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).

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. 

No, please, don't make me a member of the club!

The interesting series of reading that I enjoyed and suffered this week, as a part of my strange way of living in my new situation, happy like a bookworm in a library and tired like a bear in his cave, proposed to me a number of topics to follow.

The two most interesting in my personal (and in the case of the blog de facto indisputable) opinion are:

·       a repetition of last blog’s thematic of “history and memory for the big public: the fundamental and yet misleading role of media in shaping our sense of the past”

·       house museums: on the verge of beauty and boredom

·       radical chic art and the futility of the hipster history.

(They are three, I know; but the third is so heavily charged by my personal, wrong and shameful distaste for performing art and everything remotely linked to Duchamp that I can’t purposely write about it).

This two, as I said, arguments by themselves couldn’t represent the readings properly, so let’s mix them together.

I remember a good number of house museums that I visited: a farm with a reconstruction of the life at the time, Washington’s Mount Vernon, the birth house of Napoleon in Ajaccio, a marvelous palace of Cardinal Spada, which is perhaps one of the first of his kind, being there without any major modification from the Seventeenth Century.

But the one that is connected the most with the readings is the house of an academic. A very sophisticate man, art critic, English literature scholar, his name was Mario Praz. I had to read one of his books for an undergraduate class of mine. The book is almost esoteric and often difficult to decrypt, but express clearly a deep love for objects, and indeed he was also a great collector.

The first time I went to the house I went because of the name: my entire life I was attracted by anything that was military, thing that perfectly collide with my pacific attitude (I hope so), but drove me and my poor parents with me all around the most unvisited museums. No museum was as disappointing as the Napoleonic one: indeed it was a house, full of art and dusty stuff apparently piled in the most disorganized way. Only after ten years, when I read the book for class and I had to go again to the museum, I understood the strange logic of beauty behind the collection and only learning from the text the history of some objects I could understand their value.

Literature, readings and emotional connection: objects and rooms are nothing but meaningless junk if there is not knowledge, interpretation and interest. I was impressed to read about the displays in Mark Twain’s house (ok ok Mr. Clemens) and I wandered what a little bit of imagination could have done in Mario Praz’s house.

Imagination and entertainment are at the center of the other idea that was twisting around in my mind while I was reading. Trying to learn English while I was waiting for the clearance of my Visa Status, I went to the right place: YouTube. I found a very neat program “The Edwardian farm”. Despite it suffered the capital sin of being a reality tv show and the even worst one of having historians and archeologist as actors it was a really educative series that was easily putting the audience in the context of the everyday life of a farmer of the late Nineteenth early Twentieth Century.

Intellectual and sophisticate beauty or reality tv show: I don’t know what is the correct answer, if there is one. In a perfect world everyone would see a very beautiful and educational reality tv show, one that increase not only the knowledge, but also the perception of the world; everyone would be an historian and everyone would read the kind of heavy military history books that I like. But I would not like to be in a world like that perhaps because as Marx (Groucho) said once “I would never be part of a club of a which I am a member”.

Rhapsody in Blue

Dolores Hayden’s The Power of Place and Andrew Hurley’s Beyond Preservation: that is all that I will say about the books. However, what I will say is sometimes in the books.

I always liked nostalgia. It is a double-edged sentiment that shapes the memory and link the people to the past but at the same time recreate the past with colors tinted by sour or sweet feelings. Nostalgia pushes perhaps the first steps of every historian and crooks their neck on the back, influencing once and for all their going. Nevertheless, nostalgia is not owned by historians, it infects every human being, and, by my experience, even cats, if I think on how my black furry companion was searching around the house for his old places when we moved here in Philly.

Peoples, communities and neighborhood share with a common memory also a common nostalgia, often mixed with pride or mystification of the reality of the past, but together these people are also the matter that constitutes the past, or at least of its remains.

Museums and galleries, even if beautiful, require a certain detach, sort of an intellectual journey that filters the community out and leaves the visitor alone with his mind in front of the little altars of knowledges  and their descriptions on the walls.

Not all the art rests enclosed in the walls though. Interaction in the street creates interesting connections between memory, place and community that can build or characterize the common memory and “remind” the past to the present.

I read the books, they made me think and then I remembered. I was not in the U.S. for most of my life and the sidewalk monuments of this new world were not part of my experience; I had my load of Garibaldi’s statues and marble signs reminding to me the events that signed the lives of my city’s people, but nothing of America’s past life. Or perhaps it is not true.

Radio days, the intro of Manhattan with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Once upon a time in America; the list could continue long with the scenes full of color, sentiment and even a sort of smell. For the still images Hopper and his urban humanity or Will Eisner of Dropsie Avenue or A contract with God with his characters that show with their own point of view the general personality of the city or of the neighborhood.

Personal point of view, this is the core: memories, experiences and emotions, in a single word the life of the people that built the place and that gave it the tactile and concrete presence in our life today.

I wonder if the memory frozen in the movie, the painting or the comic book is a lesser memory than a monument on the street or on the wall of a temporary art exhibit. Moreover, are all these part of history or are part of memory?

Will Eisner, Dropsie Avenue: The neighborhood.

I had a memory of the past, well now it is history.

In class last time we had a good discussion on the difference between past and history. I finally could wear my elegant senatorial toga with the crimson stripes so en vogue in the hipster community nowadays, put on the table my Greek and Latin dictionaries and pontificate on the subtle differences between the past that’s past, the one that’s history, the presence of the past in history’s stories. Too bad that there was not a theater outside participating to the awe of the class and the enthusiastic applause of the teacher. But perhaps my memories differ a little bit from the reality.

In the introduction to his A Shared Authority, Michael Frisch touches the interesting topic of Memory. He underlines the double nature of this elusive but omnipresent principle in which coexist both the value of the “remembered past” and of the “deeply cultural artifact” subject to manipulation.

The historical value of Memory is out of discussion, but Memory, like a sponge, has a structure that revolves around voids. The past, long or short gone, is the same: it leaves footprints all over the place like a lovely cat in his solitary adventures in the house. What about History? The historian is the one that tries to find out where the cat is and what he did in the meantime.  The relationship between past, memory and history probably seems an academic problem, but it is not. The interpretation of the past and of the memory, seen as a collective or personal view on the past, do not influence only the historian. Indeed the view of the past strongly modifies societies, communities, countries, in one word it influence and modify the present and the future with it.

Obviously the past is the main field and minefield of the historian. He can either try to follow the sacred grail of objectivity or dismiss it as impossible, but he has to deal with the process of the interpretation of the past. Reading The Oral History Manual you can have the impression that the structured techniques provide an objective terrain to start a study, reading Frisch and his analysis of Author and Authority you can almost think that the copyright of the study should be of the interviewed people, but the truth is that at the end of all, what makes the research are the questions that the historian makes and his answers, which are, like every memory, an interpretation.  

Post Post

Let’s forget about the past. I know it is impossible for an historian, or at least it would be probably the end of his career, but in this case it should not be so problematic.

The last post, the one on the cute remembrance of the commercial past of Society Hill, was wrong. Not in the meaning that the content was wrong, it is still (I hope) plausible and firmly founded on pictorial evidence, but it is wrong on the fact that it is not a Reading Post of a, surprise surprise, a Reading Blog.

Confessions of a compulsive industrial’s heritage collector* is an interesting book on a very interesting topic: how people of Pennsylvania interprets and feel the memory of the past.

She sails in multiple different seas, some more problematic, others less. Museums, memorials, thematic parks, touristic areas. To be more precise I should say that her insatiable craving for new experiences on the field led her across oceans of situations, not seas, but perhaps I am indulging too much on the metaphor.  The common ground of these manifestations of interest is the memory of the industry; she chose a broad meaning of the word, including farming and in general everything that put men to work.

Other than writing practically an encyclopedia on the argument, the author shows some interesting analysis, drawing the attention on some delicate matters.

Two M come out from the distillation: myth and money. Two words fundamentally important in the world of public history and both coming from the same origin, people.

The uncomfortable position of the public historian princess is indeed caused by the pea of the necessity of dealing with a public. Academia dwell in the comfortable sheets of its ivory tower, but not the poor public historian. Public means money, simply because they pay and you need to provide a product that has to be interesting to the common plowman. Showbiz! History is surely educational, sometimes interesting, but not always entertaining. How much the entertaining aspect, so much needed in dealing with public, dilute the educative role of the study of the past? To not speak about the highly influencing ability of the money coming from donors or (ahi ahi) owners.

The second M is myth, and it is very interesting. The public deliberately undergoes the multiple tortures of an exhibit or any historical-linked activity mostly not because they feel the emptiness of their lack of knowledge, but because they already have ideas and feelings for the argument.

But we know how hard is to hurt the feelings of someone.

-I am sorry ma’am, but Pocahontas did not have any raccoon friend.

-Are you sure son? She was Native American; she surely had a special connection with the nature!

-Yes ma’am… no ma’am: it is complicated.

*To be a correct historian and going to the Chicago:

Carolyn L. Kitch, Pennsylvania in Public Memory: Reclaiming the Industrial Past (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012).

Vendors' shouts

Yesterday, in a hotel room, I stopped my poor wife that, like a whirlwind, was getting ready to go out. She had the make up in one hand, the shoes in the other and the husband still on the computer, but she actually stopped for a second and answered. In that moment I had again my obvious answer to the philosophical dilemma of the historian: “What do I need to finish the research?”. New Evidence? Another trip to the archives? My only answer is patience: the patience of the wife.

But I think and hope that was not only patience that stopped my wife for a moment behind my shoulder. She seemed indeed interested to the black and white photo on the monitor. I just asked her what street of Philadelphia was on the picture, and the answer was very interesting to me.

“The Italian market!”

The large street in the photo was clearly bending on the left and I said that the Italian market, if I was not mistaken, is on a narrow and perfectly straight road.

Docks St. 1908. Lib of Congress.

I was right: it was not 9^th Street. My spidey sense of historian helped again in the path to the truth (and the very descriptive caption on the bottom too). But I missed the point. Indeed my wife in a way was right and I was wrong: it was indeed a market, a busy street crowded by customers, piles of boxes, barrels and carriages parked nearby the big sunshades that extended the shops on the streets. Nothing resembled Docks Street of today, with the fancy-cut stone on the ground, the pretty trees and grass on the side and the modern like houses behind the curtains of the leaves.

Docks St. today.

This past has been erased and has left few other traces than the name of the street. So when I told my wife that this was the street that disturbed our poor bottoms of bike riders the other day, she was surprised and interested, at least for the 20 seconds that she could dedicate to it before reminding me that we had to leave the room (and this, my friend, is the privilege of who are living in the past and the curse of the ones living around them).
Last Tuesday we had the lesson at Powel house on 3^rd Street. We will work on some projects on the House in this semester. A pleasant bike ride from my place, the house has a pretty but not stunning façade, a big old door and the stone steps consumed by age. Inside there is a more that decent house, owned by one of the richest men of the Colonies and of the infant U.S.

On the ground floor, his parlor suggests a rich but not lavish life, made of business and appointments. The mahogany stairs remind us, step by step, how it is made a well-made work of an artisan that knows his trade. On the first floor, bright and luminous, the ballroom: a magnificent room with stuccos and mirrors, a beautiful chandelier hang in the center of the ceiling, it is easy to imagine it with his load of candles in an elegant night. On the fireplace the coat of arms of Samuel Powel: “Proprium decus et patrum” - Pride of yourself and of your fathers- (you betcha dude, clearly you don’t like to show off!) and on the side the chairs that gave some rest to Samuel Adams’ or Washington’s feet during the dances.

Yes I said Washington. The saint patron of U.S.A. came here multiple times and was a family friend. But I don’t care: I can, I am Italian and my saint patron is Garibaldi. What really got me was the view from the windows. A couple of skyscrapers and a less than attractive block of houses from the ‘60s. Someone pointed out how should have been at the time: roofs with smoke climbing out of the chimneys, some green fields on the right, where only a couple of blocks to the south the city ended, the masts of the ships on the Delaware all lined on the horizon trying to hide New Jersey on the other side of the river. My mind traveled for a moment and saw the mud on the streets with the people walking with a hand on the cocked hat in a windy day, the noise of the carts rolling around and the voices in the markets screaming their prices. The same voice, on different goods and different times, that my wife heard in the photo of Docks Street in 1908.

History is often seen as the dust on the cover of old books. Who, like me, enjoys the smell of aged paper and the tactile experience of crawling in the past through the pages of old books, can appreciate the grey layer on the volumes, looking behind the apparent immobility on the shelves. A world of memories and lives opens to the reader willing to walk through the dusty covers.

However, if you see the dust, often you perceive a simple and plain boredom.

Public history has the challenging task of interact with the people, I mean the normal ones that are not populating the corridors of Academia. It has to swipe the dust. The paper should leave the stage to other actors that can talk to the public in a more direct, tangible and interesting way, like a piece of furniture (still boring?!), images depicting the life in the past (oh c’mon that is better!), some two hundred years old gossip (I knew that you would have liked this!).

In this blog I will record my attempt to learn the language of this History.

Being a Blog by definition is personal, subjective and time-related. I will try to be loyal to these capital sins of the academic world. If possible, I will use my past as graphic artist, art history student and pun enthusiast to hide my hunchback and grey hair of present historian, hoping to move and stir the argument with some fresh air.

Above all, I’m learning here, so please be patient and pretend to enjoy it. Ah, I almost forgot: I am Italian, so please forgive me some grammar stumbles.