My thoughts on week 15 readings

This week’s e-articles addressed the still nebulous response of the public history profession to the internet, despite the more than two decades which this technology has existed for. Joshua Brown’s piece made interesting points about the dichotomy between database-like interconnectivity versus narrative storylines in electronic history media. His observation on the difficulty of producing commercially viable historical e-media like the Who Built America project reminded me of our in class discussion two weeks ago on history in video games. Modern consumers of video game-like electronic media such as the Lost Museum Flash application are used to an ever increasing level of sophistication as the electronic media industry evolves, making it very difficult for academic projects with limited funding to compete for popular attention. This is likely to continue to be a problem of “popular history” types of electronic media.

            Both Cohen and Brennan and Kelly deal with the difficulty of documenting, archiving, and sharing episodes of recent history in the digital era. I appreciated Cohen’s observations about the paradox of digital media simultaneously expanding the range of documentary evidence of a historical event, and threatening the survival of that evidence by the media’s fickle nature. Brennan and Kelly’s article was also interesting in its exploration of people’s hesitation to utilize an electronic archive that discussed recent history. After reading Archive Stories, this hesitation is understandable, if unfortunate. Politics, in the broadest sense of the word, is always present in archives of any type. This observation is simply much more obvious in easily accessible archives that are committed to incidents of recent history, when the politics are still “hot.” The fear that one’s personal contribution to an archive might be picked instantaneously by any of a limitless number of bloggers and then disseminated to the entire internet in a radically re-contextualized manner is reasonable. One can only hope that people realize this is the risk of sharing such content in a democratic institution such as the internet, and will have the courage to contribute in spite of it.    

My thoughts on the readings for week 13

This week’s readings deliberately blurred the line between “public” and “popular” history by considering the medium of historical films. Glassberg’s study of public reactions to Ken Burns’ The Civil War was extremely interesting, and went to further illustrate his main contention that history serves the American public in ways that academic historians often fail to recognize. Like the rest of Sense of History, this chapter left me feeling conflicted about the desirability of what Glassberg describes. Does it matter that The Civil War does not address the thorny racial issues of the antebellum and reconstruction eras as well as it could? I would like to hear Glassberg debate James and Lois Horton on this point. That said, I think it is a little ridiculous to compare The Civil War with Birth of a Nation as some academic critics did.

I also had mixed feelings regarding Michael Frisch’s article, although for different reasons. Unlike The Civil War I have never seen Vietnam: A Television History, so I had no frame of reference for evaluating Frisch’s commentary. Nevertheless, I felt that some of Frisch’s basic criticism of the public use of oral history was troubling. Why does Frisch claim that there is not much “critical self-consciousness of what oral history is?” This is manifestly not the case, even in 1990. As far as I could see, all of the issues which Frisch raises about oral history have been dealt with even in the literature on oral history we have read as part of this class. I suspect that Frisch’s real discomfort comes not from the utilization of oral history, but from the fact that Vietnam does not employ a blatant interpretative narrative, giving the audience the opportunity to apply their own meanings to the events under discussion. Again, I think an academic debate between Glassberg and Frisch would be interesting.

My Thoughts on the Readings for Week 12:

Oral History and Public Memories was another excellent introduction to a subfield of public history. I liked the editor’s premise that oral history and the academic discipline of memory studies ought to collaborate more since their communities of practice are very similar. Of the individual chapters, my favorite was probably the very first one by David Neufeld. Not only does it bring out the special dynamics of oral history as opposed to the more traditional textual historical approach favored by the Canadian Park Service, it also gets to some of the core difficulties of the modern movement towards including the perspective of marginalized groups in historical accounts. What should be done when the perspective of these groups is so radically different from one’s own that it cannot be integrated within the same framework, in this case western science? The idea of presenting “two cultures side by side” is better than letting the dominant culture to continue to dominate the historical narrative, but this approach also raises questions about how cultural reconciliation can take place in a context of separation.

Another overriding theme of the book is the importance of oral history as unmitigated source material. Nothing is more effective in combating stereotypes than listening to the direct experiences of actual, complex human beings, irrespective of how trustworthy such contributions are as objective facts. Riki Van Boeschoten exemplified this in his fantastic observations about student interactions with Albanian immigrants in Greece. The parallels with our own country are starkly obvious. The same observation occurred to me when I listened to my Studs Terkel interview. I heard a 1968 interview with Jimmy White, a former Chicago gang leader and high school dropout. However, the majority of the interview related to White’s observations on the education system, his appreciation of poetry, and beliefs about society, not areas of interest traditionally associated with street gangs. Studs Terkel is amazing.

My Thoughts on Week 11 Readings:

            Archive Stories brings to light how archives, which many historians consider to be the most dry and tedious subsection of our profession, are in fact dynamic institutions where power struggles are played out, memories are unearthed or buried, and encounters between diverse individuals occur frequently. Chapters I particularly liked included Jeff Sahadeo’s troubling revelations about the legacy of soviet era historical censorship and the stark disparities between first world researchers and third world archivists in modern Uzbekistan. I also liked Helena Pohlandt-McCormick’s discussion of heavy handed government destruction of documents in South Africa and Craig Robertson’s frustrating experiences trying to access an exclusive niche of the supposedly open and public National Archives of the US.

            Although the stories compiled by Burton were unfailingly interesting and thought provoking, coming as they do from professors with extensive writing experience, I felt the collection would have been better had it included contributions by archivists themselves. Having worked in two archives myself, I can confidently state that even the most observant researcher only sees a select aspect of any archive. Hence the wonder shown by authors such as Pohlandt-McCormick when permitted to access the shelved collections themselves. How would the archivist in attendance have told the story of Pohlandt-McCormick’s “discovery” of the shelved political posters? An inside perspective or two would have enriched the collection. That said, Archive Stories is a very interesting and engaging work that would be of interests both to current and future professors and current and future archivists.