Nuggets of History

Society Hill is a beautiful, wealthy, elegant and yet disjointed neighborhood. My wife and I biked there multiple times enjoying the rows of townhouses under the shade of trees and the little cafes. The problem arises with the high-rise buildings of the Society Hill Towers, which interrupt the sky, and Interstate 95 that severs the neighborhood from the Delaware river.

Anyone that would like a walk in the past — and there are many who go to Society Hill for that — would need a great imagination to see how different the neighborhood was not only in colonial time, but even just sixty years ago. This area is like a cake: layer after layer different flavors offer the visitor a various taste of the past, but the saccharine icing of the urbanistic renewal of the 1960s kills in part its character; yet, it is part of the cake.

The area destroyed in the renewal of 1956 (from the documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPuqgOyu8iU)

Workshop of the World: Philadelphia has a strong heritage as a blue-collar city, and Society Hill, under the new elegant coat hides a past of workshops, immigration, and warehouses. I decided to include six stops, arranged in a circuit:

1: Powell House - Description of the house as a warehouse after 1904.

2: 3^rd Street - The neighborhood between 1880 and 1950: immigration and population; the industrial use of the area.

3: Dock Street - A fast jump back to the 18^th century; reasons behind the odd shape of the street (the street once was a creek, then a sewer, then a street).

4: Korean War Memorial Park/Urban Renewal: How was the neighborhood before the renewal? Brief history of the urbanistic planning of the area; the Korean War Memorial.

5: The Docks on the Delaware- The evolution of the docks and of the area from the foundation to the building of interstate 95, and finally today.

6: Bayuk's first factory - Showing the exact site of the factory, the industrial heritage of the area; the working conditions; the Phillies cigars in American art and Music.

Creating a guide from scratch requires a certain dosage of imagination, but what really steered my thoughts were class readings. Public history is like a walk on ice: between you and an effective exhibit there is a slippery surface layered with cliche' and often problematic interests of the public on which it is difficult to maintain a good balance. Clearly to read the practices and analysis of experienced public historians is more than helpful. Probably the most influential for my mindset were Andrew Hurley's Beyond Preservation (1), Tammy Gordon's Private History in Public (2) and Dolores Hayden's The Power of Place (3): the first offers interesting perspectives and problems in public history dealing with cities and neighborhoods; the second illustrates some well done projects on urban communities; the third is a window through which to peek at the public's taste for the past.

These books, but not only them, helped me in shaping my guided tour, the purpose of which is to cut the cake for the visitors, provide them with spoons and hope for an “Oh, that’s interesting!”. With this objective in mind, I tried to diversify the arguments behind every stop, keeping in mind the fil rouge of the Workshop of the World.

The Eureka moment is precisely what makes the study of the past interesting. I fortunately had a couple of them during my research for the material, such as when, searching between the tons of photos of the waterworks archives, I found the picture of old 3^rd Street: Shops on the sides, men busy in their day's work and a couple of kids interested in the photographer and his camera, the image shows a lost neighborhood where immigrants set down roots for their life and families.

Another golden egg was on the atlas of Philadelphia of 1910: I was searching for some interesting workshops, perhaps a factory or warehouse, something that could be illuminating and serve as a good example of the industrial history of the area, now buried under the new boxy shapes of the modern houses.

online map: http://www.philageohistory.org/tiles/viewer/

Nearby Powell house (on another map) there was a perfume factory, which would have been elegant  in the research for the interesting contrast between the pungent industrial area and the fragrance of the factory's product, but it did not offer any hook; the same was for a candy factory, just on the other side of the street of the house. Looking more at the map however, I saw that on the corner of Third and Spruce there was a cigar factory, perhaps not really politically correct today, but the strange name — Bayuk — was interesting enough. I did not know, obviously, that this building was the first factory of the brand which  later changed their name to Phillies, one of the most famous brand of the U.S., the same brand that appears on one of the most famous masterpieces of American art.

Edward Hopper: Nighthawks. 1942.

That is the kind of thrilling nuggets that you find sifting through the dust of the past; a job that is rarely easy and often (or at least for most of people, the normal one unlike me) boring. Patience and resilience are needed when you are trying to find the photo or the story that catches the attention of the guests, the ones that are not under the influence of history, or perhaps, just not yet.

Bombed museums

This week’s readings offer a dive into the argument of museology. Randolph Starn’s paper, A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies, delineates a brief history of the concept of a museum and its application: behind a language sometimes cryptic and verbose[i] the author explains the different forms that museums have assumed in the past, recreating a context in which it is possible to analyze today’s interpretation of a museum’s educative role in relation with the public and technology. The last part of the article is particularly interesting in offering an examination of today’s crisis of museums, opposed by two factors: a new appealing technology that is difficult to integrate into the old-fashion mausoleum and a general research of easy entertainment even in structure dedicated to education, which leads to the sometimes horrifying infotainment or edutainment. However, the author does not forget the new possibilities offered by a new interpretation of museums, more democratic and inclusive of the public.

Another big problem lies in the tension between their innovating compulsion and the mainstream perception of past. The strong educative role of museums tends to put under scrutiny the exhibits, in the constant attempt to show to the public the complexity of the past events, this often happens in ways that conflicts not only with the opinion of the visitors ( a struggle that could bring good results in the visitors themselves) but also with institutions. The case of the exhibit of the Enola Gay (the bomber that released the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945), well documented by Edward T. Linenthal in History Wars: The Enola Gay and other Battles for the American Past, offers a very clear example of how an honest depiction of the past can enter in dangerous minefields of blind patriotism, national pride and fossilized representation of past events. In the case in question the problem became even more acute because of the national relevance of the Smithsonian Institute and its role of memorial of national pride, role that can’t easily coexist with the one of educational instrument if the argument is historically related.

Ken Yellis in his paper Fred Wilson, PTSD, and me: Reflection on the History Wars understands the lesson from Enola Gay’s aborted takeoff but also acknowledges the success of another exhibit, Mining the Museum. While the first teaches the errors to avoid, the second offers an interesting and effective interpretation of the role of the museum as stage for a new interaction between public and historical analysis. A new language seems to be needed, a dramatized and artistic interpretation of the past able to feed the new appetite of a public in search for new stimulation.

Interesting for the analysis of non-academic driven museums is the book Private History in Public by Tammy S. Gordon. He explains the forces behind three different kind of historically driven environments, which he defines as Community, Entrepreneurial and Vernacular exhibitions.

The Community exhibit derives from a reappropriation of the control over heritage from communities that others defined before. These exhibits are often strongly related to folklore, religion, and ethnicity and sometime lack the high professionalism of the academic museums; however they miss also the “oversaturated high polished [of] cultural products”, which often alienates the public.

The Entrepreneurial and the Vernacular exhibits are interesting and borderline, because they offer an interpretation of the past private and public at the same time. The first category -- that defines a private organized and personally managed little museum, often linked with an artisanal workplace – is easily deciphereable as museum: these exhibits lack probably a deep interpretation of the past, but offer a genuine representation of it. The second category, the Vernacular, groups private collections in public environment, such as the memorabilia in bars and shops. Personally, I find difficult to imagine a bar full of collectibles as a museums, because it misses totally the active cultural interpretation of the past, but at the same time the insertion of this category in the book offers an interesting perspective on the real meaning of museum, a meaning that presently appears blurry while it waits a new definition.

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[i] Language that offers sometimes gems of sibylline splendor: “Objects are remarkably unobjective subjects, if we mean by objective stable, self-sufficient, or self-explanatory”.

Workshop of the World draft stops

2: 3^rd Street

Society Hill today is one of the most elite neighborhoods in Philadelphia. Going back in time of 100 years the elegance and quiet of its streets would disappear, and you would find a commercial and industrial area full of immigrants, shops and traffic. Between 1880 and 1910 white collar workers gradually moved from Center City to better houses in the suburbs. The big industries left the city for areas near the Schuylkill or in the North Philly. Society Hill, then an immigrant area, was a densely populated neighborhood where houses, workshop, small industries and big warehouses coexisted together. As you can see from picture n X (3^rd Street on  google drive) 3^rd Street’s atmosphere resembled closely the one you can see in movies such as Once Upon a Time in America; walking out of the Powel house you would have seen between the townhouses a candy and cigar factory (final stop).

3: Dock Street

Clear cobblestone on the ground, exclusive restaurants and trees create the modern day distinctive appeal of this particular street. As you can easily notice, the street does not follow the regular perpendicular pattern of Philadelphia’s streets. Its sinuous shape and its name come from the fact that the street was actually a creek (Dock creek) until 1820, when it became a sewer. By 1840 it was completely covered and transformed into a street. In the early years of Philadelphia on the sides of the creek there were the workshops that needed a water source, in particular potteries, brickmaking and tanneries[i]. All these industries were highly polluting and we can imagine how pleasant the smell would have been at Powell house! In the mid-nineteenth century, these workshops moved to the outskirts but Dock street remained a highly commercial area (as you can see from the photo n. X) surrounded by the various warehouses of the port. In the 1960s it was at the center of the major urbanistic review which resulted in its present-day appearance; the project also comprised the rebuilding of City Tavern, the most famous colonial tavern of the city, which had been demolished in 1854.

De-ranging

The more I read about public history the more I feel upset. The actors are not anger or delusion, but a deep feeling of conflict between the historian and the citizen. 

Both of the readings for today’s class have a focus on the highly educative and enriching power of history. Historia magistra vitae said the Latins, and I deeply believe that it is true; however often it means also to highlight a meaning in history that undermines the complexity of the past with the ghost of presentism – the distortion of the interpretation of the past with today’s perspective --.

Yet, as Nash clearly explains with a quote in his text (1), history can be a blunt instrument for entertainment “to make people feel good, but not to think”. Otherwise, if used in the correct way (if there is a correct way to use history) history can be a powerful weapon to set things right politically -- in the most positive way of interpreting this word –.

On the same tune is the book of Cathy Stanton The Lowell Experiment (2), in which the underlying presence is a constant research of how can the Lowell park improve the collectivity and avoid mistakes (3). Here it comes my concern and my problem, because I feel the importance of history in creating a better world, or at least better citizens, otherwise what could be the utility of history itself, but at the same time to put focus on the educative role of history only can blur the complexity of the past and undermine our good comprehension of what happened at the time and why. It is a problem that is at the heart of public history and probably can’t be avoided without rendering this discipline meaningless.

For this reason is useful Stanton’s research as anthropologist, because she inquired the problem with a different perspective, producing some interesting results. Her interpretation of history as form of cultural performance (4) provide a social context for public history, where the discipline loses the kind of academic neutral definition and meaning to acquire the status of a product of dialogue between different actors of society; it is a definition that does not goes far away from the terrain of “shared authority”, but it flips the coin to define the historians as part of the community and not as generous distributors of  knowledge; a dangerous perspective perhaps, but surely an useful one for public historians.

The second important contribution of her work is an anthropological analysis of the people working with the public, the rangers.

(on the rangers it is interesting to note how both Stanton and Nash share the opinion that often they are de-rangers, herding the public to a touristy interpretation of the past that translate memory in commodities (5). The other thing is that they definitively disrupt my childhood’s image of the rangers as the “save the basket” heroes of Hanna and Barbera).

With an interesting perspective, Stanton unveiled the obvious: whomever works as a guide on historical sites has reasons, family history, education and political beliefs which interact with their role.

Presentism is a bad thing, or at least the world explains the bad aspects of something that is perhaps impossible to solve, but the historians and their obsession to look at the past sometimes should remember that they are walking forward too. 

I just wrote the last phrase and I am already, again, deeply concerned about its meaning.

1)     Gary B. Nash, “For Whom Will the Liberty Bell Toll?: From Controversy to Cooperation”, in Slavery and public history: The tough stuff of American memory, ed. Horton, James Oliver, and Lois E. Horton (New York: New Press, 2006). 86.

2)     Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006).

3)     Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 59.

4)     Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 23.

5)     Cathy Stanton, The Lowell Experiment, 27.

Three birds with a stone.

Digital History!

I am almost sad that today I am not talking about When the United States spoke French: I had a couple of witty quotes that attacked both Americans and French (Italians and French are supposed to be in a "family feud") . It is obviously an opportunity too juicy to miss:

“America is as good an asylum as any other” said the French Talleyrand who said also “The United States are a country where, if there are thirty-two religions, there is only one dish, and it is a bad one.”

I disagree almost completely with him but… hey, two birds with a stone.

Two birds with a stone is perfect to talk about digital history too. To be fair it should be three stones for a bird, because I beat the poor fowl with academia, 3D graphics, it appears even with programming.

I am very excited for Tuesday class: I saw Deb Boyer’s portfolio with great interest and I am eager to learn more about the different instruments to apply in our research field.

In the numerous pages for Tuesday’s class three were the ones that caught my attention more: the tales of an indiscriminate tool adopter, the core “competencies in processes and methods” part of “A Short Guide to the Digital_Humanities” and the Intro to 3D modelling.

Intro to 3D modelling:

I worked as a 3D graphic artist; art, art history, history are part not only of my CV, but also of my thinking process and 3D modelling crossed all these disciplines. It is a very powerful toy that is good not only for recreating cool images and for appealing videos, but also for learning and understanding the subject that you are recreating. HERE you can find my portfolio. Modelling require a good amount of training, moreover if you want to achieve a professional level; I don’t think that it is possible or advisable to train historian in 3D graphics, but I think that it would be more than useful if historians, moreover the public ones, had a basic knowledge of what it is possible to do with the instruments, the costs and timing, what it is easy to do and what requires too much ( I had once a client that thought that to add the grass and the trees and the horizon to an image would have been a matter of minutes). For examples that don’t even need a knowledge of 3D modeling but of the 2D basics, maps and reconstructions would improve so much historical books to be simple and immediate to understand and sometimes even for famous books you can find only maps coming out from some decrepit photocopier of the 1980s.

The tales of an indiscriminate tool adopter:

I loved this page and I think that every department should implement something with the double intent of informing the students on the instruments available and their limits and giving a basic training or tips for an efficient use of them. I am obviously not talking about word-processing software, but even if some software are too much, why don’t list them and show their potential? In addition there are some programs that are so useful that some tips would be advisable, Evernote for example.

 Competencies inprocess and methods:

Someway related to last argument, this chapter of the short guide touches database knowledge, metadata, gis platform (maps) and scripting language. Here we are with programming. Another staple of the modern life that should be part of the general education. We play with computers all day long, we use programs, we surf the web (and often we drown in the internet); however even with a PHD, how many of us know the basics of programming? I know that for History can be sort of a big jump, but we debate all the time regarding the need of leaving the ivory tower but we remain well glued to our beloved dusty covers of books when we could do so much on understanding and crunching big data from online sources (google books?). If we consider a basic knowledge of math a staple of the life of the modern man we have to accept that programming is important as well. For example I love to collect books: I revere them and when I came to the U.S. one and a half of my two bags were heavy, precious, marvelous books (and the backpack was my desktop computer dismounted). Books take space though, and the marvels of computer time allows me to have gigabytes of pdfs too, but good luck in organizing them and creating a database, it would take so much time to open them, search for the title, write the title somewhere, rename the file by hand, insert the title in database. Well why not program something to help? C#, my friend, you can handle access databases, create them, populate them, open pdf files and even search online the isbn number and come out with the all the data by yourself! (well if I tell you how to do it…)

Three stones for a bird? Gimme more please, I am near-sighted.