This week’s readings included a funny, (albeit sad for the historian,) reply to a letter sent from a university professor to a ‘house’ museum curator somewhere in the south and that we shall only know as the Baron Von Munchausen House. We also looked at Rosenzweig and Thelan’s The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life.
The book by Rosenzweig and Thelan looks at the many ways in which history comes alive for the average American. Their study was the result of several years of discussion, meetings with other historians and students, question preparation and revision, pre-testing and the final telephone survey conducted in 1994. It was five years after their original idea that the survey was granted funding and carried out by some enthusiastic graduate students.
Their careful planning and pre-testing allowed them to settle upon the phrase ‘the past’ as opposed to history or tradition or some other word referring to the past. They noticed the respondents gave much more detailed responses when referring to the past because it could refer to their own experience rather than a classroom or lecture hall. Of the several hundred respondents, the two authors began to notice some broad similarities but it was particularly interesting when they reviewed white American experiences against Black and Native American experience. “Talk of intimate pasts animated most of the conversations we had with Americans [but the] Americans we interviewed also talked about connecting with pasts outside their intimate worlds. They wanted to personalize the public past.” [p. 115]
The authors found that overwhelmingly, white Americans tended to view the past through the lens of personal and family connections and events but that both Black and Native Americans attached a wider social significance to the past. Whereas the former might have talked about family history, genealogy, collections of significance etc. the latter connected their lives to events such as antebellum slavery, the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jrs. speech etc. Both, however, talked about keeping their family history alive for the next generation. A New Jersey psychologist said “we are the carriers of history in my family. We come from now relatively small families, and we carry history along. Someone has to be the carrier of history in every family.” [ p. 16]
It’s a really great book - while some of the findings seemed fairly obvious, one of the reasons the authors wrote the book was to point some of those obvious findings back at classroom historians. By showing that Americans think about history in personal ways they were trying to get instructors, curators and other historians to remember that when teaching it.
Back to that letter to the Baron Von Munchausen House museum. The professor who wrote it had visited the museum and felt compelled to point out some fairly glaring mistakes presented by the docents. He was also quick to praise the museum for its general collection and assured the curator that he wasn’t trying to be offensive, merely hoping to make them aware of some myths they were unaware of. The reply was not so pleasant and actually added to the sense that history for this museum was not so much about presenting facts but more about hiding them. The curator was particularly disgruntled when talking about slavery and said she didn’t want to upset the many students who came through the museum. Also to not be so danged cynical and to essentially, leave them to their own business. Amusing stuff but it is time for people to own their past and make sure it tells the truth.
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