Richard Rabinowitz
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Richard Rabinowitz, American History Workshop “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.
Big banners will scream, BOSTON AT THE CROSSROADS and IS BOSTON “COMMON GROUND”?
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.
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.
Big banners will scream, BOSTON AT THE CROSSROADS and IS BOSTON “COMMON GROUND”?
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.
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