Paul Evans: Scripting history ... Culture Wars Challenge Historical Museums
"You’ll be touring Colonial Williamsburg," says Richard Handler, a U.Va. anthropology professor and associate dean for academic programs, "and stopping at, say, Raleigh Tavern. The guide is completely candid: ‘You’re looking at a reconstruction. The building burned in 1816 and was rebuilt in the 1930s the way it was thought to be, but we now know there are details that just aren’t right.’ Yet by the end of the tour, you’re in a meeting room in the tavern when [the guide] will say, ‘And this is the very room where the patriots met to debate the revolution.’"
Such doublespeak, Handler maintains, not only prompts head scratching among the crowds who tour the nation’s most renowned living history museum, but reflects an identity crisis afflicting the institution itself. Just as most of its guides don periwigs and breeches, yet address visitors not as characters reciting scripts, but as historical "interpreters" parlaying information, corporate Williamsburg seems a soul divided.
A decade ago, in The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Handler and Mary Washington University anthropology professor Eric Gable set out to see how America manufactures its collective memory. Today, their concerns still disclose an ongoing tension. As Handler says, "Presenting history to the public through objects presents problems that writing history doesn’t." For example, in Williamsburg and its spin-offs, can the remarkable, sensual re-creation of the past—the "authentic" structures, the flouncing skirts and footnoted detail—so overwhelm visitors that they forget that these, after all, are simulations? Are they bedazzled by first-rate theater or grounded in sound historical theory?
Historical theory—there’s the rub. History, we now understand, is Hydra-headed and many tongued. While Napoleon quipped that it’s a tale the winners tell, the philosopher George Santayana saw it as the lesson we all must learn. There’s the "great men" history of Thomas Carlyle, champion of kings and heroes; and there’s Marxist history, out of Hegel, charting the dialectic of socioeconomic currents. Courtesy of the French Annales School, "history from below" advocates for the marginalized—the seaman, for instance, rather than the admiral; the maid, not the mistress. Postmodern theory also factors in, its disciples holding that narratives conservative historians claim as factual are really chronicles encoded by hegemonic forces—in short, propaganda.
For Handler, Williamsburg became a battleground in the right/left "culture wars" of the ’90s and beyond, an institution resident scholars fought to reshape in the image of ’60s-derived critically trenchant "social history," as against the reflexively bugle-blowing history enshrined at the museum since its founding in 1926 by John D. Rockefeller. Here, a great epistemological debate continues to play out, Handler says, "between ‘objectivists,’ who think that knowledge can be objectively amassed and truthful and ‘constructivists,’ who regard it as the product of cultural or historical settings and therefore always relative. This raises the great question: ‘What is the nature of truth?’"
As far back as the Bicentennial, when Colonial Williamsburg’s attendance peaked at around 1.2 million, there was a move away from the old patriotic history to present a critical, populist history. Yet, at Williamsburg, he points out, "the medium works against that message, because the public sees all these buildings and thinks they’re ‘real.’ And, in some ways, the museum wants or allows them to believe that. Basically, the institution is caught between two positions."...
Read entire article at University of Virginia Magazine
Such doublespeak, Handler maintains, not only prompts head scratching among the crowds who tour the nation’s most renowned living history museum, but reflects an identity crisis afflicting the institution itself. Just as most of its guides don periwigs and breeches, yet address visitors not as characters reciting scripts, but as historical "interpreters" parlaying information, corporate Williamsburg seems a soul divided.
A decade ago, in The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, Handler and Mary Washington University anthropology professor Eric Gable set out to see how America manufactures its collective memory. Today, their concerns still disclose an ongoing tension. As Handler says, "Presenting history to the public through objects presents problems that writing history doesn’t." For example, in Williamsburg and its spin-offs, can the remarkable, sensual re-creation of the past—the "authentic" structures, the flouncing skirts and footnoted detail—so overwhelm visitors that they forget that these, after all, are simulations? Are they bedazzled by first-rate theater or grounded in sound historical theory?
Historical theory—there’s the rub. History, we now understand, is Hydra-headed and many tongued. While Napoleon quipped that it’s a tale the winners tell, the philosopher George Santayana saw it as the lesson we all must learn. There’s the "great men" history of Thomas Carlyle, champion of kings and heroes; and there’s Marxist history, out of Hegel, charting the dialectic of socioeconomic currents. Courtesy of the French Annales School, "history from below" advocates for the marginalized—the seaman, for instance, rather than the admiral; the maid, not the mistress. Postmodern theory also factors in, its disciples holding that narratives conservative historians claim as factual are really chronicles encoded by hegemonic forces—in short, propaganda.
For Handler, Williamsburg became a battleground in the right/left "culture wars" of the ’90s and beyond, an institution resident scholars fought to reshape in the image of ’60s-derived critically trenchant "social history," as against the reflexively bugle-blowing history enshrined at the museum since its founding in 1926 by John D. Rockefeller. Here, a great epistemological debate continues to play out, Handler says, "between ‘objectivists,’ who think that knowledge can be objectively amassed and truthful and ‘constructivists,’ who regard it as the product of cultural or historical settings and therefore always relative. This raises the great question: ‘What is the nature of truth?’"
As far back as the Bicentennial, when Colonial Williamsburg’s attendance peaked at around 1.2 million, there was a move away from the old patriotic history to present a critical, populist history. Yet, at Williamsburg, he points out, "the medium works against that message, because the public sees all these buildings and thinks they’re ‘real.’ And, in some ways, the museum wants or allows them to believe that. Basically, the institution is caught between two positions."...