Sense of History

The Place of the Past in American Life

David Glassberg

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781613762455
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

As Americans enter the new century, their interest in the past has never been greater. In record numbers they visit museums and historic sites, attend commemorative ceremonies and festivals, watch historically based films, and reconstruct family genealogies. The question is, Why? What are Americans looking for when they engage with the past? And how is it different from what scholars call "history"? In this book, David Glassberg surveys the shifting boundaries between the personal, public, and professional uses of the past and explores their place in the broader cultural landscape. Each chapter investigates a specific encounter between Americans and their history: the building of a pacifist war memorial in a rural Massachusetts town; the politics behind the creation of a new historical festival in San Francisco; the letters Ken Burns received in response to his film series on the Civil War; the differing perceptions among black and white residents as to what makes an urban neighborhood historic; and the efforts to identify certain places in California as worthy of commemoration. Along the way, Glassberg reflects not only on how Americans understand and use the past, but on the role of professional historians in that enterprise. Combining the latest research on American memory with insights gained from Glassberg's more than twenty years of personal experience in a variety of public history projects, Sense of History offers stimulating reading for all who care about the future of history in America.

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Sense of History

Fig. 1. A procession winds through Mogollon, New Mexico, in 1914 to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, the anniversary of Mexico’s victory over the French army at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

WHEN I RECALL my education as a historian, I think of two tables. One was located where I went to graduate school, at Johns Hopkins University, an ancient rectangular dark cherry that filled the seminar room on the second floor of Gilman Hall. Legend had it that the first generation of professional historians, Herbert Baxter Adams, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Woodrow Wilson, had sat around the same table; we students, seeking to follow in their footsteps, searched the underside for the places where they might have carved their initials. Through fall and spring, seminar after seminar, I returned to the table, absorbed in what my professors and fellow students called “History.” If I had any doubt about what was and was not History, I could ask my principal professor, who had studied with someone who had studied with Turner and written a book with that title outlining the rise of the historical profession in America. But there were no doubts expressed around the seminar table at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s, no wavering in the belief that history meant professional scholarship and an appointment at a research university. Around the table, we learned that becoming a historian meant separating your personal uses for the past from your professional career, putting aside the history of the people and places you cared about, the history of your family or hometown, and dedicating yourself instead to questions posed by the professional literature. Each of us sought to discover a gap in the literature, and the one thing about the past that we could know more about than anyone else, that would help us make an original contribution to knowledge. It was through the accumulation of these contributions, shared around the seminar table and published in scholarly journals and monographs from university presses, that History developed. The table was a monument to the common historical enterprise, its enduring presence a reminder of the continuity and solidity of the profession.¹

Then the school year ended, and I departed for a seasonal ranger position at Mesa Verde National Park. On this “green table,” stretching for miles above the semi-arid plain of southwestern Colorado, I experienced a much wider range of possibilities of what history could mean. Although this was an ancient landscape, with evidence of human occupation older than anything readily visible on the east coast, at the time the Park Service did not consider the lives of the puebloan peoples who had made their homes in the cliffs seven centuries ago part of the nation’s history. The men, women, and children who had occupied the now picturesque ruins were “prehistoric”; Mesa Verde was a national park, not a national historic site. If I was looking for history, I could find it instead down below in the nearby towns, and it was comparatively short: dusty ranching, farming, and mining communities that seemed to have been built only yesterday. One was Moab, Utah, whose uranium boom of the 1950s and 1960s had just busted, and which was desperately courting new development to escape from passing into oblivion. Of course, the Hopi, Navajo, and Apache whom I met at the park had a very different relationship to that history of western discovery and settlement. In contrast to the history I studied at Hopkins, which had nothing to do with the natural surroundings of Baltimore and the Chesapeake Bay, understanding the natural setting at Mesa Verde was essential to the human story I told the public. My employers asked me to tell this story not only by talking about the ruins as I guided the visitors through, but also by demonstrating some of the activities that might have taken place there, such as grinding corn and making pottery; at my first pottery-making demonstration four Native American women tourists watched in amused silence. Most important, my concept of history expanded at Mesa Verde from listening, day after day, to the questions that the public asked as they tried to relate their own lives and histories to the people who had lived in the canyons centuries ago. The public asked questions about the past that did not correspond at all to what I was learning was history in graduate school.

The intellectual distance between the two tables in the 1970s seemed even greater than the 2,200 miles that separated them, yet both contributed to my development as a historian. Leaving graduate school in the fall of 1981 with a Ph.D. but no full-time academic position in sight, I moved back to Philadelphia, where I had grown up, and for the next four years continued to work intermittently for the National Park Service and area museums while teaching college part-time. My involuntary postgraduate education, shuttling back and forth between the worlds of academic and public history, not only led to my present position teaching public history at the University of Massachusetts, but also further provoked my curiosity about the place of the past in American life, and how popular ideas about history differed from those of the historical profession.

By the mid-1980s, when I arrived in Amherst, the enormous distance between professional historians and the larger culture had become a matter for public discussion, a discussion that is still raging today. Much of it has taken the form of a debate over the content of what Americans do or do not know about their past. Why, with the explosion of postsecondary education since World War II, do Americans seem to know so little about their history? Political conservatives, anxious to defend the patriotic verities of the Cold War era, blame the loss of “American memory” on professors too caught up in the identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the history of women and minorities to teach what American youth need to know to feel proud of their nation’s past. But many on the political left also attack the college professors, for over-specialization and the failure to make their research intelligible to contemporary audiences or relevant to contemporary concerns. At the same time, other critics note that even if professional historians were to reach out beyond the walls of the academy to bring history to the masses, they face what the historian Michael Wallace has termed a “historicidal” American culture. The nation’s rapid pace of technological innovation, insatiable hunger for novel forms of mass entertainment, and relentless transformation of the physical environment inevitably work against its citizens’ sense of the past and foster a popular disregard for the traditions of yesteryear.²

I have little patience with these polemics attacking the public for their ignorance of history or the professors for being out of touch. From my perspective it seems that popular interest in the past has never been greater. Considering the frequency of commemorative ceremonies and historical festivals, the output of historical films and novels, the numbers of visitors to historic sites and museums, the intensity of campaigns to mark and preserve historic buildings, or the sales of software for probing family history and genealogy, it appears that if Americans do not have a strong sense of history, they certainly spend a lot of their leisure time looking for one, in historical pursuits of one kind or another.

Rather than trying to assess the degree of history-mindedness in America, we need to examine more closely its qualities. What are Americans looking for when they engage with the past? What do we mean when we talk about a “sense of history”? How is it nurtured and communicated? How does it change over time? How is it different from what the historical profession calls History? For years, we have traced the successive frameworks that historians have employed for interpreting the past and called it “historiography”—the catechism imparted around the seminar table at Hopkins and countless other graduate schools which is considered central to the training of future generations of professionals. It is now time to examine the place of the past in the wider culture.³

While professional historians talk about having an “interpretation of history,” something that changes in the light of new evidence, others talk about having a “sense of history,” a perspective on the past at the core of who they are and the people and places they care about. “Sense of history” reflects the intersection of the intimate and the historical—the way that past events of a personal and public nature are intertwined, so that public histories often forcefully, and surprisingly, hit home. It is the sensation I got in 1993 in Washington, D.C., on the fourth floor of the newly opened Holocaust Museum, when I saw a passport to Shanghai covered with swastikas mounted on the wall and realized that I had the same artifact in my attic, a legacy for my children from my father-in-law, who had escaped Germany for China in 1939. Or the sensation I get when I visit Atlanta, Georgia, where my late mother grew up, and hear her sisters tell stories about the time when all the Jews in town knew one another, or visit the cemetery where the gravestone of her immigrant father stands tightly clustered with those of his fellow landslayt, a shtetl of stones on an open, rolling hillside.

Although a sense of history is not based in physiology like a sense of smell or sight, reminders of a past event not personally experienced can evoke sensations deeply felt, such as feelings of loss, or reverie, or intense pride. Sense of history is akin to what environmental psychologists describe as sense of place—not quite territoriality, as among other animals, but a sense of locatedness and belonging. Sensing history, we explore fundamental questions concerning personal and group identity and our relationship to the environment. A sense of history locates us in space, with knowledge that helps us gain a sense of where we are, helping us to understand why our formerly thriving inner-city neighborhood is now a wilderness of vacant lots, or why a piece of erstwhile productive farmland nearby is now a shopping mall. A sense of history locates us in time, with knowledge that helps us gain a sense of when we are, filling in gaps in our personal recollection and family stories that allow us to understand our place in a succession of past and future generations. And a sense of history locates us in society, with knowledge that helps us gain a sense of with whom we belong, connecting our personal experiences and memories with those of a larger community, region, and nation.⁴

Where does a sense of history come from? At the most intimate of levels, we can talk about autobiographical memory and reminiscence, how individuals in reviewing their past experiences form a coherent personal identity and sense of self. We can also talk about communication about the past within families. But these intimate places for learning about the past inevitably interact with public ones, and it is those public histories that are the subject of this book. Such investigation includes the study of politics and collective identities—how some versions of history are institutionalized and disseminated by government as the public history through schools, museums, monuments, and civic celebrations, and how that public history intersects with other versions of the past communicated among family and friends. It includes the study of popular culture—those versions of the past created and disseminated not by government but through the marketplace in television, film, novels, and commercial tourist attractions, and how audiences understand what they see and hear. And it includes the study of environmental perception—the cognitive transformations that occur when a landscape is designated as “historic” either by government or by popular practice. A sense of history and sense of place are inextricably intertwined; we attach histories to places, and the environmental value we attach to a place comes largely through the historical associations we have with it.

In the following chapters I explore how a sense of history has been created, communicated, understood, and changed over time in twentieth-century America. They range across the many places where we encounter history in our lives—a war memorial in the town park, a parade of historical floats down Main Street, a television program about the Civil War, a neighborhood historic district—as well as about the contexts of family and community where we learn to interpret what these encounters with the past mean. Rather than weaving a single narrative, the chapters individually explore the images and uses of history in a particular time and place. They are arranged not by chronology or geography but rather as models of investigation, to exemplify the importance of politics, popular culture, and place in understanding the nature of Americans’ connection with their past.

In studying the sense of history, I build not only on my firsthand experiences working with the public, but also on what others have written about popular images and uses of the past. For decades, scholars associated with American studies have investigated the role that historical myths and symbols play in forming distinctive national and regional identities. Literary critics and art historians have analyzed the often idiosyncratic historical imagery present in the works of artists and writers, while folklorists have investigated the historical tales of less prominent individuals. Political historians have explored the changing historical reputations of heroes such as Jefferson and Lincoln, the notion of history embedded in the ideology of political movements such as republicanism and populism, and how government officials have employed historical analogies in the making and selling of public policy.⁵

In recent years, this scholarship has appeared under the name of “memory.” What distinguishes the new scholarship on memory from the old is not subject matter but approach. Where earlier studies primarily sought to characterize a single group or institution’s beliefs about its past, the new studies primarily seek to understand the interrelationships between different versions of the past in the public arena. They investigate what the anthropologist Robert Redfield termed “the social organization of tradition”: how various versions of the past are communicated in society through a multiplicity of institutions and media, including school, government ceremonies, popular amusements, art and literature, stories told by families and friends, and landscape features designated as historic by either government or popular practice. In a sense, the new memory scholarship expands the types of institutions and ideas that historians customarily examine in the traditional historiography course, situating professional historical scholarship as not the only thought about history but one of several versions of the past competing for public influence in a particular place and time.⁶

With this change in approach has come a shift in focus from studying the institutions that produce history—colleges and universities, government agencies, the mass media—to studying the minds of the individuals where all these versions of the past converge and are understood. Earlier approaches assumed that everyone who encountered a historical image understood it in more or less the same way—if George Bancroft’s histories were popular in the mid-nineteenth century, it meant that they embodied the era’s popular historical consciousness. New approaches, by contrast, emphasize the many different meanings we derive from the same historical representation. The meaning of a historical book, film, or display is not intrinsic, determined solely by the intention of its creator, but changes as we actively reinterpret what we see and hear by placing it in alternative contexts derived from our diverse social backgrounds. To paraphrase Carl Becker, every person is his or her own historian, creating idiosyncratic versions of the past that make sense based on personal situation and experiences. But then how can we make meaningful generalizations about a public history?⁷

Indeed, much of the new scholarship on memory examines communication about the past only on the most intimate of scales: autobiographical memory and reminiscence. Psychologists and oral historians explore how individuals in recalling the past form a coherent personal identity and sense of self. We tell stories about the past that place ourselves at the center of historical events, or reveal our “uchronic dreams” which combine recollections of events with our judgments concerning how history should have turned out. But our individual memories are not solely the product of idiosyncratic recollection; they are also established and confirmed through dialogue with others. An individual memory is the product of group communication, intimately linked to the “collective” memory of the community. The insight that memory is constructed out of social interaction, first advanced by the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs early in the twentieth century, links individuals and groups to the creation of a public history. Through conversations with others, we learn about a past before our own experience, share versions of that past with others, and seek to have our version of that past accepted in the larger society. This leads to a larger question, one that has been at the core of much of the recent scholarship on memory: with all the possible versions of the past that circulate in society, how do particular accounts of the past get established and disseminated as the public one? How do these public histories change over time?⁸

Politics

One approach to these questions is to analyze how the prevailing images of the past in a society reflect its political culture. In recent years, debates about history have spilled into the national political arena. In September 1994, the United States Senate passed a resolution in response to the complaint of veterans’ organizations that the exhibit being developed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II was going to question the necessity of the dropping of the atomic bomb. The Senate proclaimed that indeed the bomb was “momentous in helping to bring World War II to a merciful end.” Bowing to pressure, the Smithsonian scaled back its plans and in 1995 displayed the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the plane ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Sense of History
• 2 Remembering a War
• 3 Celebrating the City
• 4 Watching The Civil War
• 5 Place and Placelessness in American History
• 6 Rethinking New England Town Character
• 7 Making Places in California
• Conclusion: Finding Our Place
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Back Cover