I liked Mickey Mouse History and Other Essays on American Memory by Mike
Wallace. It was easy to get through, offering a view not often thought about
concerning public history. It was
interesting how it talked about how history is presented in different slants
depending on the views of the people who put it together, talking about all the
controversies on page xi. It goes along
the lines of how Ford created a utopian-esque view of the “Good Old Days” with
his Greenfield Village and Williamsburg created by John D. Rockefeller Jr. This brought to mind the Civil War reenactments
I’ve been to that were so clean cut and left out some really big issues of the
day. The next article describes the development
of museums and how they need continual evolution of encompassing more and more
of history without blinders in regards to “class, race, gender and
micro-cultures” (p. 43).
The readings in Public History: Essays from the Field, edited by James B. Gardner
and Peter S. LaPaglia, spoke about professional historians and how to become a
public historian, and the conflicts and differences between the two. I liked the second article the best, Becoming
A Public Historian by Constance B. Shulz the best if only because it clarified the
training involved, the various jobs included under the title of public historian
and where the field could be headed.
The online article from The New York
Times entitled Museum Sells Pieces of Its Past, Reviving a Debate by Robin Pogrebin was really eye opening. I had
never even considered that a museum would sell pieces for its own funding,
weaseling its way around the myriad rules concerning such an issue. There are so many different interpretations of
the laws governing history museum collections that it leaves the items
vulnerable to less than honorable intentions.
The other website, Museums and the Best
of the Web Awards, included a lot of information and was a bit confusing. The
title is self-explaining, will the results of the voting going all the way back
to 1997. I noticed on the page it talks about the nominating process it says “you
are encouraged to nominate a site other than your own”. I take it you can nominate your own site,
which I think is kind of like cheating.
Museum Blogging, written by Leslie
Madsen-Brooks who is a researcher, professor and public historian, is an easily
maneuverable blog, if a bit dry and confusing at times, requiring a bit more
knowledge of the inner workings of a museum or related technology than the
average person might have. Though there
are lighter bits, like the post Bringing the sexy back to public history, I prefer
the other blog which I talk about below.
The other blog site, Burke Blog, maintained
by the University of Washington with various author postings, is like visiting
a museum online. The posts had interesting topics that were relatively easy
reads on new discovery’s, museum personnel, and links to numerous other sites
concerning history and conservation.
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| A beinakerlingar in Iceland. Photo courtesy of Burke Museum Blog |
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