NEMA 2015: “The Language of Museums”

“…The stories we craft, and the stories visitors to exhibitions both bring to, and craft from, their encounters, can expand empathy and create transformative experiences, provide new insight and catalyze action.” —Marla Miller, Professor, UMass History

The New England Museum Association (NEMA) held its annual conference in Portland, ME, on November 4th-6th. This year’s theme was “the language of museums,” and many sessions explored the importance of communication. Students, faculty, and alumni from the UMass Amherst Public History program attended the conference, and several of us maintained an active presence in the conference’s Twitter conversation, #NEMA2015 (click the link to see our tweets on Storify).

UMass Amherst Public History faculty, alumni, and students at NEMA 2015.

Many sessions that we attended focused on making museums inclusive spaces that combat systems of oppression, but there were also sessions on visitor engagement and photographing museum collections. Other members of the UMass Amherst Public History cohort attended sessions on objects and emotion, creating empathetic experiences, legislative advocacy, statewide collaborations, having difficult conversations in museum workplaces, and graphic design.

Here are some reflections from faculty and students on #NEMA2015:

Reflections on Writing the History of the Holyoke Civic Symphony Orchestra

By Dr. Jane Rausch, Professor Emerita, Department of History

In 2017 the Holyoke Civic Symphony will celebrate its 50^th anniversary. As a non-profit organization composed of 60 mostly non professional musicians who come together once a week to rehearse, it has survived, thanks to generous support from Holyoke Community College (HCC) and local businesses. The organization has also thrived because of the efforts of highly motivated instrumentalists and Boards of Directors. These individuals were determined to provide opportunities for people in Holyoke and the surrounding communities both to play and to hear high quality performances of symphonic works of music.

Science (and Math!) for the People

By Emily T.H. Redman, Assistant Professor, Department of History

This past weekend I had the pleasure of seeing a year-long project come to fruition: the Science for the People (SftP) conference here at UMass Amherst. The conference, aimed to bring together participants from the 1970s radical activism group — alongside academic historians, scientists, and young scholars — explored the early origins of SftP and its lasting legacy, with a healthy dose of looking toward future reform, advocacy, and activism. I was, by the start of the conference, quite eager to see how it would unfold, which speakers would make an impression, and the overall zeitgeist of the event.

As a historian of science, I am interested in the ways in which science interacts with the larger culture. Science, of course, is inextricably part of that culture, but one that shares an interesting position — many find it inaccessible, imagine it to exist within impenetrable ivory towers (or worse, lock-and-keyed federal laboratories), and be driven by moneyed or powered interests that remain concealed. Science represents a stark duality of both fear and promise. Just as we look toward science and technology to solve our problems — ranging from cancer cures to prosthetic limbs to cleaning our oceans to just about everything — we also have a long history of deeply mistrusting science. At best, science is the pinnacle of human achievement; at worst it’s our Frankenstein, set into motion by our collective hubris, sure to rear its monstrous head and wreak havoc on any comfortable intimacy we might have had with scientific inquiry and practice.

The Untold History Beneath “12 Years”

By Manisha Sinha, Professor of Afro-American Studies, Adjunct Professor of History

Recently Manisha Sinha wrote an article for the New York Daily News on the Hollywood film version of Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave. Due to the continued popularity of the film after its Oscar night success, Sinha’s argument seems all the more poignant. Read her take on the story, the film, and their lessons.

Relevant Links:

12 Years a Slave

David Ruggles Center

The Counterrevolution of Slavery, by Manisha Sinha

A Distorted Haiti, or the Real American Horror Story

This is the second in a series of entries from the UMass community celebrating Black History Month. How do Americans perceive blacks of the international community? Does U.S. popular culture reveal deep-seated prejudice against countries like Haiti? What does this mean for those of African and Afro-Caribbean descent living in the U.S.?

Julio Capó, Jr., Assistant Professor, Department of History and Commonwealth Honors College

We went to the movies the other night, where I let my partner choose the film. After all, the real entertainment for me would be eating a whole tub of popcorn in the comforting and seemingly non-judgmental darkness of the theater. Buttery kernel goodness in hand, we sat down to watch Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues. The movie, starring Will Ferrell, is a comedic sequel about the life and times of an incompetent — but often well-intentioned — news anchor ignorant to the real news happening around him and throughout the world. A mildly enjoyable film, one scene in particular left me feeling icky. At one point, protagonist Ron Burgundy tells his son that the only thing he has to fear in life is Haitian vodou. “That…will mess you up,” he warned. To avoid danger, steer clear from Haiti.

Fast forward a week or so to when I saw the season finale of the highly popular cable show, American Horror Story: Coven. The plot features a coven of witches struggling to both survive and assimilate in modern-day New Orleans. Most of the coven seemed to trace its ancestry to the witch trials of 17th-century Salem. A subplot, however, introduced viewers to the world of black Creole vodou. Actress Angela Bassett, who hasn’t seemed to age at all since she got her groove back as Stella in the 1990s, plays the notorious historical figure Marie Laveau. Today, Laveau’s story is more myth than reality. Her 1881 obituary, for example, called her the “Queen of the Voudou” and she immediately became the stuff of legend. On the show, Bassett’s character struck a deal with the devil, so to speak, to make her immortal. Except it wasn’t the devil. It was a frightening manifestation of the vodou crossroads spirit, Papa Legba. In exchange for the “gift” of immortality, Legba requires that Laveau make a human sacrifice: an “innocent,” most often found in the uncorrupted souls of children.

Sochi Olympics: “No different from the Super Bowl”?

Just in time for the opening events, Altstadt explores the darker side of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi.

By Audrey L. Altstadt, Department of History

“Outside the stadium on Super Bowl Sunday,” said a man in the audience, “there will be security police.” They won’t allow protests near the stadium. If you put up protest signs, they will rip them down. Protestors might get hauled away in police vans. And everyone will get searched to enter. So “I don’t see the difference,” he told me during a recent presentation about Russian human rights violations in connection with the upcoming Winter Olympics in Sochi.

If one takes a sufficiently narrow view of Super Bowl security and Olympic Game security, several similarities and demands stand out and could lead to the conclusion that “there’s no difference.” Both events entail crowd control in an era of world-wide terrorism. Both demand the facilitation of the needs of paying guests for seats, food, trinkets, and shouting room. Ensuring that the game or games take place is, of course, the top priority. But to suggest there is no difference between crowd control in New Jersey and human rights violations in Sochi is to ignore decades and centuries of the rule of law and divergent status of individual rights.

On the Passing of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

By: John Higginson, Department of History

South Africa and the world have lost a great moral compass with the passing of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela last week. How many sitting politicians or corporate executives would voluntarily cut their annual salaries in half, for example? On can scarcely imagine a “negotiated settlement” ending South Africa’s last apartheid government or the first truly inclusive election in the country’s history in April 1994, without Mandela’s measured but steady tread toward the seat of power. Once F. W. De Klerk’s government was compelled to release Mandela from Viktor Verster Prison in February 1990 and to lift the ban on the African National Congress (ANC) and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), the cruel political certainties apparently collapsed. However, even more dangerous ambiguities and uncertainties took their place.

Mandela’s “rainbow nation” was never a given, even though the ANC’s leadership, with Mandela guiding from the rear, avoided a bloody civil war and won an election. The Afrikanervolksfront, which was composed of former generals from the General Staff of the South African Defense Force (SADF) and the leadership of proto-fascist organizations such as the Afrikanerweerstand beweging (AWB), was fully capable and willing to prosecute a devastating civil war. Under the leadership of General Constand Viljoen and others far to the right of him, plans for a conflagration on this scale swung into high gear after the assassination of popular anti-apartheid leader Chris Hani in April 1993. Even after future president Mandela invited Viljoen to tea at his home and persuaded him that he should run for a seat in the prospective parliament, others went forward with a plan for a protracted military campaign.

John Singer Sargent Watercolors at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

By Rob Weir, Visiting Professor of History

This post is one of Weir’s daily entires from his blog on culture, music, and politics. The John Singer Sargent Watercolors show will be at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts through January 20, 2014.

I know someone who teaches at a private school because it supports his folk music career, a yoga teacher who used to pay the bills through editing, and a landscape painter whose paychecks come from illustration work. As songwriter Charlie King once put it, “Our lives are more than our work/And our work is more than our jobs.” Keep that in mind when you venture to Boston to see John Singer Sargent’s watercolors.

And venture forth you should. There are nearly 100 works he produced between 1902-11 and there’s not a dud in the lot. These images are John Singer Sargent as few of us think of him. Sargent (1856-1925) was renowned as the portrait artist of choice for the Gilded Age elite, and small wonder — few artists of his day matched his eye or technique in oil and few in all of art history had his mastery of painting white on white or black on black. So good was Sargent that our mental images of late nineteenth-century upper crust Boston are largely conjured from paintings hung upon the walls of the city’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA).

The Takeaway: Relief, Democracy and Corruption in the Philippines

Featuring Richard T. Chu, Associate Professor of History

Despite the massive relief efforts underway in the Philippines in the aftermath of last week’s typhoon, the situation remains grim for thousands of displaced survivors. Richard Chu was a guest on The Takeaway on Tuesday, November 12th, shedding light on the historical relationship between the United States and the Philippines, the current political situation in the country, and how these will affect recovery. According to Chu, “I would predict that after a few months [of relief] the same story happens again. We will still be embedded in the culture of corruption.”

Click here to listen to the show.

For more on this subject, read Chu’s November 18th article on The History News Network.

The U.S. National WWII Memorial and the 2013 Federal Shutdown: Politics, Culture, and Public History

Courtesy of Amanda Tewes

By: Samuel J. Redman, Assistant Professor of History

In the days following the October 2013 government shutdown, streams of
veterans passed through barricades and walked through the grounds of
the National World War II Memorial. The memorial is managed by the
National Park Service, a federal agency mostly shuttered during the
recent political budgetary battles that led to the shutdown of the
federal government. Students in a recent meeting of Introduction to
Public History — an undergraduate course here at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst — considered how historical monuments and
memorials emerge as political tools shaped by the evolving contexts
and discourses of the day. The National WWII Memorial, students
suggested, became the most prominent flashpoint in the political
rhetoric surrounding the recent federal shutdown and budgetary crisis
because “The Greatest Generation” and Second World War are often
positioned as nostalgic icons of the United States of the mid-century.
The post-war era, popular memory suggests, was marked by the nation’s
global ascendancy to world superpower. The era also represented
perceived social and political unity, economic affluence, and
confidence in government to confront challenges and solve problems. In
a way, these ideas become manifest in the memorial to the war that
sits prominently — indeed, erected as a tangible symbol of
remembrance — on the National Mall.

Historical monuments and other sites of cultural memory such as
battlefields, historic houses, and historical reenactments
occasionally emerge as important contact zones between contesting
factions of our society. These factions work to cloak their own
political sentiments in charged rhetoric about the past. But why the
National World War II Memorial, I asked our group, and not one of the
many other monuments or historical site in Washington D.C. or beyond?
Other locations, such as the Liberty Bell and battlefield and massacre
sites have also witnessed heated contests over the nature of their
memorialization in recent years — what, then, imbues a particular
monument with performative symbolism in a particular time? Referring
to recent events on the National Mall, students pointed to the visual
or aesthetic appeal of the WWII monument as an relatively prominent
and open space. Also important are the advanced ages of the veterans
allowing for greater emotional connection, the proximity of the
monument to Capitol Hill where important political decisions are made,
and the nature of the media spectacle as possible influencing factors.