Something that Happened to Me

From my experience as a student and a teacher, it seems that many people are encouraged to view history as something apart from themselves. They consider their major contacts with history to be made in two places: history classes and historical museums. A friend from Louisiana tells of taking her required high school course in state history, and as is typical, she was bored. Years later she learned her hometown was one of the earliest Euro-American settlements in Louisiana, yet her town had not once been mentioned in her course. She grew up thinking that she and her community were somehow apart from the history of her state. 

Even at grassroots occasions of living history, like folklife festivals, all too often only old-timey music and crafts are featured, creating the impression that "tradition" is not a part of the modern, urban South. It is as if certain places or people have a monopoly on our perception of history. 

I suggest that history is not something that happened somewhere else to somebody else, but rather that history is something that has happened and is happening to each of us. Our historical museums in the South offer a fine opportunity to teach this more democratic history. Because they reach a wide public audience, the history they teach is of vital importance. 

I would like to discuss five common misconceptions perpetuated by museums that foster and strengthen the distance between the museum visitor and his/her history. In the process, I hope to be something of a devil's advocate, but do not intend to denigrate museums. I recognize that all of us working with museums have made mistakes and would like to do more thorough research and creative interpretation if we had sufficient funds and personnel. 

The first misconception is that history belongs only to the affluent. When the historical museum and preservation movement began, only the homes of renowned figures were saved and exhibited, since the preservers thought these people represented symbols of our past that strengthened our national or regional pride. Indeed, much of the present-day historical preservation movement originated in the South. Mount Vernon was among the first sites in the nation to be preserved, and the Society for the Preservation of Old Dwellings in Charleston, South Carolina was among the nation's first preservation organizations. 

While the preservation of beautiful homes did serve the purpose of galvanizing concern for the past, we need to develop this concern farther and interpret the community context in which their residents lived. In the South, historical homes on exhibit are predominantly the main houses of plantations and the homes of the merchant class, to the exclusion of the dwellings of agricultural workers, whether slave or free, black or white, even though their houses often constituted the majority of homes on the site and were integral to the world in which affluent whites lived. For example, historian Peter Wood tells of visiting Thomas Jefferson's remarkable home, Monticello, and overhearing a visitor say to her friend, "It's a beautiful place. Do you suppose he had any help?" 

The second misconception is that history is progressive. America is represented as the story of the triumph of democracy, the story of successful upward mobility. Nowhere is this more strongly illustrated than in the story of Abraham Lincoln — who in the land of promise, rose from a humble log cabin to the White House. This saga of "rags to riches" permeates our historical museums. Lincoln's log home is now enshrined in Kentucky, and at the Hermitage, the home of Andrew Jackson near Nashville, we see his original log cabin house juxtaposed against the elegant mansion to which he ascended. 

What we do not see or learn about is the broader context which includes the story of struggles and failures, of farms lost due to crop failures or mortgage foreclosures, of houses abandoned due to rural poverty and prejudice, mechanization, and the lure of better jobs and a new beginning in the city. We do not see the preservation of sites central to the saga of form labor and union organizers, nor learn of their defeats and triumphs in the South. 

The third misconception is that history was designed by interior decorators. In so many historical homes, furnishings appear to be impeccably arranged, and I get the feeling that if I sat down with my newspaper and cup of coffee I would mess things up. Indeed, according to my wife, I "never put things up." Am I without historical precedent? And at historical battle sites we see re-enactments of battles that are theatrically designed and thrilling to behold. Soldiers are dressed in new, clean uniforms and have fun. We do not see or learn about what actually happens to people when they are wounded or killed, nor witness their pain and terror. I was in Vietnam in the First Infantry Division, and I remember the first dead Viet Cong I saw. How strange it was that he could not somehow get back up — we were no longer playing army. 

The fourth misconception is that history can be interpreted through artifacts alone. Too often guided tours of historical museums or houses consist primarily of the identification of its furnishings and architectural details. How many times have you visited a museum and heard the guide say while touring the rooms, "This mahogany table is of the Sheraton style, made in Philadelphia in 1805. And this couch . . ." The major issues of American history contemporary to that period remain overlooked. For example, at restored plantation sites across the South, one wonders what the specific responses of the residents — of all colors — were to the Civil War and Emancipation. In North Carolina the Division of Archives and History has published a laudable history of the state interpreting such historical moments through the story of specific historic sites, and it stands as a model for other Southern states. 

The fifth and final misconception is that history is remote, something in textbooks or museums, something that has happened to other people. My clearest experience with this occurred while I was researching a farm tenant house from Maryland on exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. During the course of my research, I located families who had actually lived in the house and invited them to the museum to share their recollections for the reinterpretation. One of these was the Johnson family. Mamie Johnson visited the house with her son George, who had been born upstairs in that house in 1923. With them was George's son, Terrence, who had visited the Smithsonian earlier on a school field trip. He distinctly remembered visiting the house and was now amazed to learn that it was the home of his grandmother and the birthplace of his father. 

Our major challenge then is how do we connect people to their history? My belief is that we can do so by opening up our museums so that they are not for the affluent only, but for everyone; so that they do not just tell the stories of success and progress, but also of struggles and failures, and do not just emphasize decorative arts, but the economic, social, and political issues of Southern history as well. In being more forthright in our interpretations we challenge visitors to think, to re-examine their easy, pat answers to the past. We develop their curiosity, their ability to inquire. It is by questioning that we learn. In these ways visitors can come to understand that history is not something that happened somewhere else to somebody else, but something that has happened to each of us, that has happened to me.