One of the book readings this week was pages 168-187 in The Power of Place Urban Landscapes as Public History by Dolores Hayden, which was chapter 7 entitled Rediscovering an African American Homestead.  It was a breakdown of how the memorial for Biddy Mason was planned and established on Spring Street in Los Angeles in the late 1980’s. 

             The other book reading was pages 1-144 in Confederates in the Attic Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War by Tony Horwitz, which covered chapter’s one through six.  This book is about Horwitz’s travels around the South and his experiences with Civil War history, the people who have a passion for it and how it’s remembered today.  

            Never mind the slavery, have you dipped a candle yet? was an interesting take on how house museums and historic sites leave out certain historical facts and events in order to not ‘rock the boat’.  The author uses examples of Southern plantation house museums downplaying the role of slavery to get his point across. Sites that are making an effort to include slavery in their interpretations are also mentioned.

Horton Grove slave quarters at the Stagville State Historic Site. Photo courtesy of  the Stagville State Historic Site webpage The Structures.

            Another web reading was A white man remembers slavery in the Shenandoah Valley from Cenantua’s Blog.  It was a posting of a letter found in the local newspaper by the blog author Robert Moore. The letter was written by Jacob H. Coffman and was published in the Page News and Courier on January 1, 1932.  Coffman writes about his experiences with slavery, and concludes with how some of the slave holders he knew seemed to reap consequences that were a result of their slave holder status.  He also mentions some slave holders who were ‘nice’ to their slaves.

            The web reading Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph by Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr. discusses the claim by Yale historian David Blight that Neo-Confederates are trying to change history by saying the Civil War wasn’t about slavery and that thousands of African Americans willingly joined the Confederate army, some even alongside their masters.  It uses an example of a picture of black Union soldiers that had been doctored to look like a group of black Confederate soldiers and is being sold by a pro-confederacy online store www.rebelstore.com as an authentic historical artifact.

            A website we visited this week was Sons of Confederate Veterans.  This website took on a different view of the Civil War than just about everything else out there.  A quote from their home page is “The citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution. The tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. These attributes are the underpinning of our democratic society and represent the foundation on which this nation was built.”  The rest of the website is in the same theme. It offers research assistance on genealogy projects, history links supporting Confederate views, and a store where you can buy anything from southern music to children’s books on the Civil War.  This website defends that the Civil War was not about slavery all the while iterating that President Lincoln and the North were not about slave rights, and didn’t want to give slaves their freedom either.  They brush over the realities of slavery in the South, and while they don’t deny that there was slavery, it never goes into any depth on the issue.   There are links to report ‘Heritage Violations’, which are defined as an attack on the Confederate Heritage represented by their flags, monuments or symbols.

Sons of Confederate Veterans logo. Photo Courtesy of Sons of Confederate Veterans website.

Urban Memories

            This week’s reading was the first half of The Power of Place Urban Landscapes as Public History by Dolores Hayden.  It consists of three chapters; Contested Terrain, Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space, and Place Memory and Urban Preservation.  Chapter one, Contested Terrain, talked about controversies surrounding urban landscapes and what historical landmarks therein to preserve.  A thought provoking quote from page 7 in the book is “Centuries of neglect of ethnic history have generated a tide of protest—where are the Native American, African American, Latino, and Asian American landmarks?  Gender involves similar, interconnected questions. Why are so few moments in women’s history remembered as part of preservation?”

Suffrage Statue of Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony and  Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Photo courtesy of  the National Women's History Museum

            Chapter two’s title is Urban Landscape History: The Sense of Place and the Politics of Space.  It spoke about how urban landscapes have many layers of social history, based on race, gender, ethnicity or economic standing.

            Chapter three is entitled Place Memory and Urban Preservation and it addresses the memories that are connected with places.  By fully delving into a complete social history of multiple buildings it allows the possibility of better reaching the public.  This can be challenging, as “All of the participants in such a process transcend their traditional roles”. (p 76) It requires being able to step outside your comfort zone and work with people you don’t usually have contact with.  

Photo courtesy of Louisville.com

Week 5: The Perilous Journey Ahead

            This week’s reading was 397-416 in Public History Essays from the Field edited by James B. Gardner and Peter S. LaPaglia, an essay by James T. Sparrow entitled On The Web: The September 11 Digital Archive.  This article addresses the rise in the online presence of museums and historical societies.  It talks about the downfalls of such a shift, like the depersonalization of history, prioritizing digital artifacts over physical ones and possible damage to reputations but also the benefits, such as reaching a broader audience, creating more public interest in history and the ability to interact more with the public.  The article also includes a case study of The September 11 DigitalArchive, including how it came to be, what it includes as digital history, what steps the team had to take in order to make it happen, how it reached out to the public, the reaction of the public, and the steps they are taking to ensure its preservation.   I though this article hit on some real issues that museums face by trying to shift into the digital field, yet also covered the good that can come out of it.

            The other part of the print reading was pages 250 through to the end of the book Mickey Mouse History And Other Essays on American Memory by Mike Wallace which includes the chapters Ronald Reagan and the Politics of History and the chapter The Battle of the Enola Gay.  The first chapter went over the presidency of Ronald Reagan, his habitual lying and attempts to rewrite history, the ability of cinema to completely bungle historical events, and followed up with the reasoning that while mythologizing history makes for a good story, real accounts of history are what allows us to make better decisions in the future.   The second chapter went over the Enola Gay fiasco at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in 1995.  It discussed what the original scripts contained, the response of the Air Force Association (AFA) and subsequent media backlash on the museum and the museums rewritten display.  The chapter discussed the bad timing of the display, the problems of the postponement strategy, and their insufficient attention to the communities they wanted to represent and address.  It also discussed the development and relationship between the Air Force Association and the Air and Space Museum.  I though this chapter did a good job of taking an in depth look at what museums go through; the necessity of maintaining good relationships with other organizations, being able to understand who you are trying to represent and reach, and how big an effect the media can have.  The chapter concludes with what needs to change in the future by learning from this event, such as museums recognizing they will face opposition and should be prepared, to include different perspectives in their exhibits, to adhere to professional standards and for museums to stick together.  One of the sentences that really stuck out for me in the chapter was “More disturbingly, no one, right or left, took issue with the assumption underlying such initiatives—that the federal government had the right to mandate historical interpretations.” (p. 296)

            One of the web readings was DigitalKeys for Unlocking the Humanities Riches, From Ancient Rome to a Valley inVirginia: More Digital Humanities Projects by Patricia Cohen from Arts Beat.  This site lists several well done websites on historical events/places, including Rome Reborn, Railroads and the Making of Modern America, The Dante Project, the Spatial History Lab and The Valley Project.  My favorite was Rome Reborn and the video that goes through a complete digital reconstruction of Rome.

A view of the Flavian Amphitheater and surrounding city. Photo  courtesy of  Rome Reborn.

            The other web reading was “Lick This”:LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing by Larry Cebula on his Northwest History Blog.  The topic was the partnership between the Library of Congress and Flickr and their posting of 3000 historic LOC photographs online and allowing people to tag, annotate and just generally mess with them. Of course, nothing very productive came out of it, as the project allowed unlimited access and was open to the general public.  I noticed in the comments user Patrick Peccatte references his own crowdsourcing project PhotosNormandie and the steps they have taken to make it more inclusive, thus allowing more useful comments to be given. 

            The video Big Data: Drowning inNumbers was a little confusing with all the technical jargon, but I think I got the gist of it.  Digital Data is getting cheaper, bigger and more easily accessible. But it also leads to the problem of less privacy.

            The other video was ProtectingReputations Online, which gave advice on being careful what you post online, as it could come back to haunt you one day.  I thought this was a very good video, and every school should show it, or something like it, to its students so they are aware of oversharing, which I feel is a very big problem in our society. 

            Digital Humanities and the case forCritical Commons was the third video for review this week.  It is a clip of a hypothetical situation in which Hitler was alive today and his reaction to the internet and the ability to share data and information quickly and globally.  I think the idea of this video is to dramatically illustrate the case for publically available copyrighted material by likening the absence of it to Hitler’s control of information and education during the Nazi era.