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.
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