A Doll-Sized Helping of Public History: An interview with Rebekkah Rubin

By Past@Present

P@P: First, it’s so exciting to see your photo on the cover of the new issue of The Public Historian—Congratulations!  Can you tell us how that came about?

RR: Thank you! I knew The Public Historian was publishing a special issue about childhood, gender, and play, but it was a surprise when the editor contacted me about using one of my photos for the cover. It’s such an honor to have my work recognized by colleagues in the field.

P@P: More than 3000 people follow your Instagram feed, @iamexcessivelydollverted.  When and why did you launch that project?  And how do you use this platform as a public historian?

RR: I began @iamexcessivelydollverted three years ago as a way to discuss and expand upon aspects of history related to American Girl’s historical characters. Over time, the project has transformed into a discussion of the history that is overlooked by American Girl. In recent years, American Girl has introduced more characters from marginalized backgrounds, but the vast majority of the dolls they sell are white and all but two of their historical characters are Christian. I am really interested in the idea of historical fiction as public history and how we can use fiction as an entry into understanding history, so I began creating my own historical characters from time periods and marginalized communities overlooked by American Girl. I use these original historical characters to discuss histories of non-white and non-Christian communities in the United States and elsewhere. I also use this project to connect history to contemporary events. All of American Girl’s canonical historical characters fight for justice and equality in their books, so it makes sense to me to use these historical characters to discuss contemporary issues of justice and equality and to trace how contemporary racism, sexism, and inequality is rooted in history.

As a public historian, this project is an extension of my other work. I typically write history articles for online and print outlets, on topics ranging from suffrage history to environmental history. On @iamexcessivelydollverted, I often discuss topics that I’ve written about for websites and magazines, but I’m able to interact with a different readership—over half of my followers are 18-34 years old and the majority are women. Too often, history writing aimed at a popular audience is synonymous with weighty tomes about men written by men. By using American Girl dolls to discuss history for a popular audience, I’m fighting against that stereotype; writing popular history is and should be a feminist act.

American Girl dolls dressed as early 20th-century suffragists used for the cover of The Public Historian’s February 2021 Issue.

Living Monuments: Artist Nina Rossi’s “Pedestal Takeover”

By Marla Miller

Now more than ever public attention is drawn to the ways in which public art creates space to talk about a wide range of subjects, past, present and future. Earlier this year in Turner’s Falls, Massachusetts—an industrial village within the larger community of Montague—artist Nina Rossi embraced a fleeting moment in the history of Spinner Park to offer a thoughtful, provocative, and even joyful intervention around a local monument that both celebrates and elides histories of women’s work. Though most recently she has embraced multi-media work with a range of materials, including found objects, Rossi here turns to photography, in artwork that invites us to contemplate both idealized and real images of working women, and presents a rich case study of the possibilities when artists work in public history spaces.

Since the mid 1980s, “The Spinner”—a nineteenth-century classical figure holding a drop spindle—has stood near the corner of Avenue A and 4th Street to celebrate the women who once worked in the nearby Griswold Cotton Mill. The town is working this year to update the park, making it safer, more functional, and ADA-compliant. The 700-pound, cast iron Spinner will remain in the newly refurbished park, but is off its base as it is being restored during the construction. The work left the figure’s pedestal in place, but unoccupied. Rossi—never, in her words a “huge fan of the romantic, sentimental version of a mill worker symbolized by the Greek/Roman spinning goddess”—took advantage of the sculpture’s temporary absence to replace it with a succession of local women. Each mounted the empty pedestal holding tools of her trade today, moments Rossi captured in photographs.[1]

Left: The Spinner and Spinner Park before renovations (photo: waymarking.com, 2016). Right: Weaver Peggy Hart (photo: Nina Rossi, 2020)

Rossi’s intervention is an important one. Monuments with female figures are far more often allegorical than representational. One study of some “5,575 outdoor sculpture portraits of historical figures identified by the Smithsonian” found that, after subtracting examples of abstract, allegorical, or anonymous figures, fewer than 200 statues (that is, not even 4%) remain that depict identifiable women. Recent attention to the installation of statues of Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony in Central Park (the first women to join nearly two dozen men), or to the highly anticipated monument to Ida B. Wells, planned for the Chicago neighborhood where she lived and worked, shows the high degree of interest in the ways women’s history is marked on the landscape.

The daughter of UMass sociologists Peter H. and Alice S. Rossi—the latter “a founder of the National Organization of Women and specializing in family, sexuality, gender and feminism”—Rossi believes that her work “has that kind of sociological vision. This is where my perspective comes from.” “The drop spindle daintily held by a draped classical figure,” Rossi observes, seems “very unrealistic for what must have been a dirty and mechanical and noisy job tending thundering looms inside the Griswold mill.” “Other women in town worked in the paper mills, mostly in the rag room, slicing up rags by running them up on fixed knives,” she continues, and “I doubt they looked much like this perky nymph, or would have identified with her. But I have always loved the fact that the park and statue was a homage to female workers. So I thought an updated, modern version using living local models would be fun.” And the timing was perfect: not only was the pedestal vacant—and its surrounding azaleas in full bloom—but in the wake of the lock-down associated with the pandemic, “we were coming out of weeks of huddling at home. The idea of doing a public art project where I could interact, however briefly, with people again was very appealing after weeks of solitude and lack of inspiration.”

Rossi began by inviting women whom she knew personally, but word quickly spread, and by the project’s conclusion some forty women embraced the chance to strike a pedestal pose. Rossi has made her photos available as a series on her website. And so we meet musician and poet Nina Gross, copyeditor and grantwriter Trouble Mandeson, town clerk Deb Bourbeau, and chef Ashley Arthur. Clothing and textile makers are still well represented, by corset-maker Jackie Lucchesi and UMass Amherst public history student, weaver Peggy Hart. Artists and musicians hold brushes and instruments; activist Edite Cunha carries the all-important clipboard. Amy Donovan, who works for the Franklin County Solid Waste District, chose a bucket and shovel.

The Spinner statue, purchased in the 1980s, was cast by Alabama’s Robinson Iron Works (who also contributed the lamp posts lining the street) after a sculpture created by 19th-century French artist Louis-Léon Cugnot (1835-1894).[2] Cugnot was well known for his allegorical figures. According to one source, this form, rendered in the Art Nouveau style, was not intended to depict the work of spinning per se, but rather represented Clotho, the “Greek goddess of destiny,” “measuring the thread of human life.”[3] But the statue gained new meaning when installed in a town built upon the labor of female textile workers.

At the same time that Cugnot’s figure was first cast in France, in 1875, a world away the vision for the Turner’s Falls cotton mill took shape. The Griswold Cotton Mills was founded by Joseph Griswold in the nearby town of Colrain in the 1830s. By 1879, the company had moved to a new, larger factory in Turner’s Falls—a planned industrial community founded only a decade before on the banks of the Connecticut River.[4] The 1880 U.S. census counted just over thirty women and girls employed by the cotton mill, the majority of them either Canadian or born to Canadian parents. Mothers and daughters worked alongside one another, as did sisters—sometimes whole families working together in the cotton mill. The 1884 Sanborn map noted that the “carding & spinning rooms” where most of these employees worked “run night and day.” Weaving took place on the ground floor, with the carding and cloth rooms above; the third floor was devoted to spinning, spooling, and warping, and the 4^th allocated for storage. By 1891, some 500 mill hands ran 700 looms and 30,000 spindles, producing light weight fabrics and fancy goods.  A large boarding house and tenements housed workers from the Griswold mills.

The Spinner best represents the real women of the town’s cotton mills in that she is depicted as a young woman: In 1880, the median age of women employed as weavers, spinners, spoolers, and warp tenders and web drawers in the cotton mill was twenty, though several workers were as young as twelve and thirteen, and a handful were in their thirties, or had reached forty.[5] But the dangerous work performed by women in these mills certainly looked very different from the spinner of the sculptor’s mythological imagination. Cleaning and preparing fibers, swapping in fresh bobbins, warping and weaving cloth—in contrast to the quiet, contemplative image of the Spinner, this was all difficult and dangerous work, performed around heavy machinery, in deafening environments. Among other risks, the fiber-laden air made cotton workers vulnerable to a range or respiratory illnesses, while the common practice—before the introduction of self-threading shuttles–of sucking thread to bring it through a shuttle contributed to the spread of tuberculosis.[6]

Women in another western Massachusetts mill. (Photo: “A Chicopee Cotton Mill – spinning room – 3 men, 12 women on the production floor,” Chicopee Archives Online, accessed August 6, 2020, https://www.chicopeepubliclibrary.org/archives/items/show/5380)

As textile companies moved their operations from New England to the southern states, plants like Griswold’s could no longer compete. Between 1922 and 1933, some 93 Massachusetts cotton mills closed, including Griswold’s. Most closed before 1928, throwing 40% of the Commonwealth’s textile employees out of work.[7]  By the time the Griswold property was sold to the Kendall Company in 1932, the firm had switched its focus to manufacturing hospital dressings, medical gauze, and related products,.[8] World War II boosted revenues, but soon competition from southern mills caught up, and the company closed it in 1952, forcing some 135 employees to look elsewhere for work .[9]

The post-war decades were difficult for Turner’s Falls economy, as mills closed one by one and jobs vanished. With the assistance of the Massachusetts state government, in the mid-1980s the town launched a revitalization effort that included plans to create a park on an abandoned lot on the main street. Town leaders decided to celebrate the women who had once worked in its textile industry by installing the Cugnot figure in what became “Spinner Park.” A plaque placed at the figure’s 1985 dedication reads “May the charm, grace and elegance of this statue be a lasting symbol of women at work”—language that may seem incongruous with the actual labor of millwork, but the statue’s installation ceremony also brought, and honored, several women who had worked in the Kendall mill, as well as the Esleek and Strathmore paper mills.[10] In their presence, the abstract, allegorical Clotho took on another valence, as the representative of these real, working women.

Thirty-five years have passed since the Spinner’s installation. Today, as the park undergoes renovation, Suzanne LoManto, executive director of RiverCulture (the town’s cultural programming department), notes that “the intention of the Spinner statue has always been to honor Montague’s industrial past, and especially to acknowledge the women who worked in the mills.” As part of work, local sculptor Jack Nelson will refresh and restore the Spinner before it is reinstalled—creating the opportunity embraced by artist Nina Rossi to recognize, and celebrate, the diverse ways in which women work in the contemporary community.

Nina Rossi’s photographs now appear on the wall enclosing the construction site, allowing visitors to imagine contemporary women atop Clotho’s pedestal. (Photo: Nina Rossi, 2020)

In summer 2020, Rossi’s photos became part of the physical presence at the site, printed on weatherproof polymer paper with a landscape fabric backing and mounted on the construction fence, along the Fourth Street side of the site.  While Clotho is absent, these photos remind viewers of the working worlds of women today. Meanwhile, Rossi is continuing to contemplate the additional possibilities offered by the moment, such as installing a time capsule inside the refurbished statue, containing these photos alongside perhaps “some survey or written statements from the people who posed,” or other ways to document women’s working lives in 2020. Whatever comes next, Rossi muses, “40 real women being represented inside a statue that is supposed to stand in for dozens or hundreds of 19^th-century women” could be “a cool contrast of technology and vision.” 

Note: the first published edition of this article omitted Sojourner Truth’s name from the list of statues honoring women in Central Park. We apologize for this error.

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[1] All quotations from Nina Rossi are drawn from responses to an email interview, June 26, 2020.

[2] See https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMRW3Z_The_Spinner_Turners_Falls_MA

[3] Alternatively, one auction house claims that “The statue represents a girl from an Italian village on the island of Procida.”

[4] “MHC Reconaissance Survey Town Report: Montague,” (1982), pp. 3, 10. For another story related to larger conversations about local history and memory, see this account of an effort to rename Turner’s Falls, in light of a growing effort to disassociate the community from William Turner’s 1676 attack on a Nipmuc encampment during King Philip’s war: Cori Urban, “Turner’s Falls May Be Renamed Because of Association with Native American massacre,” MassLive July 16, 2020.

[5] Interestingly, the work was not as strictly segregated by gender as we might assume: weavers in the census records are identified both as male and female, and the same is true of spinners (at least per the Federal Census of 1900), who could also be male or female, usually in their early teens

[6] Janet Greenlees, “Workplace Health and Gender among Cotton Workers in America and Britain, c.1880s–1940s,” International Review of Social History, Volume 61, Issue 3 (December 2016) pp. 459-485;.

[7] Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism (NY: Penguin, 2015), 394.

[8] https://www.referenceforbusiness.com/history2/3/Kendall-International-Inc.html

[9] North Adams Transcript, 26 February 1952.

[10] Tim Hilchey, “Montague Honors its Working Women,” [Greenfield Recorder], May 13, 1985.

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A Museum in Your Living Room: The Smithsonian Learning Lab

By Helen Kyriakoudes

“At the Smithsonian Institution, a new object is digitized every six seconds.”[1] A handwritten letter from Mary Cassatt, the Gemini VIII spacecraft capsule, and a pair of James Brown’s autographed loafers are just a sampling of the more than 5.5 million objects drawn from the nation’s largest museum, education, and research complex.

This ever-expanding trove of resources can be both exciting and daunting. While it includes paintings and artifacts from the Smithsonian Institution’s twenty-nine museums and associated units, there are also articles, blog posts, video, and audio materials drawn from the various institutions under the Smithsonian umbrella. It raises the question – how can an individual researcher, educator, student, or member of the public harness this wealth of information?

The homepage of the Smithsonian Learning Lab invites users to discover, create, share and learn

The answer is the Smithsonian Learning Lab. Created in 2016, this digital learning hub allows users not only to access the millions of Smithsonian resources floating in the cloud, but to use them to build and share original collections and lesson plans that place the Institution’s objects at their center. A user creates a profile and from there can search across the twenty-nine organizations comprising the Smithsonian Institution, saving objects, sorting them into digital “collections,” uploading original materials, and crafting lesson plans that bring the combined resources of the Smithsonian directly into classrooms or living rooms arounds the world. By eschewing a “top-down” approach to museum education, the Learning Lab provides wide-ranging access as it fulfills its mission “to build a global community of learners who are passionate about adding to and bringing to light new knowledge.”[2]

 The development of the Learning Lab grew, in part, out of a desire to better connect educators with the full range of the Smithsonian’s digital resources while also creating educational materials that best suited their needs. The site debuted in 2016 after an extensive period of research and development, including three weeks of in-person teacher workshops during which educators tested out site functions and provided feedback to developers as to what would be most helpful in the classroom. By designing the site around what teachers said they needed, the Learning Lab team created a platform that furthers its ultimate goal of educators becoming “active creators and sharers of digital resources personalized for learning in their own classrooms.”[3]

The Learning Lab now has over 6,000 published collections created by both Smithsonian museum staff and members of the public. Places such as the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and the National Museum for African American History and Culture use the Learning Lab as a significant piece of their education programming. Smithsonian professional development programs for educators incorporate the tools of the Lab into workshops and seminars. And as activity increases, the Learning Lab staff now host weekly office hours online to field questions and expand collaboration with those using the site.

This summer, I am working remotely with the Learning Lab as a communications and outreach intern. My work includes creating social media content and researching partnerships to expand the lab’s use in classrooms and at home. As part of my work, I’ve spent hours happily scrolling through the materials created by the museums, educators, and students who use the site. The topics range from science to history to the arts, as varied as the museums that line the National Mall in Washington, D.C. One collection explores power and portraiture through works by American painters Kehinde Wiley and Titus Kaphar. Another introduces objects such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chat” microphone and a Tellatouch braille typewriter as students follow the development of technology over time and ask, “What makes something innovative?”

The “Power and Portraiture” lesson plan from the National Gallery of Art

While exploring this user-created content in the Learning Lab, I’ve been reflecting on the idea of “shared authority” as put forth by public historian Michael Frisch.[4] An often-discussed phrase in museum and cultural heritage circles, the notion of “shared authority” has transformed in meaning in the years since Frisch first examined it in the early 1990s. Frisch interprets shared authority as a noun, a distinct concept acknowledging the inherent power dynamic that exists between institutions and the communities they work with as they present history to the public. Rather than a one-way, directional transfer of information, he describes shared authority as “a more profound sharing of knowledges, an implicit and sometimes explicit dialogue from very different vantages about the shape, meaning, and implications of history.”[5]

The term has since evolved in the public history field, transforming for many from a noun to a verb. Sharing authority is a process of de-centering museums and institutions as the “sole interpreters” of historical narratives, and those who use this evolved meaning strive to empower those with the deepest experience and knowledge to craft the way their histories are told.[6] While the scope of the Learning Lab expands beyond public history into the arts and sciences, this concept is still highly relevant to its work. I find both the noun and the verb interpretations of shared authority useful in my considerations of public history, and see the latter reflected in the Learning Lab’s approach to sharing information. In thinking about how museums and institutions can best serve their publics, I return to questions of access and community engagement.

I see equitable access to information as a crucial starting point for further sharing this authority and the Learning Lab can be a tool in this endeavor. As the world continues to social distance, many museums have opened their doors to visitors digitally, offering a welcome reprieve for those staying at home. It’s now possible to take a virtual stroll through the galleries of the Musée D’Orsay or the National Museum of Natural History – visits that, for many, would not be possible in person even in so-called “normal” times. Similarly, the Learning Lab expands this access to cultural resources. Although it pre-dates the pandemic by four years, the Lab is filling a niche for educators, parents, and caregivers seeking out resources for students who are learning remotely, as well as a means of visiting these institutions via their collections while remaining safely at home.

There are no easy answers and no clear-cut paths towards perfecting the sharing of authority. It would be inaccurate to say that the Learning Lab completely relinquishes all authority to its users, as it ultimately curates the digital objects made available on the site. However, it also provides a framework on which users can build out their own materials. For instance, tools that allow users to upload their own lesson plans, or copy and modify other published collections, ensure that the “implicit and … explicit dialogue” that Frisch observed continues.

Despite these complexities, I see all attempts at expanding access to museums and cultural institutions as steps in the right direction. For the museums and various departments in the Smithsonian Institution, this means offering the public direct access to digitized materials while allowing users to play with and build off of museum interpretations of those items. For educators, it means being able to use those resources to craft Learning Lab collections that best fit their classroom needs. For general users, it means the ability to explore the Smithsonian from the comfort of their own homes, while also creating their own collections from the items they discover. By eliminating as many barriers of entry as possible – distance, cost, and, in 2020, health risk – the Learning Lab takes a step towards making the institution once known as the “nation’s attic” more accessible for all.

Check out the Smithsonian Learning Lab Here!

Helen Kyriakoudes is an M.A. student in History who is pursuing the Public History Graduate Certificate, UMass Amherst. Her 2020 internship was supported with a Charles K. Hyde Scholarship for UMass Public History interns.

Works Cited

“About the Smithsonian Learning Lab: Smithsonian Learning Lab,” Smithsonian Learning Lab. Smithsonian Institution. Accessed July 2, 2020. https://learninglab.si.edu/about.

Frisch, Michael, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990.

Frisch, Michael “From ‘A Shared Authority’ to a Digital Kitchen, and Back,” Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World. Edited by Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski. Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011.

Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies. Digital Learning Resources Project, Volume IV: Technical Specifications Document. Washington D.C: Smithsonian Institution, 2012.

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[1] “About the Smithsonian Learning Lab: Smithsonian Learning Lab,” Smithsonian Institution, accessed July 2, 2020, https://learninglab.si.edu/about.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, Digital Learning Resources Project, Volume IV: Technical Specifications Document, 3.

[4] Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990).

[5] Ibid., xxii.

[6] Michael Frisch, “From ‘A Shared Authority’ to a Digital Kitchen, and Back,” in Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski (Philadelphia, PA: The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011), pp. 12-127.

Airplanes and Memories: Unlocking the Stories of an Institution

By Tianna Darling

Today, I had the pleasure of interviewing a restoration volunteer at the New England Air Museum in his late eighties who has worked here for fifty years. Beginning in 1970, this volunteer has made an impact on most of the aircraft in our collection; when asked what he has worked on over the years he states, “Almost everything. I’ve been involved in one way or another.” He knows where everything is, down to a specific bolt for a specific airplane part: “I remember stuff that I moved 20 years ago. I know right where to go pick it off the shelf.” I soon find out this is not an exaggeration, as he walks me around the storage building he refers to as his home, pointing out every piece of equipment on the numerous shelves. He remembers going to get certain airplanes, showing up to work after the 1979 tornado, what engine he has moved where, and why it was moved. It is all stored safely in his memory.

I am lucky to be able to intern this summer at one of my favorite museums, the New England Air Museum (NEAM), supported by a Charles K. Hyde internship fellowship. I may be slightly biased, as I have worked at NEAM for about a year and a half as part of the public programs team. This summer, I get to wear two hats: one on the museum floor interacting with visitors in my public programs team role, and another behind the scenes in my intern role, researching, writing, and interviewing for my project, “NEAM: 60 Years, 60 Stories.”

This year, the New England Air Museum celebrates its 60^th birthday, although not quite in the way it expected to. As with other cultural institutions around the world, NEAM closed its doors to the public this March, reopening the outside exhibit Memorial Day weekend. It was the longest closure the museum had seen in its history. By the end of June, we were able to open our indoors to visitors, and are now operating as an “open air” museum. My project will hopefully bring some celebration, albeit virtual, to the site’s 60^th year by highlighting some of the fascinating and important stories that have made NEAM what it is today. Through text, audio, and images, this virtual exhibit will bring attention to stories of aircraft, restoration projects, objects in our collection, institutional history, and the incredible people that make up the New England Air Museum.

I am sure that when, in 1960, the original members of the Connecticut Aeronautical Historical Association (NEAM’s parent organization) were celebrating their incorporation as a non-profit institution, they could have never imagined the organization would be celebrating its 60^th anniversary in the midst of a global pandemic. However, this is not the first time the museum has survived a severe setback. On October 3, 1979, a tornado ripped across northern Connecticut, wreaking havoc to anything in its path. Unfortunately, this included the Bradley Air Museum (as NEAM was called at the time). The tornado upended, twisted, and tossed around enormous aircraft in the outdoor yard, and tore through the indoor hangar. While many aircraft were able to be restored, numerous planes were lost. This, however, did not stop the museum from charging ahead. Opening to the public shortly after the tornado, the museum then went on to open another hangar in a new location only two years after the devastating damage. The New England Air Museum is a resilient institution: in a mere 60 years not only has it handled the changing cultural and economic landscapes that historic institutions deal with every day, but it has also survived a tornado, and is now confronting a pandemic, while only growing stronger.

As a component of “NEAM: 60 Years, 60 Stories,” I am conducting short oral history interviews with a number of docents, restoration volunteers, board members, and staff at the New England Air Museum, both as part of my research and also to preserve the rich knowledge that each person has about different aspects of this museum. At any given time, NEAM has over 100 volunteers, working as restoration crews, craftsmen, docents, and everything in between.[1] My short interviews will not be encompassing this entire group, but will include approximately twenty interviews with volunteers, board members, and past and present staff, with a focus on those involved with stories chosen to tell for the 60^th anniversary. These interviews opened my eyes to the amount of history that people have within their own minds that might never be shared if someone doesn’t ask. Institutional history is important to an organization; knowing where you have been can direct where you will go. My classmates in the UMass Public History program have recently worked on similar projects, such as the development of an excellent oral history handbook for Old Sturbridge Village to capture their stories for their upcoming 75^th anniversary.[2] These types of projects undertaken with academic programs or with the help of student interns can help sites immensely, as most museums and historic sites may not have the staffing capabilities to undertake this type of project in addition to their own work.

NEAM has an amazing group of volunteers, each with their own rich background both at the museum and in the world of aviation: some have worked on one-of-a-kind aircraft in the restoration hangar; others celebrated their 100^th birthday with NEAM friends just this past year; still others flew for Pan Am, worked on gear for the Apollo missions, and/or worked for the numerous aerospace organizations in the state of Connecticut. There are current and former staff members who remember details big and small about the museum’s history. These are the people who were working the day of the tornado, who helped the museum get back on its feet, who saw NEAM into a new generation. They remember details about restoration projects, such as how wheels were acquired for our one-of-a-kind Burnelli CBY “Loadmaster,” and how carefully the plane had to be weighed so as to not tip it over when the massive engines were installed on the front. They even remember details as small as what poem caused a laugh at a Christmas party. While records can tell you quite a bit about an organization’s past, recording these stories feels important on a different level. They are the personal connections people have to an institution, and show why this place matters to so many. Commemoration of an anniversary is an excellent time to emphasize the work done by staff and volunteers, while also thinking about the years to come.

The story of an organization can be lost if it is not preserved as you go along, and the people are the history. As we live through a global pandemic, my attention is drawn to the fact that this is now a part of NEAM’s institutional history, and now more than ever it is important to preserve the memories of the people that make the air museum what it is, both past and present. The New England Air Museum is an extraordinary place filled with extraordinary airplanes, but in my opinion it is the remarkable volunteers and staff that make this place truly special. I sincerely hope that these simple recordings may help someone down the road, asking themselves: what was it like to show up at work after the tornado? How did NEAM acquire the engines for the blimp car? What did it feel like to be a docent at NEAM in 2020? I feel honored to able to preserve even a fraction of these stories in whatever manner I can, and highlight what an outstanding museum NEAM has been over the last 60 years. One docent I interviewed today said it better than I ever could: “I came in earlier, they just opened the doors, and it’s like the place is coming alive. I see you walking by, you know, and I see a couple more coming through, I see the lights coming on, the displays coming on. It’s like the place is waking up.” The New England Air Museum is alive with the stories it has acquired over the last six decades. The common expression “if these walls could talk” could be used for NEAM, except they can: just ask our team.

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For more information about the New England Air Museum, visit their website at https://www.neam.org/shell.php?page=about_us_organization

Tianna Darling is an M.A. student in History who is pursuing the Public History Graduate Certificate, UMass Amherst. Her 2020 internship was supported with a Charles K. Hyde Scholarship for UMass Public History interns.

Original? The Copy in Art Historical and Museological Context

By Danielle Raad

I am looking at Apollo Sauroktonos, the Lizard Slayer. He is naked, nonchalantly resting his left arm on a tree trunk, arching his torso, and putting weight on his right foot. His boyish, idealized face is framed by curls and his gaze rests on a lizard climbing up the tree. More specifically, I am looking at an image in the online collections database of the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, Connecticut. The photograph is of a plaster cast of Apollo Sauroktonos located in the museum in Norwich, Connecticut. It is a cast of a Roman marble sculpture made in the late 1st or early 2nd century AD. The sculpture is one of several copies of a Greek bronze statue from the 4th century BC. 

Left: Digital photograph of the plaster cast of Apollo Sauroktonos in the Slater Memorial Museum. Right: Digital photograph of an albumen silver print (ca. 1870-1890) in the Getty Museum of the marble Apollo Sauroktonos in the Vatican Museums

This summer, I am working remotely as an Education Intern at the Slater Memorial Museum. I am researching and writing sections of a training manual for museum staff and volunteers all from my home office in Amherst. While writing the section on classical art history, I realized just how far removed I am from what would be considered the original work of art. With Apollo Sauroktonos and several other works, I am working from digital photographs of plaster casts of Roman copies of Greek sculptures. 

In this essay, I complicate the concept and value of the “original” and consider copies and representations as products of their times. My lens is that of a public historian and archaeologist of the contemporary and I see these media transformations and reconstitutions of material culture worthy of critical examination in their own right. I’ll zoom out through three levels of abstraction from the lost Greek bronze to the digital photograph. Interrogating each layer of replication reveals entangled stories of classical art, art historiography, and museum studies. 

First abstraction: Roman copies of Greek sculptures

During the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, as Rome expanded its reach across the Mediterranean, works of art from conquered cultures were brought back to the capital. Romans had a particular affinity for classical Greek art from half a millennia earlier, and as a result a neoclassical tradition blossomed in Rome. Artists made copies of Greek sculptures, using molds of originals to replicate them (Department of Greek and Roman Art, 2002). Roman sculptures were in turn rediscovered by Italians in the Renaissance and taken to be originals. Only after large-scale excavations in Greece in the 18th and 19th centuries did archaeologists and art historians realize that many Roman sculptures were in fact modeled after Greek art. At this time, art historians and archaeologists shifted to Greek, not Roman, art as the classical ideal. Greek art became lauded and Roman art in turn fell in estimation. As Greek bronze statues were often melted down, much of what we know about Greek sculpture actually comes from these Roman copies. They have been practically ignored by students of Rome and rather studied as Greek art (Gazda, 1995).

But Roman sculptures are Roman, not Greek. In recent decades, two long-standing assumptions about Roman sculpture have been challenged. First, that Greek art is original and Roman art is characterized in contrast by copying, imitation, and deviation. Second, that it is possible to learn about lost Greek art by studying Roman sculptures (Perry, 2010). We cannot assume that Roman copies are faithful replicas; some may be composites or otherwise altered. Decisions like recreating a bronze sculpture in marble or altering the size and orientation of a lizard were made by Roman artists. 

Romans consciously chose to copy Greek sculptures. The labels art historians use to describe artwork carry implications, as “classifying an object as a copy incorporates a fundamental denial of the validity of that object as a unique expression of its own time and culture” (Gazda, 1995, p. 124). These objects are more than surrogates for Greek art, they are the material culture of Rome. Instead of viewing sculptures “merely as informants on what has been lost of Greek culture’s artistic heritage we can appreciate them as selective and informed determinants of the artistic legacy of Greece in Rome” (Gazda, 1995, p. 148). By shifting the focus, we can instead investigate how the copy would have functioned in Roman sociopolitical life. We see how visual communication through the distribution of replicas was part of Roman propagandic and economic agendas. We also see how Roman aesthetics were guided by tradition and classical ideals. Emperor Augustus, who transformed Rome into an imperial capital, promoted the emulation of classical Greek styles and motifs. His intention was for Rome to eventually surpass the lauded achievements of ancient Greece (C. Hemingway, 2007). Thus the copying of Greek art is linked to Roman imperial aspirations.

The original Apollo Sauroktonos is attributed to the Athenian sculptor Praxiteles, based on passages written by Pliny the Elder. The Cleveland Museum of Art claims to have procured the original Greek bronze sculpture, thought to be lost to time. There is much debate about the validity of this claim and the attribution of the sculpture to Praxiteles. But does it matter? We do not need to identify a definitive first Apollo Sauroktonos for the Apollo Sauroktonos in the Vatican Museums, excavated in 1778 on the Palatine Hill in Rome, to have value. Not only can we learn about Roman attitudes and aesthetics, but also about the systematic collecting practices of the Catholic church in the 18th century and papal sponsorship of archaeological excavations.

Second abstraction: Victorian plaster casts of Roman sculptures

The Slater Memorial Museum opened in 1888 displaying exclusively plaster casts of Greek, Roman, and Renaissance sculpture. The selection of art was carefully curated with the aim of educating the public and allowing them to contemplate the intrinsic beauty of classical art (Norwich Free Academy, 1889). Henry Watson Kent, the museum’s first curator, reflected in his memoir that it “was to be entirely a museum of reproductions, but of reproductions treated with the gravity and respect due their great originals” (1949, p. 39). Today the Slater Museum boasts one of the largest plaster cast displays in the country. Still on display, the casts continue to be used as teaching tools, a three-dimensional art history textbook, for both the general public and for students at the Norwich Free Academy. 

The history of plaster casts begins centuries earlier, in Renaissance Europe where the wealthy commissioned casts to decorate their homes and gardens. This trend spread to Colonial America; George Washington had casts of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar sent over from London to decorate Mount Vernon and Thomas Jefferson intended to decorate Monticello with casts of classical sculptures (McNutt, 1990, p. 160). Plaster casts were used to teach the values of Western civilization to artists and to “elevate” public taste.

Many museums, like the Slater and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), were founded with collections of casts. During the Victorian era between 1874 and 1905, European museums made casts of sculptures in their collections and sold them to American museums (Born, 2002). This arrangement worked well for Europeans who did not want to lose objects of their cultural heritage to the United States (Fahlman, 1991). Casting studios capitalized on this market. For example, Caproni and Brothers, founded in 1900, traveled around Europe making over a thousand direct molds which they used to create and sell casts out of their Boston studio. The plaster cast industry resulted in a canonization of classical works of art displayed in American museums. 

These museums eventually began acquiring original art and artifacts, and interest in plaster casts declined. In 1904, Matthew S. Prichard, the Assistant Director of the MFA, was vehemently against displaying casts in the galleries. He asserted that casts are “engines of education and should not be shown near objects of inspiration. They are data mechanically produced; our originals are works of art” (Whitehall, 2013, p. 202). He robs the cast of any artistic merit or ability to evoke inspiration. His perception of casts, shared by many others, also applies a double standard. Why not reject, too, works like the Apollo Sauroktonos at the Vatican Museums? Are the Roman marble copies not analogous to the Victorian plaster casts?

While many museums have relegated cast collections to storage facilities, sold them off, or otherwise let them deteriorate, a few like the Slater Museum still attest to the educational use of the replicas. Over a century after the plaster casts were made, they are historical artifacts which “do not merely replicate and embody famous ‘originals.’ Rather they testify to the reception and heritage of sculpture” (Nichols, 2006, p. 127). Looking at the history of casts, for example, we can learn about 19th century aspirations (Born, 2002). Americans attempted to elevate themselves culturally by appreciating a canonized European artistic heritage. Linked to the circulation of casts, we also see a rise in the reproduction of the classical body as an artistic ideal, which was subsequently dismissed by Modernists (Nichols, 2006).

Slater Museum’s casts are reproductions created from molds of the original sculptures, however they are not without some last minute modifications. Henry Watson Kent recounted events that transpired the day before the Slater Memorial Museum opened in 1888:

Somebody, somehow, had at the last moment thrown up horrified hands at the unconcealed naturalism of the Greek sculpture that was going to be displayed on the morrow. Cico, the plasterer, was called to the rescue with a sheaf of proper if hastily made fig leaves, and, after a bit of rushing round, the Museum was ready to be opened with, it was hoped, irreprochable dignity. A month later, some of the New York and Boston newspapers raised a hullaballoo about this desecration of pure art, with appropriate sneers at provincial prudery, but Norwich stood its ground. (1949, p. 42).

Alterations such as the addition of censoring fig leaves present on Apollo Sauroktonos and many other nude male sculptures reveal Victorian attitudes toward propriety. In addition, the cast of Apollo Sauroktonos at the Slater Museum differs in a few small ways from the one in the Vatican, namely the placement of the fingers of the right hand, the number and location of the tree branches, and the size of the lizard’s body. An investigation into these differences would elucidate the technology of plaster cast production as well as choices and perhaps shortcuts taken by the cast makers (artists? crafters?).

Third abstraction: Digital photographs of plaster casts

Interest in plaster casts revived in the 1990s, which corresponded both to a renewed interest in Roman sculpture for its own sake and to museum collections going online. As early as 1935, the philosopher Walter Benjamin considered the democratizing potential of photographs of art. He wrote, “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. Above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway” (Benjamin, 1969). In some ways, an online collection mirrors that of a plaster cast exhibit, making art available to more and more people.

Indiscriminate and widespread digitization resists canonization, allowing members of the public and scholars alike to curate their own set of artifacts and artwork with endless possibilities. New advances in the digital humanities have even opened up big data to art historians, like the creation of a visual search engine that can detect attributes of digital representations of art (Seguin, 2018). 

However, along with the push to digitize came hesitations. Museums feared that if their collections were viewable online visitorship would decline. Actually, scholars of museum informatics have found that an online presence increases physical attendance at museums (Marty, 2010). Museums have also grappled with copyright issues and an unease in making images of their artwork available. Others have completely embraced open access, like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has waived their copyright for images of artwork in the public domain, and the Getty, which allows anyone to use their digital images for any purpose with no permission under their Open Content Program. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, museums have virtually opened their doors to field trips. Especially now, students like myself are able to conduct productive research from quarantine thanks to online collections and archives. In my internship, I am writing the art historical and ethnographic sections of the Slater Memorial Museum Interpretation Manual which will be a training manual for future staff and volunteers. I am tracing the development of art historical trends exhibited within the museum’s permanent collections, including ancient sculpture from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, art from Africa, East Asia, and the Islamic World, and American fine and decorative arts.

In order to continue to act in their role as institutions to serve and educate the public, museums must have a substantial online presence. The images of and information on the plaster casts on the Slater Museum website provide visitors with the opportunity to learn about the founding of the museum, the story of the casts, and the attributes and art historical significance of the works in the museum. Cornell University has a database of their bygone plaster cast collection, attempting to digitally reunite damaged and scattered collections and allow for the study of casts as a historical medium of the 19th and 20th century. 

Artwork of the past lives multiple lives (Bergmann, 1995). Their second and subsequent lives may be lived as replicas and photographs. The transition between lives, the act of reproduction, is a rich area of art historical and archaeological attention. The exact identity of the original ceases to be the object of fixation. Whether it be Roman marble replicas distributed through the empire, plaster casts sent off to American museums, or photographs hosted on a server accessible from any device with an Internet connection, copies have their own value.

Danielle Raad is a Public History Graduate Certificate Candidate and PhD candidate in Anthropology, UMass Amherst.  Her 2020 internship was supported with a Judith A. Barter Scholarship for UMass Public History interns.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, W. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Zohn (Trans.), Illuminations (p. 26). Schocken Books.

Bergmann, B. (1995). Greek Masterpieces and Roman Recreative Fictions. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 97, 79–120. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/311302

Born, P. (2002). The Canon Is Cast: Plaster Casts in American Museum and University Collections. Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, 21(2), 8–13. JSTOR.

Fahlman, B. (1991). A Plaster of Paris Antiquity: Nineteenth-Century Cast Collections. Southeastern College Art Conference Review, 12(1), 1–9.

Gazda, E. K. (1995). Roman Sculpture and the Ethos of Emulation: Reconsidering Repetition. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, 97, 121–156. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/311303

Kent, H. W. (1949). What I Am Pleased to Call My Education. Grolier Club.

Marty, P. F. (2010). Museum Informatics. In M. J. Bates & M. N. Maack (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, Third Edition. Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.1081/E-ELIS3

McNutt, J. K. (1990). Plaster Casts after Antique Sculpture: Their Role in the Elevation of Public Taste and in American Art Instruction. Studies in Art Education, 31(3), 158–167. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.2307/1320763

Nichols, M. F. (2006). Plaster cast sculpture: A history of touch. Archaeological Review from Cambridge, 21(1), 114–130.

Norwich Free Academy. (1889). Catalogue and Brief Description of the Plaster Reproductions of the Greek and Italian Sculpture in the Slater Memorial Museum, Norwich, Conn. J. Wilson and Son, University Press.

Perry, E. E. (2010). Sculptural Copies and Copying. In The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195170726.001.0001/acref-9780195170726-e-1137

Seguin, B. (2018). The Replica Project: Building a visual search engine for art historians. XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, 24(3), 24–29. https://doi.org/10.1145/3186653

Whitehall, W. M. (2013). The Battle of the Casts. In Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: A Centennial History, Volume I. Harvard University Press. https://hup.degruyter.com/view/title/323589

‘Reliquaries of Blackness:’ Documenting Holyoke’s Black Past

“Reliquary of Blackness: An Exhibit of Oral Histories”, curated by UMass PhD student Erika Slocumb, opened to the public and scholars at Wistariahurst in Holyoke, from August 27, until October 23, 2019. The exhibit was based on hours of oral history interviews Slocumb and her colleagues conducted with members of Holyoke’s black community in 2018, a project funded by Mass Humanities. By focusing on the experiences of those living and working in Holyoke during the mid-20th century, the exhibit showcased the results of this year-long project to document the history of Holyoke’s Black residents.

“I think it should inspire history students and scholars to look in places where we think ‘the story has been told’,” Slocumb told Past@Present, reflecting on the significance of her exhibit for history students and their research. “It’s important to look at the histories of spaces, especially local histories, and ask ‘who propped up the prominent figures in this narrative?’ ‘Who is missing?’ and tell their story, let them tell their story.”

Erika Slocumb is a mother, an artist, and a community organizer, from Springfield, Massachusetts. She is a PhD student in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies who is beginning work toward the Graduate Certificate in Public History. She is also cofounder of the Western Mass Women’s Collective, a community organization advancing empowerment through “literacy, critical thinking, experiential knowledge, and community engagement.” 

You have conducted many oral history interviews with members of Holyoke’s black community. Several Holyoke residents also shared with you family photos and documents. Please tell us about your project and its importance for preserving local black history. 

I was born and raised in Springfield, and when I look at the documented history of Black folks in Springfield the thing that is missing are people, specifically Black women who had influenced and mentored me. When I was presented with the opportunity to uncover the history of Black people in Holyoke my initial response was “There are no Black people in Holyoke.” I think when you look at the history of Holyoke that has been publicly documented, the Black folks’ stories are missing. And the fact is, that there is so much of a rich Black history that dates back to the eighteenth century and so much that the Black community of Holyoke has contributed that it needs to be told. If not for any other reason, so that Black youth growing up in Holyoke can know their history and generations will have the opportunity to claim space in Holyoke.

How does this project challenge the dominant narratives about Holyoke history? 

I think the project adds to the narrative. It works to fill in holes that exist in the dominant narrative. You can’t tell the history of Holyoke accurately without the history of Black people in Holyoke. There have been too many contributions by Black people to the city of Holyoke going back generations. And we have just scratched the surface with the work we’ve done so far.

One of the themes that you mentioned in your work is that Holyoke is traditionally associated with other populations: the Irish, the French Canadian, and most recently the Puerto Rican community. But there have been African Americans in the area since the 17th and 18th century. What have the challenges been as you try to recover Holyoke’s black past?

The challenge in uncovering the history has been the limited sources of Black Holyoke history. I think the biggest challenge I had with the oral history project that was funded by MassHumanities is that because of resources and time there are so many folks that didn’t get interviewed. I have made connections with so many people who want to have their stories told. I think the other part that was challenging in conducting oral histories is realizing that there is so much that goes into building relationships, and in order to do that, we have to find time in our schedules to bond and to understand the community and the context in which the history is situated and that takes time.

There is no rushing oral histories. These memories, for so many in Holyoke’s Black community are sacred in a way, and I think that is why I named the exhibit “Reliquary of Blackness.” Here you have this whole community of people that have been saving up their stories, collecting their family’s histories and for many they have been waiting for a project like this, for an exhibit, or a space to exhibit, their family’s history. I think in doing something like the exhibit, the challenge for me was making sure that I presented their stories authentically, with as few of my words as possible, because the exhibit was an exhibit of oral histories.

What have some of the most exciting moments been in this process?

I think some of the most exciting moments in the process have been making connections—as well as the face someone makes when they look at a picture that we found in the archives and they recognize themselves or their mother, who they haven’t seen in years, or some obscure childhood friend, and that photo invokes memories of place, and sounds, and brings them back to a time that they had forgotten. Something else that has excited me is the validation I get from the community and the excitement. Ms. Dian McCollum said “Erika was an answer to my prayers. That someone would come to uncover the history of Black Holyoke.” That is something you can’t get from researching a thing that has already been researched, or from using solely secondary sources. There is something about the oral histories, watching the history unfold right before your eyes. There is nothing better.

– Mohammad Ataie

Commemorating the Nineteenth: The Nineteenth Amendment and the National Park Service

by Brian Whetstone

Early afternoon sunlight filtered down through the immense skylight of the former Wilmington Artisans Bank, casting shadows into the musty corners of the Art Deco lobby that now made up the reading room and library of the Delaware Historical Society (DHS). Earlier that morning I had boarded a train from another Art Deco monument—Philadelphia’s 30^th Street station—as I began my search for the history of women’s fight for the right to vote in the “First State.”

It was here in the solemn atmosphere of the muted orange onetime bank lobby that I found myself poring over the papers of Delaware suffragist Emaela Warner. Mixed in amongst her clippings of “controversial” anti-suffrage tactics and letters with fellow suffragists was a lengthy report written in loopy, scrawling cursive describing the first woman’s suffrage parade held in Delaware. The report, drafted the day after the May 2, 1914 parade, was an important internal record for Delaware’s suffragists as they charted and recorded the history of their movement. As I haltingly read the author’s handwriting, I noticed amongst the list of parade attendees the Wilmington Equal Suffrage Study Club, one of Delaware’s most active black suffrage organizations. The author noted the club was “composed of colored women,” before going back and striking out the entry in a bold, thick line of ink.

In that moment I was transported back to my first semester at UMass Amherst and my initial encounter with Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “silences in the archive,” described in his landmark Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. This particular “silence” I stumbled across seemed to reverberate around the hushed library of the DHS. More than a list of parade attendees, this report marked one of the exact moments at which Delaware’s black suffragists were deliberately erased from the history of the suffrage movement. This document was both product and producer of the gross power inequities embodied by the suffrage movement.

I grappled with Trouillot’s notion of archival silences and the thorny implications of commemoration and memorialization throughout my summer in Philadelphia. As a National Council for Preservation Education intern, I spent my summer in the Northeast Regional Office of the National Park Service (NPS) in downtown Philadelphia helping coordinate efforts to commemorate the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment. An ongoing NPS initiative, the commemoration of the centennial will conclude in August of 2020, 100 years after the amendment was ratified and added to the United States Constitution. More specifically, I was charged to undertake original research for three relatively new NPS park units: the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park (HATU) in Dorchester County, Maryland, Harriet Tubman National Historical Park (HART) in Auburn, New York, and First State National Historical Park (FRST) in Delaware. My research sought out connections that all three parks shared with one another through the lens of suffrage and voting rights, and is to be eventually incorporated into the parks’ interpretive agendas. Additionally, I produced digital articles and shared content for the parks to publish on their respective websites and conducted outreach to cultural institutions that could be potential partners with each park in commemorative efforts for the centennial.

These cultural and institutional partners presented potentially substantial opportunities for the NPS to share authority in the creation of narratives about the significance of the Nineteenth Amendment conveyed in park interpretation. All three of the park units I researched maintained some kind of partnership with organizations established long before the creation of each specific park: Both Harriet Tubman parks are run in close partnership with other organizations created earlier in the twentieth century to interpret Tubman’s legacy, and FRST’s constellation of sites scattered throughout Delaware are cooperatively managed with other organizations that have long operated them as individual historic sites. Yet it was unclear to what extent these efforts to share authority were the product of necessity, or of a sincere collaborative philosophy. The reality is probably somewhere in between. Limited resources and staff at these parks necessitate that the NPS establish connections to lean on partners as parks “get off the ground,” so to speak. But such partnerships are also the product of a genuine desire to mediate between local and national narratives about the historic sites and places encompassed by the national park system, contributing to the process identified by John Bodnar whereby local and personal pasts are incorporated into a national public memory. [1]

It was these local and personal pasts—the voices, stories, and lived experiences of suffragists—that I was asked to draw from in establishing the ways all three parks were bound together in the broader history of the suffrage movement. The basic structure of this charge from the NPS, to seek out the materials needed to justify and strengthen a particular historical narrative, should be familiar to public historians. Often we are asked in our role as public-facing scholars, preservationists, and historians to connect the dots laid out by whatever agency, organization, or institution we happen to be working for as they pursue their own interpretive agenda. The particular dots I was to connect— HATU, HART, and FRST— initially seemed disparate and dissociated from one another in their geographic locations and historical themes. Researching the vast histories associated with each park was daunting enough, let alone attempting to connect all of them.

There are obvious reasons to feel apprehensive about this approach: putting ourselves to work towards a potentially uncritical or celebratory agenda risks reinforcing the silences in the archive I first noticed in the DHS. In its concern not to alienate potential audiences and work within the stringent parameters of a federal agency, the NPS can err on the side of caution. For example, in recounting suffragists’ split over the enfranchisement of black men through the Fifteenth Amendment, one NPS article couched Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s racist jeremiads against black enfranchisement and the ensuing fallout with Frederick Douglass as a simple “disagreement with their friend.” The cautionary reticence to unpack the racist history of the suffrage movement embodied by this article is understandable. But at the same time, I worried my research could be put towards reaffirming the entrenched silences around the complex racist history of the mainstream suffrage movement, much like the line of ink that struck out the presence of black suffragists in Delaware’s suffrage movement.

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Despite my initial reservations about forging links among these three parks, there were genuine connections they all shared with one another and I was given wide latitude to research whatever and whomever I wanted. Most obvious was the presence of Harriet Tubman at all three park sites; as she moved back and forth between Auburn, New York, and Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman led formerly enslaved runaways through Delaware by way of Thomas Garret’s home in Wilmington. Likewise, the national organizational infrastructure of the suffrage movement brought suffragists associated with each park into the same physical and institutional spaces as one another. The 1896 founding meeting of the National Association of Colored Women brought Delaware suffragist Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Tubman together in the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C. in the same way that the Congressional Union and National Woman’s Party linked other suffragists together across space and time.

Suffragists at each park were tied together in much more complex ways as well. As they fought for their right to vote, suffragists constructed a usable past they deployed to justify their activism. But, as the document I stumbled across in the DHS archive suggests, the ways in which suffragists constructed historical narratives about themselves and their movement intersected with the virulent antiblack racism leveled by white suffragists against black enfranchisement. Black suffragists at all three parks were forced to not only weather these attacks from white suffragists, but also navigated the limits and constraints of state violence and neglect, residential segregation, and economic instability. When Harriet Tubman spoke at suffrage events, she rarely spoke about women’s right to vote. Instead Tubman used the suffrage platform to promote her Home for the Aged, an institution she established to provide for indigent and elderly black people in the absence of state provisions for their care. Black suffragists like Tubman maintained a firm belief that access to the vote would not only provide them with increased social and political capital, but more autonomy over their own bodies and wellbeing.

At the conclusion of my internship, I was faced with another scenario experienced time and again by public historians: turning over my research to my immediate supervisors. This particular part of my experience raised pertinent questions about what it means to be a public historian. While I could ultimately draw as many conclusions as I wished about the connections all three parks shared to the suffrage movement, in the end it is the NPS that shapes how my research is fused with interpretation. This realization was initially uncomfortable: as university-based scholars, we rarely have to worry (or think) about the ways our research and conclusions will be framed in the final product—we are typically the ones framing them! But as employees of a federal agency, there are more limitations on what NPS employees can or cannot say. At the end of the day, the NPS is also inherently a public agency. My research thus feeds into national initiatives to engage with public audiences, a widely shared goal amongst public historians that impacts far more people than a single journal article or scholarly monograph.

Nor does the NPS shy away from the sticky realities of commemoration; as I was coached early on before meeting with potential park partners, the NPS is commemorating the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial in all its complexity and uncomfortable reality, not celebrating some imagined harmonious vision of a unified movement. Despite whatever reservations I had at the beginning of my internship, the NPS does maintain a sincere commitment to critically engage in serious and sometimes discomforting conversations about our nation’s past. It is not a question of if the NPS will hesitate to utilize my research, but rather how the NPS will put it towards a critical reflection of a social movement as complex as women’s suffrage.

Commemorations like the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment provide space to reflect on the complicated trajectories of social movements like the struggle for women’s suffrage. These commemorative initiatives inherently ask us to reflect on our contemporary moment—we look backward at the same time we look forward to the work that remains to achieve any kind of lasting social, political, and racial equity. In this way, public historians can provide success and cautionary tale in equal measure, helping us navigate our present political moment and, in the process, uncovering silences in the archive along the way.

[1] John Bodnar, Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

-Brian Whetstone, Ph.D. Student, Department of History, UMass Amherst

A Room Full of Passionate Historians by Mohammad Ataie

UMass History Department Holds Oral History Workshop with the Moving Memories Lab

On October 1^st, the UMass Oral History Lab held an oral history workshop to provide introductory level training to students and community partners who are planning to do oral history. Oral History Lab faculty Emily T. Hamilton (an Assistant Professor, oral historian, and historian of science), Samuel J. Redman (Associate Professor and oral and public historian); Jason Higgins (a UMass Ph.D. candidate and Director of the Incarcerated Veterans Oral History Project), and Tanya Pearson (a Ph.D. student and Director of the Women of Rock Oral History Project housed at the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College) welcomed a group of new oral historians to introduce some basic interview techniques, tips on recording and staging oral history interviews, and an in-depth discussion of oral history ethics.

“The UMass Oral History Lab serves to bring together students, scholars, and community groups to collaboratively improve oral history projects of all kinds,” says Professor Samuel Redman in response to Past@Present’s query about this workshop. “One way we go about doing this is by organizing occasional one-day Oral History Crash Course workshops. Recent UMass Oral History Lab Crash Course workshops have taken place at UMass Amherst, UMass Springfield, Brown University, Clark University, and Berkshire Community College. In the workshop, we practice our interviewing skills and work to develop our approaches to writing about and archiving oral histories. Workshop participants have gone on to establish their own oral history projects and make more accessible existing archival oral histories.”

The October 1st workshop was attended by students and scholars from inside and outside the UMass Amherst. “We were thrilled to welcome a large and diverse group of professionals connected to the Forbes Library in Northampton, Massachusetts,” says Redman. “Additionally, we were fortunate to welcome four additional graduate students from the Department of History at UMass Amherst – each with a varying degree of previous oral history experience. Having the opportunity to come together to discuss the challenges and opportunities related to this methodology is exciting. Often, as historians, our work puts us into isolation or in small teams. It is a pleasure, therefore, to have the opportunity to collectively discuss the problems and promise related to recorded interviews with a room full of passionate historians and professionals.”

Jason Higgins, a UMass Ph.D. candidate who was part of organizing and facilitating the workshop, says that the participants learned “to plan oral history projects, ask effective questions, and follow principles and best practices of the Oral History Association.” During his portion of the workshop, Higgins provided in the workshop an introduction to ethical concerns of doing oral history. “While the workshop could not exhaust all of the potential dilemmas, it focused on key issues that oral historians must learn to navigate ethically and responsibility, including trauma and shared authority,” says Higgins. Other topics covered during the workshop included project planning, interview techniques, transcription, recording equipment, privacy and informed consent, and a variety of approaches to making oral history accessible (i.e. documentaries, websites, exhibits, etc.), and more.

Typically, the Oral History Crash Course trains local residents working on a range of different projects. This rendition was different – and special, in that it was undertaken in conjunction with a new collaborative, community-based initiative. Hailing from Forbes Library, Northampton Open Media, Northampton Senior Services, Historic Northampton, the Center for New Americans and the Lilly Library, the local librarians, archivists, and historians in attendance are all partnering on the forthcoming “Moving Memories Lab.” Spearheaded by Forbes Library and supported by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the lab will eventually enable community members to record and preserve their stories, photos and other memories, and to add these materials to the Forbes Library’s local history collection. Audio recording equipment will be available to borrow via Forbes’ Library of Things program, and project participants will eventually train other community members in using digitization equipment, caring for digital memories and files, and recording oral histories. Informed by the earlier work of the District of Columbia Public Library and Queens Public Library, this project will make the Forbes Library the only public library using the memory lab model in New England.

“We were excited to kick off the activities for the Moving Memories Lab with a day of learning and professional development that brought all our community partners together in one space to get to know each other, share ideas, and hear about the many oral history projects in progress in our area,” noted Heather Diaz of Forbes Library, adding that the projects explored ranged from a teen podcasting workshop to the Baystate Hotel Music History Archive to Historic Northampton’s Single Room Occupancy project. “It was great to take space to explore what a powerful tool oral history can be, and, for public libraries, how we can use this tool to enable our community to record our own histories in our own voices.”

Another participant in the October 1^st workshop was Peter Kleeman, a MA Public History student at UMass and co-founder of the Space Age Museum. He says that he found the workshop useful for improving his oral history techniques. “Doing interviews is an art form that requires a combination of soft skills and technical aptitude, so I am eager to continually learn from others with more experience. The workshop provided some insights from four oral historians who have focused on very different types of projects,” Kleeman tells Past@Present. He says that hearing the accounts and strategies helped reinforce aspects of his approach as well as introduce new things to try. “The workshop focused more on interview methods but also offered a general overview of how to use common equipment. Besides developing my own oral history projects for the Space Age Museum, I am hoping my growing experience in this field will qualify me for similar work at other institutions when I graduate,” adds Kleeman.

Both Redman and Higgins believe that the importance of oral history for students and scholars and the related challenges make holding similar workshops necessary for students and scholars. “Oral history is an increasingly necessary skill for historians working on topics in modern or recent history,” emphasizes Redman. “Moreover, oral history provides another tool in our toolkits as academic historians, public historians, and history practitioners. By this, I mean that all historians, archivists, and museum professionals can likely benefit from some level of familiarity with oral history.”

“Since about the mid-twentieth century, oral history has grown as both a sub-field in history and a methodological approach to studying the past by recording interviews with first-hand witnesses to past events,” says Redman. “Not only is it the case that many historians (and scholars in other fields) are recording new oral histories, there also exist thousands of oral histories on a wide variety of topics sitting in archives and closets across the United States and around the world. How do we interpret these unique sources? How might we understand the specific legal and ethical challenges relating to using these materials while also embracing the unique potential related to voice and storytelling when teaching about the past?” These are key questions that, according to Redman, students and scholars can discuss in oral history workshops. 

Museum Collections Management and Archaeological Inquiry by Danielle Raad

This past summer, I was a Curatorial Intern at Historic Deerfield, which is an outdoor museum dedicated to the history and culture of the Connecticut River Valley and New England. It is made up of a series of antique houses, some that are interpreted to various periods in the 18th and 19th centuries and some set up with thematic exhibits. I worked in the Curatorial Department in the Flynt Center of Early New England Life—Historic Deerfield’s modern museum facility—under the supervision of the Collections Manager, Kate Kearns. We undertook two projects: the first was completing an inventory of all objects in viewable storage in the attic of the Flynt Center and the second entailed designing and fabricating custom storage mounts to rehouse the shoe collection.

The inventory was a daunting undertaking. Moving case by case, shelf by shelf, we examined over 3,000 objects. We cross-referenced the objects present on each shelf with a printout from the database. These objects ranged from forks to chairs, teacups to clocks. I checked off objects that were in the correct location, took note of objects that were on the shelf but missing from the list, and marked as missing objects that were not actually where they were supposed to be. After each session I would return to the computer to update each object’s record, to verify or update its location. I was surprised by how many objects ended up being missing (many showing up in later cases), and how many objects that were previously marked as missing were right there on the shelf (those records were particularly satisfying to update). 

This was the first comprehensive inventory done on the viewable storage cases in several years. I realized just how challenging it is to keep tabs on every single last item with a small staff and thousands of objects in the collection, some of which are frequently moving around for study, photography, loans, or special exhibits.

I also learned about the nitty-gritty logistics of collections management, from keeping track of different numbering systems used over the decades to accessing a particular case only before the museum opens to the public as not to obstruct the entrance to the elevator. Throughout this process, I became proficient in Mimsy XG, the collections management system shared by the Five Colleges and Historic Deerfield Museum Consortium. Many times, I had to split one record into multiples, like for tea sets or matching cutlery, so that individual objects could be separately described and tracked. 

I found myself frequently thinking about the cataloging work I did last spring for the Hadley Farm Museum in Prof. Marla Miller’s Museum Studio Practicum. Those of us in the class each chose about 50 objects to document, research, and create records for. The goal was to update the museum’s catalogue from a list typed in the 1960s and added to by hand in a spiral notebook. Even with the amount of time we collectively put into this project, we only but began this large undertaking.

Often, I had to pry myself away from artifact analysis to keep working through the objects. As an archaeologist trained in close observation and materials analysis, I wanted to find out everything I could about each object. The ketchup bottle had a particular scar on the bottom and number stamped in. What machine was it made on and in which factory? I noticed that one pair of ice skates was made from a cut bar of steel. Was it mass-produced as opposed to the other, more carefully handcrafted pairs? These questions for the most part had to be sidelined in order to accomplish the task of cataloguing my share of objects in a reasonable amount of time. 

Museums are so important as repositories and stewards of material culture. I knew this going into the summer, but I did not yet appreciate the magnitude of objects management and care. 

At Historic Deerfield, I also worked on a preventative conservation project where I designed and fabricated custom storage mounts for thirty-four pairs of shoes, approximately one third of the shoe collection. The shoes were in need of attention, housed on crowded shelves and some sagging under their own weight. Kate, along with Ned Lazaro, Curator of Textiles, had identified the shoe collection as a priority for some preventative care and rehousing and I was excited to put my crafting and sewing skills to use. I am proud of the quality of the mounts I created, but am very conscious of the shoes that I did not get to. 

Conservation is an ongoing, iterative process. Museum collections must be frequently reevaluated as they age and within the context of evolving best practices. But given the realities of limited time, staff, and/or money, prioritization becomes a crucial skill to practice.

I’ve been thinking about the concept of prioritization, as well as the volume of collections in museums such as Historic Deerfield, from the perspective of an archaeologist and researcher. Archaeologists approach material culture with different questions than a curator. Context is very important for archaeologists. Historic furniture, decorative arts, and textiles that have changed hands, been bought, sold, collected and never excavated lack archaeological context and sometimes lack any provenance at all. Can archaeologists shift the kinds of questions they ask, and their mindsets, to reduce the amount of destructive excavations? Why are we unearthing more and more artifacts to catalogue, document, and care for in perpetuity while there are so many objects—metal, wood, glass, ceramic—gathering dust on shelves? Can archaeological materials analysis instead focus more on museum collections?

When I was a graduate student in the Archaeological Materials program in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, I took a two-semester series on Materials in Ancient Societies. The theme for the year was metals. For the lab component of the course, we teamed up with the Department of Conservation and Collections Management at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to carry out a metallurgical analysis of Nubian mummy-eye inlays in their Ancient Egyptian collection. These were metal frames in the shape of eyes that were inserted into wooden coffins.

I destructively analyzed one metal eye inlay by cutting it into two pieces to reveal a cross-section of the object’s interior. This artifact had been in storage for almost a century. It had never been put on display, and was likely never going to be. The staff at the MFA had decided that the benefits of studying it metallurgically and chemically outweighed the irreversible act of cutting a piece of it off. I determined that the metal was a copper-tin bronze and it was cast into the shape of an eye using a mold. It was a low-quality cast, cooled slowly, and it was not subsequently worked. Our research contributed to understanding the method of production of these metal objects and, in a small way, towards grasping the ritual significance associated with the tombs of Nubian royalty.

In what ways can such partnerships be promoted and fostered between archaeologists and museums of history and art? We should consider how, in the field of archaeology, excavating new sites could be deemphasized with a focus instead turning to existing collections. At the same time, what is the best way to start the conversation with curators and collections managers on the benefits of conducting scientific investigations of (and perhaps destructively sampling) an accessioned object?

Danielle’s summer internship at Historic Deerfield was made possible by a Dr. Charles K. Hyde Public History Intern Fellowship. To read more about the shoe mounting and rehousing project, check out Danielle’s post on the Historic Deerfield Blog from August 22, 2019: https://www.historic-deerfield.org/blog/2019/8/22/gaining-a-foothold-on-the-shoe-collection

Danielle Raad is a Public History Graduate Certificate Candidate and PhD student in Anthropology, UMass Amherst

“So…What is Public History?” by Nolan Cool

“So…what is public history?” Folks attending Adirondack Architectural Heritage’s (AARCH) day-long tours ask me this all the time. My sarcastic answer is “it’s the opposite of private history,” followed by a more serious explanation that public history is applied history out in the world. A still unsatisfied, confused look prompts me to further explain that historic preservation projects, working with communities, public stakeholders, and local governments, museums, nonprofits, and other institutions on any project with history at its core qualifies as public history. My work as AARCH’s Educational Programs Director falls under this umbrella through public programming centered on architecture, history, historic preservation, and conservation, as well as institutional outreach toward communities both large and small.

As a public historian, I am used to telling people that defining the field remains tricky. Just as anyone working to use or reuse pieces of the built environment may be a preservationist, anyone using proper methodological processes, interpreting primary and secondary sources, and drawing on wider contexts to create content for varied audiences may serve as a public historian. However, some recent scholars have worked to define public history as a practice. In her work on the early history of National Parks and public history as a profession, Denise Meringolo explains that public history retains its earliest roots in historic preservation. Mid-nineteenth century elite, white women formed the core of the preservation community through the establishment of organizations like the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association [1]. In his recent textbook exploring the field, Thomas Cauvin explains that public history emerged professionally during the 1970s. Practitioners initially defined “public history” as history practiced outside of the academy. However, this definition lacks the context of working inside and alongside of the academy out in the public. Cauvin concludes that while public history remains hard to define, “We may all become public historians, but it requires training and awareness of the challenges we can face while working in and for the public” [2]. Like defining oneself as a preservationist working in any capacity to reuse the built environment, defining public history remains in the eye of the beholder. After an AARCH outing, each participant becomes a preservationist and gains the insight to better understand the past in a wider context. They have the tools to explore deeper histories through architecture and become public historians themselves.

Public historian working in preservation are also tasked with mediating the balance between history and the landscape. In the case of an organization with more of a preservationist and advocacy bent like AARCH, promoting the preservation of place itself is as important as conveying the stories that structures convey. For me, negotiating the boundaries between interpreting accurate historical contexts through a particular structure or piece of the built environment is what public history is all about. Just as our expert hosts discuss on AARCH’s summer outings, the built environment in the Adirondacks provides a window in the story of human interaction with the environment. In an era of observable climate change across the globe, understanding the Adirondacks as a space where humans’ interaction with diverse landscapes and environments proves crucial. Providing a history to preservation practice in the Blue Line of the Adirondack Park places the region in a larger context of understanding how communities and environments continuously interact with one another. Built structures and nature exhibit long, interwoven histories across the North Country. Everyone within the Blue Line, both resident and visitor, can gain the ability to become public historians in their own communities through exploring historic structures, buildings, memorials, and other pieces of the built environment.

Ultimately, as a practicing public historian and preservationist, my goal remains to task attendees and Adirondack communities to research, experience, and share their own histories. Simultaneously, I hope to use history as a base for cultivating a strong preservation ethic among regional communities supporting adaptive reuse, green projects, and interpretive progress across the North Country. This is public history and preservation in action. Each borrows from the other. Just as public historians are often preservationists, preservationists practice public history.

Nolan Cool is currently Educational Programs Director at Adirondack Architectural Heritage (AARCH). This blog post is also cross-featured on AARCH’s blog at www.aarch.org/blog.

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[1] Denise D. Meringolo, Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History, (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), xiv; For more on early preservationist groups like to MVLA, see Patricia West’s Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (1999).

[2] Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook in Practice, (New York: Routledge, 2016), 10-11.