Professional Documents
Culture Documents
“BRIGHTCOLORED BANNERS AND RABBIT WARRENS”
Draft for Providence Confab
on the Future of History Museums, 8/7/09
I.
What good does the history museum do for the study of history? Is there some
special contribution made by museum scholarship, by museum exhibitions, or by
museum educational programs to the more advanced understanding of history?
Yes, museums broaden historical understanding—I do not doubt that. But do
they deepen it? Is there something we know about the past, or some way we
know it, that stems uniquely from the collective enterprise of history museums?
Of course, museums do take account of the physical, the material, the visual, the
geographical, the tactile, and even the kinetic and kinesthetic qualities of the past,
and so museum scholarship should logically incorporate those dimensions of hu
man experience in the past into our standard narratives. Those of us who ply the
curator’s trade often assert that “academic historians” are too likely to accept the
holdings on library shelves as the boundaries of their evidence. They surely over
emphasize the role of literacy and numeracy in human action, and discount those
skills in the past that are less easily captured or rendered in journals or ledgers.
But I did not notice that a recent issue of the Journal of American History on the
history of the senses in American history was in any way enriched by an en
counter with museum collections or with museum specialists.
As institutions that welcome a wider range of inquirers, history museums have
an incentive to develop an expertise in encouraging the construction of historical
meaning by heterogeneous groups. Classroom teachers, wherever they work,
from K12 to postgraduate seminars, implicitly imbibe and project a pedagogical
theory derived from the shared developmental or disciplinary or professional
habits of their targeted students. But history museum pros have to address audi
ences of grandparents and grandchildren at the same time, often in the same
learning group. Have we in fact learned how meaningmaking works across the
boundaries of age, interest, and motivation? Some interesting research on family
learning has been done, and some has been applied in program design, but it has
Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop
“BrightColored Banners and Rabbit Warrens”
Draft for Providence Confab on the Future of History Museums, 8/7/09, page 2
certainly not yet reframed the endeavor of public history interpretation.
II.
For most of the past year, I’ve been working on an exhibition on “Lincoln and
New York” for the NewYork Historical Society, scheduled to open in October
2009. It will be, we sometimes gibe and sometimes pray, the very last Lincoln ex
hibition anywhere, at least during this bicentennial year.
We’ve been to see the range of Lincoln shows: the very good and dense exhibition
at the Library of Congress, the disappointing one at the National Museum of
American History, and the interesting but too modest endeavor at the National
Portrait Gallery. We’ve visited the fancy installation at the Abraham Lincoln Pres
idential Museum and Library in Springfield and the Lincoln Treasures in Chicago.
What’s odd to me is that none of these exhibitions have made the slightest effort
to strike out on new terrain. All of them recapitulate the conventional narrative,
built around stories that exemplify Lincoln’s unique virtues — his ambition to
overcome a desperately poor youth, his political shrewdness in seizing upon the
“free soil” crusade, his unusual moral evolution on the issue of black equality, his
amazing patience with the ineptitude of his military and the conniving of his
political subordinates. These often are like “lady’s chapels” in the Lincoln cathed
ral, at which we pay our respects and move along the ambulatory. Some of the
chapels have fine altarpieces—well, you get my drift…
Of course, there are many books, for adults as well as children, that are similarly
anodyne, reverential, or simply repetitive. And there are also books that are
bizarrely “innovative,” foolish in their endeavor to say something, anything, new
about old Abe—about whom, it has to be remembered, Frederick Douglass de
clared the book of inquiry closed in 1876.
This has led me to ask why we do exhibitions on Lincoln and on the other pieties
of American life? Is the history museum inevitably trapped in the role of cheer
leader for regional identity, for national heroes, for tearsoaked memories? Can a
Lincoln exhibition dare to be intellectually innovative? Clearly it can be bold in its
presentation media. Springfield is that, and it was greeted with the normal chor
Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop
“BrightColored Banners and Rabbit Warrens”
Draft for Providence Confab on the Future of History Museums, 8/7/09, page 3
us of complaints about “tastelessness,” the decline of literacy, and the dangers of
pandering to the crowd. In Jim and Lois Horton’s compendium on Slavery: The
Tough Stuff of Public History, the tough stuff is not generally about the troubling or
provocative interpretive stances taken by museum historians, but rather about
whether to include slavery in the presentation and how it may be done—e.g., the
reenactment of a slave auction at Colonial Williamsburg.
There have been museum exhibitions that generated intellectual fury. “The West
as America,” a 1991 show at the National Museum of American Art, is perhaps
the best example. (See http://people.virginia.edu/~mmw3v/west/reviews.htm,
accessed 8/1/09.) But much of that fury was political. The show fell into the
cauldron of the culture wars heating up at that moment.
It is not controversy per se that I am missing, but freshness, difficulty, complexity,
and scholarly and interpretive contestation.
III.
All this has led me back to an old favorite in my library, Friedrich Nietzsche’s
1874 Nile Delta of an essay, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.”
What I love first about this piece is that it distinguishes among three ways of do
ing history – the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical – but not as meth
odological choices. Each of these, Nietzsche explains, is a way that all of us, or
the different parts of our minds, use history.
Insofar as we are active, assertive, people, we gild our actions in the monument
ality of the past; we gain standing by associating ourselves with the powerful and
the virtuous (though Nietzsche, of course, is not in favor of most common vir
tues). When we endeavor to preserve the past, we fall into the temptations of an
tiquarianism, treasuring every bit equally with every other. And, finally, when
we are bold enough to judge the past, we treat it critically, unsheltered by histor
icist explanations.
Museum exhibitions cannot entirely escape their role as monumentalizers. All
museums enshrine the subject to which they are dedicated. “The Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame and Museum,” its website says, “is the nonprofit organization that
Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop
“BrightColored Banners and Rabbit Warrens”
Draft for Providence Confab on the Future of History Museums, 8/7/09, page 4
exists to educate visitors, fans and scholars from around the world about the his
tory and continuing significance of rock and roll music.” The Smithsonian’s Na
tional Museum of Natural History “is dedicated to inspiring curiosity, discovery,
and learning about the natural world through its unparalleled research, collec
tions, exhibitions, and education outreach programs.” “The Minnesota Historical
Society is chief caretaker of Minnesota's story—and the History Center is home to
the Society's vast collections. Within its archives reside artifacts ranging from
American Indian moccasins and artwork to furniture and photographs, Civil
Warera flags and a wealth of genealogical information. All of it is accessible
today and for future generations.” No museum is going to get far by dismissing
or denigrating its core subject.
And after 42 years in this business, I’m equally sure that museums cannot fully
shake off the temptations of antiquarianism. The fetishism of the object is relent
less. Collectors, connoisseurs, and buffs are too important to the process of collec
tionbuilding. Devotees of detail love the concreteness of museums, where issues
of timeliness, relevance, and significance can be evaded. I’ve just been through
years of Lincolniana and seen it all.
But do museums often approach the past critically? Can they?
IV.
I’ve just come from a fourday workshop for teachers, sponsored by the nascent
Boston Museum, aiming to encourage them to develop curricula around the
city’s desegregation crisis in the 1970s. We interviewed the architect of Judge Gar
rity’s busing plan and a key figure in the antibusing resistance. We spoke to
people who said their lives were ennobled by the struggle and with others who
felt that they’d wasted years recovering. We took the bus to Roxbury and to South
Boston. We analyzed the famous photograph of a student’s attacking black law
yer Ted Landsmark on City Hall Plaza in April 1976, and assessed its eerie re
semblances to Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre (on virtually the
same site). (Google Soiling of Old Glory.) The 22 teachers were a remarkably
committed group of professionals, who needed to know and use this history—as
they said often—to situate their work in Boston’s classrooms this year. They were
Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop
“BrightColored Banners and Rabbit Warrens”
Draft for Providence Confab on the Future of History Museums, 8/7/09, page 5
diverse: black, white, Latino, and Asian; Irish Catholic and Irish Protestant, Jew
ish, Muslim, Southern Baptist, and Pentecostal.
By all reports, the teachers came away from the week zealously enthusiastic
about the task of writing curricula on this subject, though they were also more
unsure than ever about the events of 197476. They had been remarkably willing
to confront participants and witnesses to the conflict. They passed judgment on
those they met but without simplifying the dilemmas of the time and without di
minishing their regard for the humanness of those who failed. They had im
mersed themselves in the material and yet found the freedom to see it in historic
al perspective.
If the Boston Museum goes forward, and if an exhibition and/or public learning
program is constructed around this subject, it will have to accept both its monu
mentalizing and fetishizing functions.
Interactive exhibit elements will doubtlessly “put you in the front
window seat of those buses crossing the channel into Southie.”
Ted Landsmark’s actual suit, with the spearhole still unrepaired,
will adjoin Joseph Rakes’s actual American flag used in the attack.
But it will, I hope, also invite visitors to the sort of challenging encounters to crit
ical thinking we have enjoyed this week at the teachers’ workshop.
As a result of this thinking, I’ve adopted a subversive strategy for American His
tory Workshop projects. The overall frame of each exhibition is deliberately ano
dyne. The exhibition title is deliberately simple, unprovocative. (E.g., LINCOLN
AND NEW YORK) The advertising invites visitors to come in and reassert their
connection to the “better angels of our nature.” Insipidity is us.
But as they make their way through the exhibition, familiar things fall apart. This
is not the Lincoln we revere, not the New York we love, not the presidency we
watch on the evening news these days, not a dilemma we know how to resolve
readily. We hope the exhibition will become, for those who have the patience to
Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop
“BrightColored Banners and Rabbit Warrens”
Draft for Providence Confab on the Future of History Museums, 8/7/09, page 6
stick with it, a warren of intriguing puzzles.
Please don’t tell the client.