Remembering Lowell

The Lowell Experiment, by Cathy Stanton (2006)

Cathy Stanton’s book explores the essential paradox of culture-led revitalization in postindustrial cities. That is, the restored buildings and interpretive vignettes of working-class life, as well as the salaries of those who fashion them, are products of the same system (i.e., capitalism) that wreaked havoc on mill towns, their people, and their economies in the first place.

Stanton’s two-year stint as participant-observer in Lowell yields a richly detailed portrait of class struggle among the cultureworkers. But the kicker lies in the epilogue, in a surprise ending that blows her two years of fieldwork out of the water.

Somehow, the public historians in charge of crafting the primary exhibit, outlanders lacking deep Lowell roots, had managed despite long odds and dissension to infuse it with a critical narrative linking globalization and the quest for cheap labor not only to the city’s past, but to its present. Stanton’s postscript also takes up the question of why organized labor was marginal to the endeavor, but offers an anecdote about the use of non-union masons to reface a key building in lieu of any firm conclusions.

Stanton’s work raises more questions than it answers. How did that happen? How will this critical perspective play to visitors? Will more locals and blue-collar folks be among them, and if so, how will they respond?  Is the narrative replicable? Does it provoke?

Earlier, I expressed the hope of comparing Stanton’s work with Andrew Hurley’s approach to applying public history and historic preservation in urban revitalization. While Stanton’s emphasis on exhibit-making, paired with Hurley’s on placemaking, might suggest a comparison of apples to pears, I think the comparison illuminates.

Hurley’s team enlists indigenes in a big way. Residents are invited to re-imagine their neighborhoods through their history. In Lowell, the National Park Service and its redevelopment arm, the Lowell Development and Finance Corporation, try to expand participation, but the effort is shaped largely by the “blow-in” professional cultureworkers from the NPS along with the local power elite from the LDFC. The two factions are often at odds, while the city’s new Cambodian and Hispanic immigrants are notably missing.  

Lowell Lite

Last month, I joined a group sponsored by the Society for Industrial Archaeology for a two-day whirlwind tour of factories, mills and bridges and other historic attractions in the Quinebaug-Shetucket National Heritage Corridor, a National Park Service creation that spans 35 municipalities in eastern Connecticut and southern Massachusetts. The area goes by the name "The Last Green Valley," encompassing both natural and historical resources. The tour group, as the name of the sponsoring organization suggests, was composed largely of engineers, architects, wannabes, and others with an interest in the workings of things.

One stop on the tour was the city of Willimantic, Connecticut. Like Lowell, it is a distressed mill town whose glory days seem long past.  Like Lowell, it is mobilizing cultural resources in the service of redevelopment. Stops on our tour included the new Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum, the Frog Bridge built in 2000 and adorned with cement frogs on spools of thread to commemorate an 18^th-century incident in which the croaking of frogs dying of drought led townspeople to take up arms to repulse an imagined enemy attack, and the Windham Textile and History Museum, at the center of Willimantic’s mill complex.

                                                       A frog on the bridge


While my visit to the Willimantic mills lasted about two hours, compared to Cathy Stanton’s two years of research, the comparison was instructive. I bypassed the tour of mill buildings, which was heavy on mechanical detail (here’s to you, Tilden), in favor of the interpretive materials at the small central museum. The interpretation struck me as a pastiche.

The introductory film depicted mill work, with the obligatory nods to ethnicity, community, child labor, occupational injury and gender. One set of rooms re-created a mill worker’s home; another showed how the manager lived. Another room held sewing machines of various vintages. On the stairway were pictures of churches attended by each of the city’s main ethnic groups. A large mural narrated the ecology of the mill town, an interpretive framework favored by the museum director.  The museum periodically sponsors special events, such as the recent exhibit on Connecticut’s “cotton connection” to the Civil War. In all, the Willimantic effort, a smorgasbord of commodified culture within the added context of a pristine natural environment provides one response to Stanton’s question about the potential of second-generation culture-driven revitalization, particularly when lacking the concentrated financial largesse and political muscle that propelled the Lowell experiment.

You Must Remember This...

Memorial Mania, by Erika Doss (2010)


We cannot change our memories, but we can change their meaning and the power they have over us.  --David Seamands

Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today's events. --Albert Einstein

It’s a likely bet that Erika Doss wasn’t an invited guest at any of the myriad of media events held two months ago to mark the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. A professor of American Studies at Notre Dame trained as an art historian, Doss is the author of Memorial Mania, which explores the memorials raised to events and personages, major and minor, in the United States. Her terrain is the intersection of material culture and historical memory, as expressed in built memorials that cast emotion in physical form.

Her sprawling book looks at memorials that range from roadside crosses marking the site of fatal accidents, to the AIDS Quilt, to war memorials, to the new national September 11 memorial at the World Trade Center. By and large, she argues, these memorials reflect the identity politics and grievances of the elites who erect them.

Doss’ criticism raises the question not only of who is mediating and giving material form to historical memory, but what the adequate interpretative memorial would look like. She seems to favor, for example, an alternative to the official 9/11 memorial of a figure in free fall that made me think of the emotive quality of Edvard Munch’s painting (and visual icon of the anti-abortion movement),  “The Silent Scream.”  Ten years after the horrifying events of that day, it is asking a lot to assume that witnesses, survivors, relatives, first responders and the general public are willing and able to accept a memorial that links the three plane crashes with a narrative of American adventurism in the Middle East. 

                                             "Tumbling Woman," by Eric Fischl

                                   "The Silent Scream," by Edvard Munch

The Indian Memorial at Little Bighorn (renamed from Custer Battlefield), for Doss, is too little, too late, failing to capture the myth of the frontier, and disseminating stereotypes about American Indians. Other commemorative representations of Native Americans and their history, are infused with “warrior expectations,” not least from Indians themselves.

Doss acknowledges the right of those who participate in or are affected by events to contribute to interpreting their meaning, in memorializing them. But don’t the privileged as well as the marginalized share in this right?

Another weakness in her argument is her focus on the visual nature of memorials. Even when built of granite, these monuments are too fragile to bear the fraught weight of historical interpretation Doss would assign to them. Ultimately, the chisel and the hammer must be supplemented by words, photos, recordings and other tools of the modern interpreter’s art to create the fully faceted, representative memorials Doss so ardently and eloquently advocates. 

On the Shoulders of a Giant

Interpreting Our Heritage, by Freeman Tilden (2007)
A Shared Authority, Introduction and Chapter 12, by Michael Frisch (1990)

When the book-cover blurb promises the defining work in interpretation of heritage resources, attention must be paid. (On a personal level, I have a soft spot for reformed newshounds in porkpie hats.) The volume in question is Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage, first published in 1957 and now in its fourth edition

Tilden’s pioneering work explores the delicate alchemy between guide and audience that takes place as together they traverse, whether physically or in the mind’s eye, places of natural and historic meaning. The project was commissioned by the National Park Service, which oversees both parks and historic sites nationwide. The NPS role in bankrolling and assimilating Tilden's creative talents is worthy of a monograph or more in its own right.

The book covers some of the same ground as works we've read previously, in seeking to chart and channel the dynamics enlacing curator, viewer, and subject. But what is remarkable about Tilden's book, advocating an engaged relationship between interpreter and visitor, is that it was written during the first years of the Eisenhower administration, the era of the “Organization Man” and the “Silent Generation.” In its time, it must have been a game-changer.

 By contrast, Michael Frisch, in A Shared Authority, places his affinity for oral history and other forms of public history that empower ordinary folks squarely in the context of the “history wars” of the 1970s, when the hierarchical world view built in the aftermath of World War II was under attack from multiple quarters. Frisch's notion of shared authority more explicitly articulates a two-way knowledge exchange between historian and public, and he seems to reject Tilden's insistence on experience-based interpretation as "offensively patronizing." Still, Frisch owes an unacknowledged debt to his predecessor's efforts to reconceptualize the rigid scholar/listener model, at a time when this was a radical departure from prevailing practice.

There’s a lot more to like in Tilden. He was prescient in his caution about the use of “gadgetry” (think interactive exhibitry and smart-phone tours): "Gadgets do not supplant the personal contact; we accept them as valuable alternatives and supplements."

His preference for story above pedagogy resonates deeply with me. And finally, consider this: in a time of cultural conformity, this grand old man, an NPS employee, had the temerity to name provocation as the single most important principle of the interpretive craft!

 

Homage to Tilden?

Metalwork 1723-1889 from “Mining the Museum,” 1992,

Maryland Historical Society exhibit curated by Fred Wilson

Well Preserved

Beyond Preservation, by Andrew Hurley, 2010.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the assignment to read Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation. My patience was rewarded.

Hurley’s that rare bird, an academic who knows the difference between CDCs[1] and CDBGs[2].  His how-to guide to employing oral history and archaeology in the service of rebuilding distressed urban neighborhoods without exorcising those who already live there gives hope to those of us who have been unwitting accomplices to forms of historic preservation that result mostly in costly restoration of gingerbread cottages and festival marketplaces for the affluent. 

Hurley cites Cathy Stanton’s book on the restoration of the textile mills in Lowell, Massachusetts. I suspect the two works form a natural pairing, and hope to write more when we get to Stanton.

In the meantime, in a wild bit of synchronicity, a colleague sent me a link to a wonderful blog, “Ecology of Absence.”  The post “Where Stolen Bricks Go” chronicles the theft and resale of bricks from buildings in a north St. Louis neighborhood  described in Hurley’s book. Lack of funds, iffy real estate markets and community dissention aren’t the only forces impeding historic preservation in inner cities.

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[1] Community development  corporation

[2] Community Development Block Grant

An Etymology of Some Things Public Historians Do

Curate--from Latin curare, "to take care of"
Interpret--from Latin interpretari, " to explain, expound, understand," from interpres, "agent, translator"
Mediate--from Latin mediari, "to intervene, mediate," also, "to be or divide in the middle"

Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

Ways of Seeing

The New History in an Old Museum, by Richard Handler and Eric Gable, 1997.
Private History in Public, by Tammy S. Gordon, 2010.
“Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision,” by Tony Bennett, 2006.
Re-Imagining the Museum (selections), by Andrea Witcomb, 2003.

This week’s readings put me in mind of the grade-school science class where you look at a drop of pond water under a microscope, revealing a world full of minuscule critters, some of whom are bent on ingesting others. There’s a whole lot going on there that isn’t visible to the naked eye!  Similarly, the space, the objects and the visitors that form a museum interact in some not-so-obvious ways, in addition to creating context for the conventional functions of showing, seeing and learning. 


Kandinsky.....



Or bacteria?

Richard Handler and Eric Gable provide a backstage look at the production and consumption of historical memory at Colonial Williamsburg. They conduct an anthropological case study in order to crawl inside the minds of administrators, interpreters and visitors at the  re-created historic site.

Tammy Gordon, in her appreciation of the intimate and sometimes eccentric establishments that are the museum world’s equivalent of outsider art, creates a taxonomy, a useful one, I think, of the various forms of local interest museums. She dwells in some detail on the erstwhile standoff between the American History Association and the American Association of State and Local History over issues of professionalism, image and academic cachet. Her point, ultimately, is that local museums create interactive space for conversations, swirling around things, in which histories are defined, transmitted and appropriated.

Her vision meshes well with Rosenzweig and Thelen’s findings that people are partial to histories of personal significance, and that they trust museums and eyewitnesses as sources of knowledge. No doubt, these community and entrepreneurial museums, and their chatty caretakers, are repositories of trust. But is my local Cracker Barrel restaurant really a vernacular museum?

Tony Bennett and Andrea Witcomb theorize even more thoroughly the dynamics of the postmodern museum, its contents, and its visitors. They maintain that the days of the museum as container of musty artifacts and arbiter and inculcator of dominant social values (i.e., cultural hegemony) are so over. Both imagine today’s museum as a far more democratic and interactive space.

For both, it is sight that has long held sensory primacy as a pathway into the civic culture of the museum. Both understand, albeit somewhat differently, the role of multimedia in complicating the functions of the museum, in expanding its reach, in blurring the divide between curator and visitor, or in turning culture into commodity.

In contrast to Bennett’s picture of the 19^th-century museum as civic center, Witcomb sketches the museum as exotic pleasure palace. Her text also includes a vivid account of the unwashed masses picnicking or nursing babies in the hallowed halls of London’s National Gallery.

 

I’ve been reading about the Barnes Foundation, which started life as a workingman’s art gallery and school in Lower Merion, and is in the process of morphing into a $30 billion museum that will soon occupy a newly built home on Ben Franklin Parkway. It occurs to me that our museums, with increasingly democratized exhibits, still maintain barriers to entry and social controls in the form of fees, security, content and selective marketing.   Perhaps it is our public libraries that are now the truest civic centers and zones of multicultural exchange.   

A Historical Leaf from the Annotated Birnkrant Family Tree

This excerpt from my family history bridges the personal and the analytical.

Why did the family leave Medzilaborice?

They left for economic reasons. I could find no evidence of anti-Semitism in this region nor any mention of pogroms (Jews of Zempplen.doc). Also, in the last quarter of the 19th century, steamship passage recruiters were hired by the steel companies of Pennsylvania to hire laborers for the mills. The recruiters would visit depressed economic areas such as eastern Slovakia to find people.  But networking between America and Europe was strong. Early immigrants kept their families remaining in Austria-Hungary up to date and encouraged relatives to take a chance on economic betterment.

From Birnkrant 1.0, by Jack Heller

Everyone a Historian

The Presence of the Past, by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

True confession: I read this book after returning home from a short stay in Youngstown, Ohio, near where I lived until I was 12. The roots on my dad's side of the family extend back three generations in this economically distressed corner of northeastern Ohio/northwestern Pennsylvania.. (The fourth generation, and most of the third, has decamped for greener or sunnier pastures.)

With a cousin, I spent much of ny visit trekking through the wet grass of four cemeteries in two states, in search of gravesites that would add a finishing touch to the panoramic annotated genealogy he had compiled. Other hours were spend coaxing reminiscences from my elderly aunt's faded memory.

All this by way of preface to say that Rosenzweig and Thelen got it right.  People engage with history in ways that meet their own needs, that help them to make sense of their own lives.

And much of the time, according to the survey findings on which the book is based. they prefer their personalized history straight up, that is, unmediated by professional historians and conventional sources of historical authority. For example, museums and historic sites and personal accounts, which can be experienced directly, are valued more than school courses or books.

The ways in which folks connect with the past also vary according to race, ethnicity, age and gender, with African-Americans and Sioux Indians having a stronger collective sense of historical identity, and  men age 65 and older regarding American history, rather than family, ethnic or community history, as the most important kind of history to know. People are finding new prisms through which to view history, including sexual identity and evangelical faith.

What does this mean to those of us who aspire to do history? This book illustrates some of the tensions between personallized and professionalized history, most notably the lack of conventional analytic tools, like ethnicity, class, region and gender.  

As an antidote to the "history wars" spawned by the turbulent politics of the '60s and '70s, Rosenzweig and Thelen propose a profoundly humanistic solution, entailing the synthesis of the experiential with the contextualization and systemization that can be added by professional historians. The result would be a participatory, multifocal historical culture. that will empower people to shape social change  and create a new standard for civil and civic discourse.

I'd like to believe, but perhaps my historical memory has been addled by too much talk radio.  

Murder Most Erudite

Fundraising the Dead, by Sheila Connolly (New York: Berkley Prime Crime, 2010).

If bounty hunter Stephanie Plum[1] had grown up on the Main Line instead of in Trenton, New Jersey, she might have become Nell Pratt, the fundraiser turned amateur detective at the center of Sheila Connolly’s account of murder in the musty stacks of the Philadelphia Antiquarian Society. The whodunit provides an insider account of security, technology, staffing, organizational and financial issues faced by cultural institutions, of institutional politics, and the care and feeding of big donors and board members, who are not necessarily one and the same.  There may be TMI and not enough action for readers disinterested in the arcana of museum operations.

The preface to Connolly’s book attributes its creative inspiration to a crime that took place in a “Center City cultural institution” where she worked for several years, and was successfully detected and prosecuted.  It’s likely that the cultural institution was the Philadelphia Historical Society, and that the crime was the theft of artifacts in 1998. Fast forward to 2011, and the society, and at at least one other major East Coast cultural institution, are currently involved in prosecuting document theft of significant scope.

Fundraising's plot revolves around the female bonding behavior of Pratt and the Philadelphia society matrons who join forces with her to bring to justice the president of the antiquarian society, who uses his amorous conquests to purloin papers and bibelots to fund his scheme to build a world-class historic research center, which he, of course, will run. Pratt, as surrogate for the author, muses on the hardscrabble life at nonprofit cultural institutions, which court the same grant-givers, lack funds to install the security and technology to protect, catalog and make their collections accessible to the public, sometimes store documents in closets, and don’t insure artifacts because they’re invaluable, and there’s no money for insurance, anyway. There’s also a nice subtext, available to close reading, on history and culture, and their tangible manifestations, as consumables in the consumption society.  

The secretary to the president of the antiquarian society did it.

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[1] Stephanie Plum is the heroine of a series of murder mysteries, flamboyantly titled in numerical sequence (e.g., Three to Get Deadly),  written by Janet Evanovich, and avidly read by women of a certain age, among others.