Readings Response: Memory in Public History

            Questions that surround the study of memory range from how individuals and collective groups understand their past, how groups interact with one another, how places are defined by collective remembrances, and how can public historians understand/use memory to tackle both historical and contemporary controversies. While the questions remain open-ended, this weeks readings highlight the importance of creating a dialogue and collaboration in finding the answers.

            The Presence of the Past illuminates how many people choose to understand to past in terms of personal family history over grand narratives. In a massive survey, Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen attempted to understand what people think about history and how people learn about history. The conclusion that people most trust other people (mainly family members) and museums in which they can understand the past on their own terms places a pressure on public historians to talk to people rather than at them.

            The ensuing dialogue is invariably tied to the controversies of the day. Carolyn Kitch’s Pennsylvania in Public Memory wrestles with this issue when discussing how industrial heritage sites glorify a past that for some is still the present. How does one deal with immigration, environmental preservation and labor when those issues can be divisive, especially when pitted against one another? When approached on a national scale, these issues become abstracted in what Kitch terms “an unspecific moment of ‘yesteryear.’” (54) The strength in some of the places Kitch visits, were not however in the national story, but in the strong local and regional ties that bring people to be interested in visiting a factory or mine.

             The locality of history is a theme that is relevant not only in the readings, but also in the upcoming Funeral for a Home project. Kitch’s work on industrial sites of the past and present forces the question “which (and whose) version of community, place and character will prevail?” (Glassberg, 19) While it is noble to believe that multiple histories could exist simultaneously, more often than not, a single time and identity is given to a place. In her discussion of how the nineteenth century industrial surroundings of Independence Hall were demolished to situate the area in the eighteenth century in the minds of visitors, Kitch highlights this problem. (33)

The particulars of the creation of Independence Mall could be viewed as recognizing the realities of the economy and the roles of the heritage industry and tourism. Or one could point to the fact that because so many people have left Philadelphia, there is not much impetus to save Philadelphia’s industrial heritage from descendant populations. This example caught my attention because of the emphasis that Kitch, Rosenzweig and Thelen place on speaking to real people about the past combined with the fact that the last time I was at Independence Mall my father made a comment about how the Mall and surroundings became so much nicer after the buildings were demolished. Should public historians be more concerned with the memory of a place that is gone or the creation of a new place to create new memories in? Public history is situated in an unusual position from which to try to both understand and challenge historical memory.

Readings:

Glassberg, David. “Public History and the Study of Memory.” The Public Historian Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), 7-23.

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

Meringolo, Denise. “Prologue: A New Types of Technician: In Search of the Culture of Pubic History,” in Museums, Monuments, and National Parks. University of Massachusetts Press, 2012.

Rosenzweig, Roy and David Thelen. The Presence of the Past. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998.

Tyrell, Ian. “Public at the Creation: Place, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907-1950” The Journal of American History Vol. 94,  No. 1 (June 2007), 19-46.