The Magic Smoke

The conference Shared Authority: Public History, Social Curation, and Social Practice, organized by the Temple University Library on November 10 embraced all the focal points of Public History.

Erin Bernard illustrated her experience with the History Truck, a mobile oral collection lab that interacted with local communities helping them to revive their memory. Erin showed the fundamental importance of a strong connection with institution, neighborhood associations, and private citizens.

Cindy Little started her talk with her memories on a past project of her, similar to the History Truck for the intensive work with communities and the nomadic experience. It was a project that linked housing and heritage and played on the strong connection that everyone has for the place where we live. Citizens could share their memories on the neighborhood, on the experience they had in living there or they could retrieve information on the people that lived in their house before them.

Both these project relied on a strong participation of communities on the project, the highly interactive process that Michael Frisch (the third speaker) successfully baptized shared authority.

Frisch is scouting new paths on this ground: he is trying to develop IT technologies that offer a platform where common people can archive directly their experience or data. He is trying to utilize phone apps (Pixtory) and social media to create a virtual ambient were communities can constantly share and discuss about the past in an ambient that is practically academia-free.

After the conference, a group of us kept talking with Frisch. His ideas suggest a future that is still blurred and uncertain, but that surely comprises a higher interaction between people and technology also in relation to history. If this direction is certain and few have doubts about it, still the academia is slow in offering strong education on the digital world. We did have a more than interesting class on the argument and I already thought that this technological divide between historians and world is problematic. This conference reinforced my doubts: as historians, are we ready for the next generation of technology innovations and for the share of voice-power that they will bring with them? Will we burn in smoke like a resistor against too much power?

P.S. Magic Smoke 

Troopie from Muskogee

Strange fusion today: Merle Haggard’s good old days with the reenactors of Fort Snelling, Minnesota. It is like to mix fried chicken and clam chowder. It sounds terrible, but indulge me, there is “wisdom and absurdity mixed up together! Reason in madness!”[1].

The good work of Amy M. Tyson[2] indeed brings us into the world of Haggard and Shakespeare, because the principal characters of this book are on stage. From the early sixties to present time Fort Snelling every summer hires a group of reenactors for the season. They are not professional actors, not professional historians, not full time employees, but surely bring passion to a job that offers numerous challenges, starting from the recognition of a professionality that is undermined by both the fact that they work in costume and receive a meagre wage. The professional recognition of the reenactor is a major problem if we think also about the difficulty in acknowledging the numerous skills that such workers need to have, skills that are obviously exploited by the manager, but that don't produce a better job, which remains seasonal and highly volatile. A situation that increases the stress of the workers, already challenged by the bipolar nature of their lives, half in the past, half in the present, a difficulty that in some cases created very bad results, both in the workplace and in the "real" life of the workers. 

A big part of the book analyzes the concrete problematics that these workers have confronted in the past sixty years, describing aspects that should be known by historians when they are planning for events and locations where reenactors participate into the education of the public. In this the book is very interesting and with no doubt useful.

In addition to this almost technical instruction, the book illustrates many other problematic issues. One, common in every public history project that deals with the past, is the real difficulty in showing the dark aspects of past society: the situation of woman, of slaves or of minorities such as the Indians if represented properly in such reenactments is likely offensive for the public and can ruin the whole experience of the trip; the public, after all, is enjoying relaxation and vacation. 

The second problem is directly connected to the first: if the public has to be entertained and the reenactors must smile at every person, showing the joys of candle making and showing happy soldiers and happy women in a fort that did not host women and with all probability did not host even happy soldiers, what history is represented?

But, you know, the good old days of the happy troopie from Muskogee.

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[1] Shakespeare: King Lear; Act 4, Scene 6, page 7.

[2] Amy Tyson, The Wages of History: Emotional Labor On Public History's Front Lines, Public History in Historical Perspective (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).