael Heyman of the Smithsonian Institution announced that The Last Act would be replaced by a much more modest exhibit.

“We made a basic error in attempting to couple an historical treatment of the use of atomic weapons with the fiftieth anniversary commemoration of the end of the war,” he explained in an institutional mea culpa. “They [veterans] were not looking for analysis,” Heyman continued, “and…we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings…analysis would evoke.”

Four months later, Martin Harwit, the director of the Air and Space Museum and a well-respected astronomer who had taught at Cornell, resigned.7 The shockwaves from the Enola Gay controversy rippled throughout the history museum world for years afterward, leading to what Ken Yellis characterized as “a case of professional Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” Had some museums, he wondered, “become conflict-averse” and were still others inclined “to avoid narrative altogether?” While the controversy had made museums more wary, he optimistically concluded that it had also taught history professionals that “grappling with difficult and contested subject matter need not in itself be fatally toxic,” so long as they were prepared for the possible consequences. He also predicted that museums were “showing a little more willingness to pick an occasional fight.”

The jury is still out on the latter prediction, and recent history museum efforts to tackle difficult topics have met with mixed success at best. For every Slavery in New York, the much-lauded exhibition at the New York Historical Society in 2005-2006, there is a Hide/Seek: Difference and

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Desire in American Portraiture, an exhibition in 2010 at the National Portrait Gallery that drew intense criticism from those offended by its use of religious symbols.8 Both Mining the Museum and The Last Act posed nonetoo-subtle challenges to one of the interpretive revolution’s primary tenets—that the authority to create new narratives of the past rested with the curators, historians, and other experts employed by museums. In Baltimore Fred Wilson had basically suggested that standard interpretive approaches failed to force visitors (and professionals) to journey outside their historical comfort zones. Being asked to consider how the same cabinetry skills used to craft a nineteenth-century Victorian chair were also employed to create a whipping post discomfited all but the most obtuse visitor, while also establishing a standard for interpretive provocation that many history museums still strive to achieve.

The Enola Gay controversy posed a different, more fundamental challenge. How could historians at work in museums respond to an argument such as the one posed

by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who — Cary Carson during a Senate hearing on the exhibition deplored the changes in history since her days as an undergraduate, when the subject was “essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis.” She went on to wonder “about the wisdom of presenting any interpretation” in a manner that made clear her disdain for what was for most professionals the primary goal of any exhibition project. While such a view might have been acceptable to history professionals thirty or forty years earlier, it was anathema to the generation weaned on the certainty that, in Cary Carson’s words, “history lessons are as open to argument as…all the other present-minded disciplines that shape our cultural values and set our civic agenda.”9

Is It Time for Another Revolution?

“History lessons are as open to argument as…all the other presentminded disciplines that shape our cultural values and set our civic agenda.”

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A New Revolution Brews

B

y the end of the 1990s, attention and energy within the history museum community began to shift, from focusing on interpretive content to

enhancing the visitor experience and reexamining the balance of power between institutions and their audiences. To suggest a causal link between this shift in priorities and the Enola Gay controversy, however satisfying, would be inaccurate. History museums were not disavowing their now decades-old commitment to scholarly interpretation.

Instead, their leaders were beginning to recognize that the energies that had driven the interpretive revolution of the 1980s and 1990s were dwindling. Furthermore, the revolution had been largely successful. Despite the occasional high-profile donnybrook like the Enola Gay controversy, the

Spring 2015

intellectual authority of history museums, as Rosenzweig and Thelen reported, trumped that of all other purveyors of historical content.

Success had come in large part because the history museum community had privileged the input of its own professionals, academic scholars, and funders such as the National Endowment for the Humanities. Listening to consumers and potential consumers was generally not part of the equation. As Harold Skramstad argued in his seminal 1999 essay, “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century,” traditional museum practice “assumes that the museum is teacher and the audience is learner and that the museum cannot allow its audiences to play a role in defining its programs.”10 But this was about to change, for more and more Americans had come to expect their leisure activities to “engage them in a way that is vivid, distinctive, and out of

The Self-Directed

W

hile preparing the Connecticut Historical Society’s new strategic plan in 2014, the staff and board held community meetings across the state. We were trying to understand how Connecticans define history, why it is valuable, and their preferred ways to participate in it.

Most we spoke with—those passionate about the discipline and those who see it as a nice distraction—found relevance in history when it revolved around personal and local content. Personal and local history helped them to define themselves by explaining their sense of loyalty and identity, unusual quirks, and strongly held values.

The search for these answers provided many a sense of purpose, and the tool they most often used to address it was narrative. Based on these observations, the CHS decided upon an approach to history whereby we would help visitors tell their own stories, and help connect those stories to the larger Connecticut narrative.

With this direction in mind, the organization began a few new programs to test this approach. In March 2015 we launched affinity groups aimed at people who have niche interests in decorative arts and textiles. Joining the affinity groups is free, but membership requires volunteer time to both design and staff programs. A CHS staff member assists as a facilitator and guide. The decorative arts group curated an exhibition, while the textile (or “fashion”) affinity group is organizing a history-inspired fashion show. We will follow both the exhibit and fashion with additional programs.

The people drawn to these groups aren’t just interested in admiring beautiful and rare objects. Most have personal

the ordinary.” This was especially true of children “brought up in a world of interactive media, which sets up new expectations of active participation.” At the core of Skramstad’s new agenda was his belief that American museums should now focus on helping to create a new world in which people of all ages could “reach in” to museums through experiences that offer personal value and meaning while also broadening their perceptions of the world.11 Skramstad’s inclusion of “experience” in his formulation acknowledged an idea—the “experience economy”— popularized by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore. In a much discussed 1998 article, they argued that contemporary consumers sought more than just the provision of goods and services. They wanted an experience that drew on all five senses to enhance any activity with which they were engaging, be it shopping, traveling, or visiting a museum. In a subsequent article the two refined their ideas, arguing that

a “new consumer sensibility” had engendered the need for a museum to create the perception that it offered an “authentic” experience for each visitor. To accomplish this, a museum had to be true to itself and be what it said it was to others or, in the words of a Shaker motto: “Be what you seem to be, and seem to be what you really are.”12 A Dutch museologist expanded on Pine and Gilmore’s argument on behalf of authenticity. To customize an experience, he suggested, a museum must first understand its customers’ physical, emotional, intellectual, or spiritual aspirations

Nature of Interpretation history with the objects they study. A particular type of clock may have been crafted in the neighborhood where the person grew up, or they had a grandmother who worked in the textile mills where a fabric was woven. Deep study of these collections allows the audiences to explore their own histories. But their personal interests also lead them to research many things: differences in stitching methods or in cabinet-making, why one style was of preference, or where craftspeople learned their trade. From there, they can examine how those trends reflect immigration patterns in a community, for example, or how the blending of cultures improved construction techniques.

The next example of this approach is our spring 2015 exhibition, Connecticut: 50 Objects/50 Stories. The idea for this exhibit came directly from these strategic planning community meetings. At most meetings we found people had a very different perspective on Connecticut’s history and culture, one they understood mostly through personal experience and local identity. To help people share their own stories, and to connect them with the story of Connecticut, the CHS challenged the public and local historical organizations to submit stories as represented by photographs of real objects that they believe define Connecticut. We collect and display submissions in an online gallery. From the submissions, a committee of scholars, peers, and community members will chose fifty of these object-based stories for a physical exhibit that will run from May to October 2015 at the CHS headquarters.

A “new consumer sensibility” had engendered the need for a museum to create the perception that it offered an “authentic” experience for each visitor.

By Jody Blankenship

Rather than attempting to define Connecticut through a single narrative, this exhibit begins a conversation with participants about who we are, how we see ourselves and our communities, and what we aspire to become. So far we have received a wide range of stories and objects from the traditional Charter Oak legend and a leaf of tobacco used to make Connecticut shade leaf cigar wrappers, to the United Textile Workers of America union charter and a same-sex marriage certificate from 2008.

As the CHS transforms into an organization that helps people to discover and share their story (stories often shared and repeated in communities across the state) we are able to construct a wonderfully diverse, complex, and rich history that, rather than explaining where we came from, begins a discussion about where we wish to go.

As Rick Beard noted in this article, “The next great revolution in interpretation has already begun, as museums, in partnership with their audiences, move to craft transformative experiences that engage visitors of all ages.

Success will rely upon the history community’s ability to fuse the new technology and social media with its greatest assets—real objects, places, stories, lives, and ideas.” This is the future of historical interpretation at the Connecticut Historical Society and should be, I believe, for the field as a whole.

Jody Blankenship is Executive Director of the Connecticut Historical Society. He can be reached at director@chs.org.

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and “determine what aspirational possibilities exist” within the museum’s purview. Only then can the institution add specific elements to the experience to help guide visitors to a “transformative end.”13 Determining an institution’s “aspirational possibilities” and acting on them to reach “a transformative end” is considerably different, and for many quite a bit more daunting, than crafting an interpretive history exhibition shaped by rigorous scholarship and reliant on museum collections. Artifacts and content become means, not ends, and rather than an all-knowing content expert, the museum curator, historian, or educator becomes a facilitator. As Benjamin Filene wrote in these pages, “our usual ‘collect, preserve, and interpret’ missions are not enough to encompass this work.” It requires a new relationship between the professional and the visitor, one in which the two are on an equal footing.14 Many museum professionals are uncomfortable with the idea of letting go of their authority, arguing “that to focus on experience rather than on content is to pander to the audience and to attenuate the subtlety and nuance of what is being — Benjamin Filene communicated.” Setting aside the question of the degree to which a history museum can effectively convey nuance and subtlety, let alone communicate large amounts of information, the argument for maintaining the traditional balance of power between museums and their audiences smacks of a defensiveness that is largely generational.15 In the past ten years, many of those responsible for steering the interpretive revolution of the 1980s and 1990s have retired. Their younger replacements are men and women who have embraced the recommendations of reports such as Excellence and Equity, which stressed the centrality of education in museums, the need for inclusivity, and the central importance of forceful leadership to assuring that museums fulfilled their potential for public service.16 This next generation of leadership also appears willing, even eager, to share authority with the public and to embrace “public curation,” a process that invites “audiences to become active participants, shaping content and offering interpretations.” They recognize that “letting go” requires more, not less, involvement from museum professionals.

“What the museum lets go of are not skills and knowledge,” argues Benjamin Filene, “but the assumption that the museum has the last word on historical interpretation.” To do this successfully requires a broader range of skills than in the past. “Museum professionals,” he continues, “will need to supplement command of historical content with expertise at interpreting, facilitating, engaging, listening, and learning with their visitors.”17

Is It Time for Another Revolution?

“Museum professionals will need to supplement command of historical content with expertise at interpreting, facilitating, engaging, listening, and learning with their visitors.”

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Spring 2015

“Radical trust,” another term for this process of “letting go” of authority by museum professionals, has become popular in recent years. The Internet, social media, and the many other new ways Americans have to share opinions have made them increasingly insistent that museums listen to and include them as full participants in telling their stories.

An institution’s commitment to radical trust, however, does not mean that the public has unfettered access to the levers of interpretation and program development. Jim Gardner, a senior executive at the National Archives, has correctly cautioned his colleagues in museums to avoid “blurring of the line between knowledge and opinion in a Web 2.0 world,” noting that “we need to resist the current impulse to welcome (and thereby validate) any and all opinions. …Our challenge,” he continues, “is negotiating a role that both builds on who we are and what our strengths are and also engages and challenges the public in new ways, whether in the virtual or the real world.”18 It is too early to tell if the history museum community is ready for radical trust as an operating principle. We are just now emerging from an economic downturn that has too often waylaid plans to revise existing interpretive exhibitions or launch ambitious new projects, and in many instances has instilled a reactive rather than proactive mindset among many museum leaders and governance boards.

As frustrating as this has been for many in the profession, it may ultimately prove to be a blessing, for it has almost certainly kept institutions from investing tens of thousands of dollars in technologies that soon became outmoded.

The almost surreal proliferation of tablets, smartphones, and other personal electronic devices daily redefines how people connect with one another, access information, share it with others, and save it for future reference. Technology that ten years ago would have been all but impossible to incorporate into an exhibition or educational experience in a museum because of the cost involved is now accessible to nearly everyone entering the institution’s front door or visiting its website.

The next great revolution in interpretation has already begun, as museums, in partnership with their audiences, move to craft transformative experiences that engage visitor of all ages. Success will rely upon the history community’s ability to fuse the new technology and social media with its greatest assets—real objects, places, stories, lives, and ideas. As one seasoned museum educator wrote recently in these pages, “History museums seem more eager to innovate than ever before. And as many traditional history museums downsize due to dwindling attendance, experimenting with…experience-driven learning may be a matter of survival.”19 t Rick Beard, currently an independent historian and author, is a past member of the AASLH Council and formerly served in senior management positions at the Hudson River Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, the Atlanta History Center, the New York Historical Society, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. He can be reached at reric@mindspring.com. This is the third in a series of essays commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of AASLH.

1 Harold Skramstad, “An Agenda for American Museums in the Twenty-First Century,” Daedalus 128, no. 3 (Cambridge: MIT Press for American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1999): 128.

2 See Rick Beard, “It’s About the Story! A Revolution in Interpreting the Past,” History News 70, no. 1 (Winter 2015): 25.

3 Mining the Museum, the after-the-fact catalog of the exhibition authored by Fred Wilson and edited by Lisa Corrin, has become a collector’s item. On April 7, 2015, an interested purchaser would have had to pay from $234 (used) to $300 (new) for a copy on Amazon.com.

Maryland Historical Society Library, “Return of the Whipping Post: Mining the Museum,” October 10, 2013, http://on.aaslh.org/MdHistSocWilson.

4

5 Ken Yellis, “Fred Wilson, PTSD, and Me: Reflections on the History Wars,” Curator 52, no. 4 (October 2009): 335.

Kristin Ann Hass, Sacrificing Soldiers on the National Mall (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 162.

6

7 There are several accounts that detail and analyze the Enola Gay controversy. Among the most useful is History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past, edited by Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, and published by Holt Paperbacks in August 1996. The quotes and other information here are taken from David Thelen, “History after the Enola Gay Controversy: An Introduction,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (December 1995): 1029-1035.

This issue also has a number of other articles on the subject, some of which are also included in History Wars.

8

Yellis, 334, 335.

Thelen, “History after the Enola Gay Controversy,” 1034; Cary Carson, “Front and Center: Local History Comes of Age,” Local History, National Heritage: Reflections on the History of the AASLH (Nashville: AASLH, 1991), 91.

9

10

Skramstad, 126.

11

Ibid., 125.

12

B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, “Welcome to the Experience

Economy,” Harvard Business Review, July-August 1998, http://on.aaslh.org/HBRExpEconomy.

See also: Andrea K. Jones, “Towards the Experience History Museum: All Hands On Deck,” History News 69, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 18-22; B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, “Museums & Authenticity, Museum News (May/ June 2007): 76, 79.

13 Peter van Mensch, “Museums and Experience. Towards a New Model of Explanation,” ABRA (Revista de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional, Heredia, Costa Rica, 2006), 34-36.

14 Benjamin Filene, “Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, History News 66, no. 4 (Autumn 2011): 12.

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Acknowledges and appreciates these Institutional Partners and Patrons for their extraordinary support:

Patron Members $250+

Filene, 8-9, 12.

Tim Grove, “History Bytes: Grappling with the Concept of Radical Trust,” History News 65, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 4-5.

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Skramstad, 122.

Excellence and Equity: Education and the Public Dimension of Museums. A Report from the American Association of Museums, 1992 (Washington: Alliance of American Museums, 1992, 1998, 2008): 5. Although now almost a quarter-century old, this report remains a useful guide to the public claims on our museums.

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Success will rely upon the history community’s ability to fuse the new technology and social media with its greatest assets—real objects, places, stories, lives, and ideas.

Jones, 22.

Institutional Partners $1,000+

Kentucky Historical Society Frankfort, KY

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Minnesota Historical Society St. Paul, MN

Atlanta History Center Atlanta, GA

Missouri History Museum St. Louis, MO

Belle Meade Plantation Nashville, TN

Museum of History and Industry Seattle, WA

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Nantucket Historical Association Nantucket, MA

Pamela J. Bennett Indianapolis, IN

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History news

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Award Winner Spotlight >

By Lisa Anderson

Ursus Among Us

B

ears know how to bluff and it’s scary. When they charge and slice their huge paws through the air while forcefully blowing air from their nostrils, it doesn’t seem like a defensive act. Yet they are bluffing. It turns out that for bears, bluffing is an innate behavior instigated when they are feeling defensive, not aggressive. They are scared too.

They are scared that something may come between them and their quest for food.

No one wants to be on the receiving end of a bluffing bear, yet many people find it difficult to maintain appropriate relationships with bears in their communities or favorite vacation spots. After all, bears are cute! Bluffing is one of the many bear behaviors explored in the exhibition Ursus Among Us at the Gatekeeper’s Museum (operated by the North Lake Tahoe Historical Society). The exhibition was awarded a Leadership in History Award this past fall for its unique approach to telling the story of bear and human interactions in the Tahoe Basin.1

An Expanded Mission

In 2010 the Gatekeeper’s Museum, under the leadership of former director Marguerite Sprague, began a quest to discover what topics visitors would like to see in future exhibitions at the museum.

The museum expected to receive inquiries about the people and events that popularize local history. Instead, to their surprise, the number one topic suggested centered on bears. There was no one place in Lake Tahoe for people to learn about bears, and tourists and locals alike wanted to know more about this icon of the Northwest.

We all know that bears are an integral part of our natural history, but how many of us think of bears as members of our local community? How many of us think about how human interactions with bears over time can shape the ways we respond to bears and the ways they respond to us? For the first time, the Gatekeeper’s Museum has brought together all of the diverse bear-related interests in the Tahoe Basin to approach the topic of the black bear in the community from

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Visitors explore Ursus Among Us at the Gatekeeper’s Museum in Tahoe City, California.

the side of human history. The subject required the museum to expand its mission to include a topic usually reserved for natural history museums. Starting with the premise that bear behavior is far more complicated then once thought, the museum integrated what is understood about bears—their biology and their environment—with the exploration of how human history and actions influence bear behavior.

Bears and Humans: It’s Complicated

What images come to mind when we think about bears? Are they neighbors or predators? Are they a source for humans to exploit or tourist attractions? As Ursus Among Us explains, the relationship between bears and humans is complex and our ideas about bears vary as widely as our encounters with them. One thing is certain, bears have a shared history with humans and the past informs our ideas about how we understand them today.

Ursus Among Us begins with a comprehensive look at how different groups of

people have interacted with bears over time within a specific geographical area, the Tahoe Basin. Beginning with the Washoe people, the first inhabitants of the area, people have documented their encounters with bears. What relationship did early native peoples have with bears?

How do Washoe people relate to bears today? Washoe art and oral traditions depict a reverence and respect for the animal that has made the bear a partner, rather than an opponent in the quest for sustainable life-ways in the basin. What can we learn from their perspective?

Next, the exhibit explores how European settlers have both interacted with and impacted the local black bear population. The museum explores several specific points of human history in the Tahoe Basin and examines what has happened to bears as they encounter changing human culture and values. For example, how did the Victorian mindset about nature influence human/bear relations? How have the environmental and conservation movements helped or hurt the local bear population? How have

Photos Marguerite Sprague

changing attitudes about guns and hunting affected bears? The museum puts these questions into a unique historical context that asks, “How do bears change when humans change?”

Bears: Up Close and Personal

The remainder of the exhibition is dedicated to understanding innate bear behavior. The museum partnered with a variety of community experts including researchers, park rangers, documentary filmmakers, the Bear League, and the Department of Fish and Wildlife. Their work captures and explains bear behaviors that help humans better understand what drives bears to enter cars and houses.

Multiple videos reveal universal truths about bears: they are always hungry, they are easily scared, and they don’t understand territorial boundaries. Media presentations, tactile stations, and versatile labels show us that bears are wild animals driven by a combination of natural and learned behaviors.

Throughout the exhibit we see how individuals and communities greatly impact the natural environment of bears.

From the removal of trees to overhunting the deer population to the trash they make, humans, perhaps unwittingly, have created many ways for bears to cross paths with humans. Too often, when humans and bears cross paths, it can lead to trouble for the bear. One specimen on display stands as a testament to how much trouble bears can find. Porthos

(named for the character from The Three Musketeers) was a bear that consistently invaded human spaces. His aggressive behavior led to his death by law enforcement. His towering presence reminds us of the price bears pay in an expanding urban setting, and it challenges visitors to think about the things they do on a daily basis that could attract such an aweinspiring creature into a personal encounter. Some visitors may be transfixed by the sheer majesty of the bear, while others may be repulsed by its inclusion in the museum. But all are moved by this stark example of human policies toward bears.

A Community-Wide Effort

In addition to its many collaborations with bear experts, the Gatekeeper’s Museum also sought to capture the black bear in art, oral history, and through a variety of diverse programs. A juried art show showcased the black bear as muse.

A tactile center allowed visitors to handle a bear skull and to make their own bear paw prints. Sculptured metal images of bears turned labels into works of art and extended the tactile experience. Other programs include cowboy poetry and book readings centered on bear legends, presentations by the Washoe people, conservation talks hosted by the Bear League, a “Bear Brunch” with park rangers, and lectures on humane trap-and-release programs by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Games including a treasure hunt created diverse ways to

Inhabitants and visitors of Lake Tahoe learn about the effects of human interaction on bear populations.

deliver content about a complex subject.

One game let people imagine what it would be like to be a bear trainer, but not for the circus! This game reminds visitors that for every minute a human spends in the Tahoe Basin, they are unconsciously training a bear to either become endangered or safe. Through multi-faceted programming, the museum asks visitors to shift bears into their stream of consciousness as they leave the museum.

The exhibition has had lasting impacts in the community. The local state parks association continued the “Bear Brunch” program; school partnerships were forged; and local residents asked community leaders to re-examine human trash collection practices. The museum also saw attendance triple over the previous year, and the program marked the beginning of a new era of storytelling and community interaction.

The Gatekeeper’s Museum’s examination of centuries of human-bear history, coupled with an understanding of the complexities and motivations behind bear behavior, helps modern day inhabitants and visitors of Lake Tahoe uncover the reality that bears and humans are inextricably neighbors in an ever-changing environment. While humans and bears will likely continue to be at odds as people and environments change, we can become better educated about how our own behaviors get bears into trouble. The exhibit Ursus Among Us creates a unique opportunity to contextualize an important human relationship with nature while motivating individuals into action. When we replace fear and awe with educated understanding, both humans and bears can enjoy safety while sharing the riches of the Tahoe Basin. t The author wishes to thank Marguerite Sprague for her assistance with this article.

Lisa Anderson is the CEO of the Mesa Historical Museum and the Arizona Spring Training Experience. She is also a Founding Director of the East Valley Museum Coalition.

Lisa recently completed her second term as a member of the AASLH Awards Committee. She can be reached at lisa@mesamuseum.org.

1 Sprague, Marguerite. “Ursus Among Us: It’s Scary When Bears Bluff,” Tahoe Daily Tribune, October 17, 2012.

History news

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Book Reviews > Speaking for the Enslaved: Heritage Interpretation at Antebellum Plantation Sites

By Antoinette T. Jackson (Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012), 178 pp.

Reviewed by Rikki Davenport

I

n her book Speaking for the Enslaved, author Antoinette T. Jackson makes it clear that she is not the voice for the enslaved.

Rather, she argues that historic sites, particularly antebellum plantation sites, have a duty to seek out descendants of enslaved people and represent their knowledge and collective memories, thus ensuring that the enslaved have an authentic voice in the history of plantations. Jackson served as a commissioner of the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, the first federally designated area of land in the United States dedicated to preserving the history of people of African descent.

The Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor extends from Wilmington, North Carolina, along the southern coast into northern Florida and is populated by descendants of enslaved people who once labored on plantations, which are now historic sites, private homes, and in many cases subdivisions and shopping centers.

Jackson’s interest in the representation of the enslaved at plantation sites peaked in 2008, when Michelle Obama’s family lineage was traced back to an enslaved woman on Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina. The truly American story of a descendent of an enslaved woman now serving as First Lady served as a catalyst for a larger national conversation about the history of slavery and people’s connection to that history. While she had visited numerous plantations, Jackson states that her visit to Friendfield was unique because “it linked me to the White House all the way from the Slave Street on Friendfield Plantation. It linked me to the American dream through the legacy of slavery in America” (61). Throughout her book,

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Jackson shows that, through the voices of descendants, people are able to make connections to American history and the role of slavery within that history.

Jackson acknowledges that many historic sites have made an effort to tell a more inclusive story of plantation history. However, after extensive conversations with descendants in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, Jackson saw that their stories were not part of the public history at the plantation sites within walking distance of their homes. Visits to plantations in South Carolina and Florida revealed that these sites often limit discussion of enslaved people to their role as the labor force and, after emancipation, as sharecroppers. While many people were sharecroppers, others were landowners, and that story is seldom heard. As many descendants in Mount Pleasant told Jackson, “We were never sharecroppers” (99). Jackson challenges scholars and heritage professionals to include the voices of descendants, not just as a special program or in a brochure, but as an integral part of a site’s interpretation. The inclusion of their voices will help rectify the misrepresented, underrepresented, or silent stories of how enslaved people lived, reared their children, and created community.

Speaking for the Enslaved serves as a reminder to all people involved in public history of our responsibility to tell a more complete story and of the importance of including the voices of descendants in that story. t Rikki Davenport is the Region 5 Chair for the AASLH Awards Committee She is currently teaching South Carolina history to 110 wonderful eighth grade students at Moultrie Middle School in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina. She can be reached at davenportrikki@yahoo.com.

Doing Oral History

By Donald A. Ritchie Third ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 347 pp.

Reviewed by Jeff D. Corrigan

A

thorough introduction to the practice of oral history, this book, now in its third edition, can be read cover-to-cover, but its strength has always been the question-and-answer layout that addresses particular aspects of oral history inquiry. For example, readers interested in the legal concerns associated with oral history can quickly scan the table of contents to locate the questions in that section. The questions appear in italics for ease of use. Explanations and summaries of recent legal challenges regarding the confidentiality of oral histories, for example, appear under “Can a promise of confidentiality be broken by the courts?” and “If an interview reveals that a crime has been committed, do oral historians have a responsibility to report it?” (67-69).

A comparison of the index from the second to third edition reveals several new topics and perspectives added or expanded on in this edition. Besides updates to legal and ethical issues, this edition includes additional theory and research, and updated sections on technology, diversity, and expressive outlets for oral history. Although previous editions have always contained a wide array of oral history project examples, the third edition provides oral history projects from around the world—Australia, Cambodia, China, Japan, and the United Kingdom; this broadens the book’s appeal. Discussions on theory (grounded, memory, narrative) and research applications will probably appeal more to academics, but the book does offer easyto-follow introductions to these ideas and principles.

The variety of today’s projects (by individuals and organizations) is encouraging, and this edition presents a greater number of these efforts than previous editions. The author describes projects with aboriginal and First Nations people, Latino/Latina groups, LGBT groups, prisoners, veterans, women in journalism, terminally ill individuals, those with

mental disabilities, and homeless populations. These examples will inspire readers to document new populations. The book also addresses a variety of expressive applications such as theater, walking and driving tours, performance and dance, music, radio, poetry events, and other programming that can serve as public outlets for oral-history-based projects.

Finally, the electronic and online world has changed dramatically since 2003, when the last edition appeared. This edition covers these changes as well, including topics such as crowdfunding, Creative Commons licensing, Internet resources, iPhones, QR codes, digital recording, Skype, and social media applications.

Readers will not find specific equipment recommendations in the text, which is

understandable since recording equipment changes so frequently.

For equipment recommendations and reviews, readers might look at the “Ask Doug” tab on the Oral History in the Digital Age website (http://ohda. matrix.msu.edu/). This website is also a good source for more in-depth essays on particular oral history topics, as Doing Oral History serves more as a basic introduction to a wide variety of topics surrounding the methodology and practice of oral history. t Jeff D. Corrigan is the Oral Historian for The State Historical Society of Missouri. Currently he serves on the Oral History Association’s Publications and Nominating Committees. He can be reached at corriganj@ umsystem.edu.

Doing Oral History can be read coverto-cover, but its strength has always been the question-andanswer layout that addresses particular aspects of oral history inquiry.

History news

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New Books from AASLH > In this new feature for History News, AASLH highlights some of the latest publications from its partnership with Rowman & Littlefield.

Leading the Historical Enterprise: Strategic Creativity, Planning, and Advocacy for the Digital Age Bruce W. Dearstyne

Programming for People with Special Needs: A Guide for Museums and Historic Sites Katie Stringer

Programming for People with Special Needs is an invaluable manual with clear, concise examples of how museums benefit when they open their doors, exhibits, and programming to all audiences in a community. A commitment to common-sense universal design principles opens the dialogue about what matters in our history and culture to every citizen, thus enriching our communities through better education and community engagement.

—Carroll Van West, director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University, and Tennessee State Historian

Zen and the Art of Local History Carol Kammen and Bob Beatty

The only thing better than a Carol Kammen “On Doing Local History” essay is sixty-eight Carol Kammen essays. The only thing better than sixty-eight of Carol’s insightful, spot-on, wonderfully crafted essays is marrying each with a talented colleague laboring in our rich field somewhere in this great country who provides equally compelling commentary and reflection. This volume is a superb idea taken to the max—at once readable, cerebral, practical, philosophical, and fun.

Buy it. Read it. Pass it on.

—D. Stephen Elliott, Director/CEO, Minnesota Historical Society

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Leading the Historical Enterprise is a thoughtful dissection of where history and heritage-based organizations are now and why, and it details the hard choices they must make in order to create for themselves a new, empowered place in today’s society. The message here is all about proactive leadership, no-holds-barred decision-making, and disciplined followthrough. It’s about making a commitment to the future. And best of all, Dearstyne not only provides a clear and compelling picture of the desired destination, he offers a roadmap to get there.

sites provides an ideal balance of everyday professional concerns and profound awareness of the state of our planet. She effectively cuts through the complexities of the issue to arrive at the most common sense approaches to achieve a solid net improvement in sustainability practices.

By showing just how doable an improved sustainability can be, and how relevant to our missions, Sutton has crafted a message that is as implementable as it is inspirational.

—Paul D’Ambrosio, President of New York Historical Association and CEO of the Farmer’s Museum

—Anne W. Ackerson, former director of the Museum Association of New York, co-author of the book and blog Leadership Matters, and author of the Leading by Design blog

Case Studies in Cultural Entrepreneurship: How to Create Relevant and Sustainable Institutions Gretchen Sorin and Lynne A. Sessions

Sorin and Sessions have masterfully unveiled several case studies that illuminate the stories of institutional leaders who had the courage and tenacity to interpret external pressures and opportunities anew, to exercise adept flexibility, and to persevere with patience and humility in order to create something remarkable and refreshingly different. These stories will aid and inspire trustees and leaders to step back to reframe their reality, to ask different questions, and to explore new models that reflect more robust ways of being with their public. This collection is a welcome addition to the literature and the ongoing conversation of relevancy and sustainability in our institutions and museums.

—Gail Anderson, museum consultant and author of Reinventing the Museum

Environmental Sustainability at Historic Sites and Museums Sarah Sutton

Sarah Sutton’s highly practical and focused approach to environmental sustainability in museums and historic

Nomenclature 4.0 for Museum Cataloging: Robert G. Chenhall’s System for Classifying Cultural Objects, Fourth Edition Paul Bourcier, Heather Dunn, and The Nomenclature Task Force

Nomenclature 4.0 for Museum Cataloging is an updated and expanded edition of Robert G. Chenhall’s system for classifying man-made objects, originally published in 1978. The Chenhall system is the standard cataloging tool for thousands of museums and historical organizations across the United States and Canada. For this fourth edition, hundreds of new terms have been added, and every category, class, sub-class, and object term has been reviewed and revised as needed by a professional task force appointed by the American Association for State and Local History.

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