Curating America

Journeys through Storyscapes of the American Past

Richard Rabinowitz, Richard T. Hoyen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781469629513
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

How do history museums and historic sites tell the richly diverse stories of the American people? What fascinates us most about American history? To help answer these questions, noted public historian Richard Rabinowitz examines the evolution of public history over the last half-century and highlights the new ways we have come to engage with our past. At the heart of this endeavor is what Rabinowitz calls "storyscapes--landscapes of engagement where individuals actively encounter stories of past lives. As storyscapes, museums become processes of narrative interplay rather than moribund storage bins of strange relics. Storyscapes bring to life even the most obscure people--making their skills of hands and minds "touchable, " making their voices heard despite their absence from traditional archives, and making the dilemmas and triumphs of their lives accessible to us today. Rabinowitz's wealth of professional experience--creating over 500 history museums, exhibitions, and educational programs across the nation--shapes and informs the narrative. By weaving insights from learning theory, anthropology and geography, politics and finance, collections and preservation policy, and interpretive media, Rabinowitz reveals how the nation's best museums and historic sites allow visitors to confront their sense of time and place, memories of family and community, and definitions of self and the world while expanding their idea of where they stand in the flow of history.

Part One: Becoming a Public Historian

1: Discovering a Calling

My first stint at Old Sturbridge Village (OSV) in 1967 had been a lark. I loved the dressing-up part, pulling on my boots and remembering to remove my anachronistic watch and sunglasses before I took up my post in the law office or the schoolhouse. I occupied my early mornings and late evenings poring over dusty volumes of local history, digging up juicy anecdotes about crazy old Yankees. On my days off, I drove on country roads to remote villages from Maine to Connecticut. My technique was to seek out the oldest meetinghouse in town and measure its distance from rundown farmhouses, abandoned mill buildings, and fine village residences that had been converted into antiques shops. History was everywhere—underfoot, through the windshield and the camera lens, and up and down the rickety stairs of old buildings. On my next workday, I was well primed to deliver this miscellaneous information, my “findings,” to any and all who would listen. I didn’t yet know the word for it, but I was entering a life in the work of public history.

Much to my surprise, those seven months at Sturbridge reshaped my return to graduate work at Harvard in 1967–68. The university was a mess. Signs of turmoil were everywhere. Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge was crowded with marches, rallies, and protests against the war in Vietnam and a dozen other injustices. The evening news featured one shock after another, from the Tet offensive to the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy to the violence at the Chicago Democratic convention. What a year!

Because of these distractions, the university’s authority seemed to melt away. Harvard’s graduate program in the history of American civilization allowed students to combine seminars and courses in many departments—history, English, art history, government, philosophy, and so on. Having taken so many of the available upper-level courses and even seminars as an undergraduate, I was trusted to steer my own path. My advisers seemed to prefer exempting me from various requirements to grappling with what I wanted to learn, so I signed up instead for a series of sporadically supervised “reading courses.”

If “Am Civ” had any coherence at all for me, it came from the legacy of one of the program’s founders, Professor Perry Miller. To Miller and his disciples, who were most of my teachers, history was a journey through intellectual debating chambers in which fierce political contentions were channeled into debates over the nature of the divine, the complexities of the human mind, the locus of authority, and the fundaments of social order. All the major conflicts in American history found their truer, deeper meaning in the opposing positions taken by theologians, literary men and women, lawyers, politicians, or scientists.

By the winter of 1968 and spring of 1969, the civility of campus life was breaking down completely. Many of my students protested, some occupied university offices, one or two suffered police beatings, and virtually all of them went out on strike. On the other side, my teachers felt besieged, betrayed, and threatened. One reportedly barricaded himself overnight in Widener Library to protect the books from vandals. I just dug more deeply into teaching and learning. After Sturbridge, I was startled to discover how poorly prepared I was to teach in the university. I bore down on observing and recording the moment-to-moment flow of ideas and of teacher and student roles, experimenting with methods of drawing my group of tutees together toward a shared understanding.

Sitting at my library carrel, I began to design a course that would engage the next year’s juniors in investigations of critical transformations in several American settings—the New England village on the cusp of industrialization, the antebellum plantation on the eve of civil war, and the urban tenement as it received the massive immigration of the first fifteen years of the twentieth century. An obvious starting point was to plan a field study at OSV, and so on a bright February day in 1969, I took the Mass Pike west to Sturbridge once more. This time, Barnes Riznik listened carefully, made some good suggestions, and then shocked me by offering an alternative: a real professional job, as assistant director for interpretation and education, at $8,000 per annum. “There is,” he wrote to me that evening, “a very good history teaching job here as well as an opportunity to become involved in museum education experimentation.” At Sturbridge, he assured me, I could help create a community engaged in the sort of pedagogical and historiographical questions I was pondering on my own in Cambridge. I’d passed my Ph.D. orals and started my dissertation with long days of reading at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester. Newly married and eager to get on with adult life beyond the strife and isolation of the academy, I grasped at the opportunity. Now I was truly a “fast-fish,” as Herman Melville called it, hooked on a career in public history.

When I returned to Sturbridge that summer as the youngest member of the professional staff, I felt the weight of new duties and the charge of new ambitions. I was perhaps the first academically trained historian brought to OSV without any responsibility for expanding our collection of objects or buildings or even historical themes. I was to be an educator. My role was to communicate new scholarship about New England history in training sessions for the interpreters and the museum educators, many of whom had been my colleagues two years earlier, who met the visiting public. I helped start up and teach a graduate program in history and historical museum work, in collaboration with the University of Connecticut. I initiated a work-study internship program for college students and arranged for OSV to serve as a site for alternative service for Vietnam-era conscientious objectors.¹

OSV was thriving in 1969. Since it had opened in 1946, its annual attendance had climbed from 5,000 to over half a million. (Indeed, more than 5,000 people now typically came on single days like Memorial Day or Columbus Day.) As the busiest outdoor museum in the Northeast, it had re-erected more than thirty exhibition buildings on the site near the junction of the main highways to Boston from Hartford and Springfield. On billboards and stationery it proclaimed itself “New England’s Center of Living History.”²

OSV was not a “real” historical place. The museum was about a half-mile from the common and center village of the actual town of Sturbridge. Even as it gradually evolved into a representation of a “typical” inland New England village and surrounding farmland, OSV was still fundamentally a collection of collections. The museum had its origins in the object-gathering enthusiasms of two brothers, Albert B. and Joel Cheney Wells, who owned and managed the family business, the American Optical Company in Southbridge, Massachusetts. Cheney Wells assembled a superb array of New England glassware, clocks, furniture, and guns. A. B. Wells preferred hand tools and farm implements, folk art, and the utensils of ordinary life.

The Wells family had rejected a proposal by Perry, Shaw and Hepburn, the Boston architects who had worked at Colonial Williamsburg, to house the collections in a series of stately Georgian brick manor houses. Instead, following the advice of Boston landscape architect Arthur Shurcleff, they re-erected old frame residences, shops, mills, and outbuildings from all over New England and laid them out along unpaved footpaths. As the news spread, many New Englanders, before the era of local historical commissions and preservation groups, were happy to have the museum cart off their oldest houses and outbuildings for re-erection at Sturbridge. Some contained cases and shelves to display formal collections. Period room settings, drawn from the museum’s collection of furniture and decorative accessories, occupied the residences.

Gradually, almost inadvertently, the place began to look like the center village of a New England town, especially after the museum acquired a Greek Revival meetinghouse in 1948 and set it down on a knoll overlooking what immediately became known as the “Village common.” (Twenty-five years later, geographers determined that residences began to encircle town commons in this part of New England only in the second quarter of the nineteenth century—too late to relocate the four eighteenth-century houses already in place at OSV by the 1950s.)

By the time of my second tenure there, the museum had grown to include five residences in all, often with diverse outbuildings, gardens, and yards; a dozen sheds and shops for working craft demonstrators; several buildings housing its prize collections of glass, guns, and clocks; eight more-or-less public structures (two meetinghouses, a bank, a law office, a schoolhouse, a general store, an animal pound, and a tavern, which also housed the museum’s painting collection); a covered bridge; three water-powered mills for sawing timber, carding wool, and grinding grain (though the sawmill was inoperative); and the beginnings of a working period farm.

Visitors plunked down their admissions fees, got a map and a hearty welcome, and proceeded to stroll through country lanes and in and out of the exhibition buildings randomly, pausing perhaps for a lunch at the mock tavern or a treat of rock candy at the mock general store. A certain imprecision in historical details prevailed. The common was planted in bluegrass and mowed to an inch of its life before the gates opened. Outside the meetinghouse, visitors lined up to take photos of their children (and sometimes husbands) “locked” in the pillory and stocks, though these shaming punishments had long been exiled from nineteenth-century rural villages. Mythologies persisted. For many visitors, the overall impression was that New England folk lived in self-sufficient, preindustrial communities, isolated in space and frozen in time. Acquiring and equipping each of the museum’s crafts shops seemed to feed popular misconceptions of fairy-tale towns where “the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker” bartered goods with one another. The OSV map made it appear that every town needed one, and just one, of each specialty to survive.

In The Story of Old Sturbridge Village, his 1965 address to a convocation of business leaders, OSV president Charles van Ravenswaay attributed much of America’s success to the no-nonsense, independent, and enterprising New England spirit represented by the Village. From these modest rural communities, he claimed, the nation had grown into a great power. Growth had meant progress, but there were now dangers. “The population growth, the spread of our cities and of urban blight, the industrialization of our countryside—developments such as these make us realize how completely family and community ties with the past have been destroyed,” van Ravenswaay warned. Fortuitously, “places like this Village provide a sense of the continuity of time and man.”³ OSV could be an antidote to the ills of modern consumer society. The same interstate highways that carried away Worcester County’s steel rods and optical devices on weekdays could bring leisure-time visitors to this restorative pastoral museum on weekends.

At OSV the best of the past could be preserved. Here people were still connected almost as family members. Visitors, van Ravenswaay claimed, “have adopted the Village as a kind of ancestral home where, in contrast to their restless and mobile everyday lives, they can put down personal roots and feel a kinship to the past.”⁴ Forget, for a moment, that OSV sits near the convergence of the three most heavily Roman Catholic states in the nation, or that many of its visitors were the grandchildren of immigrant industrial workers. All these ethnic and class distinctions could be safely erased at OSV. The museum could help preserve the nation’s moral fiber and political unity as it confronted the challenges of the Cold War.

Van Ravenswaay’s Village was an oasis of heritage, a parklike setting in which the ferocity of the American industrial machine could be tamed by showing its descent from small-scale workshops. As magazine feature articles frequently said, OSV was “a place that time forgot,” a locus of nostalgia for a past that never happened in a place that never was. For the general visitor, the objects produced in Village workshops and displayed on Village shelves were simply “quaint,” a code word for their passage from utilitarian to decorative value. The labor of the past had been transformed into the stuff of hobby craft.

One could easily lump OSV with the other heritage sites savaged for their artificiality, ethnocentrism, and commercialism by geographer David Lowenthal in 1966. The past in America, Lowenthal wrote, “is fenced off in a preserve called History. It may be touched, handled, tasted, even participated in, as at Williamsburg; it is not part of everyday life.” But OSV had already undertaken a more serious commitment to historical scholarship. Its mission, board chairman Philip Morgan wrote in 1965, was “to preserve and present the story of New England farm and village life as it existed in the period before major industrial growth began (about 1840) and to do this as completely, and in as many different dimensions, as is possible in the 20th century.”⁵ Behind the scenes, OSV’s curators and researchers were producing first-rate investigations of New England’s architectural, artisanal, and mechanical practice, usually in preparation for the acquisition, reconstruction, and furnishing of new buildings, such as a blacksmith shop, a pottery, an exhibition of glassmaking, or a water-powered carding mill. For the collectors and fanciers of pre- and proto-industrially made products, OSV could be an extraordinarily rewarding resource. On quiet days I could see them engaging our crafts demonstrators for hours, talking over auger bits and the chemical content of glazes.

But until the mid-1960s, this sort of research seldom challenged the heritage mythos of “Ye Olde Golden Age of Homespun.” OSV’s Research Department then began to churn out more highly contextualized histories, usually linking what was happening in rural New England to wider contexts. In succession, the department turned out studies of the professionalization of rural medicine, of mechanical innovation in the countryside, of advances in progressive agriculture, of the expansion of overland commercial traffic, and most significant, of the emergence of industrially produced textiles, using waterpower, in mill villages planted along New England’s numerous river valleys. One by one, the old shibboleths—self-sufficiency, isolation, the prevalence of cashless “exchanges” of goods and labor among neighbors—dissolved as the historians fleshed out the picture of a rapidly changing rural landscape in the quarter-century after 1815. Drawing on notions of modernization and the “take-off” period developed by analysts of the Third World during the 1960s, the OSV researchers began to represent rural New England as a cauldron of dynamic economic development.

Gradually, the museum landscape began to register this research. In the late 1960s, led by Darwin Kelsey and John Mott, the museum vigorously initiated a full-scale working historical farm, representing the seasonal cycle of work, complete with the historically correct varieties of crops, swine, sheep, cattle, and poultry. The common was replanted in timothy and clover, the power mowers returned to the garage, and OSV’s flock of sheep there chewed away, to the amusement of visitors. Heaps and piles of fenceposts and broken barrel staves cluttered formerly well-ordered farmyards. The place began to smell like a real farm, and so did some of the interpreters. And even more ambitiously, OSV acquired land and laid out plans for a “second village,” a small-scale manufacturing community with a working cotton mill, workers’ and mill agent’s cottages, and a company store, adjacent to its original property.

My new job was to bridge the worlds of van Ravenswaay’s “heritage” and the new, more disruptive history of the OSV Research Department. I had to channel the enthusiasm of my visitors for a personal and collective attachment to a world they felt was lost to them into an inquiry as to the process by which that loss occurred. If done poorly, such an inquiry would insult visitors’ affections for that way of life or trivialize the history by viewing our historical characters as simpletons frozen in time.

Return the tractors to the garage, plant new “old grasses,” and let the flock take over the mowing (OSV, 1972).

It helped, no doubt, that I was the child of a woman w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part One: Becoming a Public Historian
• Part Two: Finding Ourselves: Interpreting Place
• Part Three: Beholding: Interpreting Stuff
• Part Four: Belonging: Interpreting Identity and Community
• Postscript
• A Reader‘s Reflections
• Acknowledgments
• Index