Wrap Up

This is the last blog post I'll post for my public history class this semester. It's been a new experience to be immersed within the field and academic side of public history, and I'm thankful for the hands-on nature of this class. Throughout the semester, I've learned many different things about what goes into local history and the importance of it. Before taking this class, I didn't really consider the value of small town history. I also appreciate the opportunity to learn about Goshen, Indiana because it is a place that I consider a partway home, but know very little about because most of my time is spent on my college campus. It's great to begin to understand the complications and issues that arise in Goshen and also the small marks of beauty that local history can show.

My favorite part of this class was exploring the Indiana Room in the Goshen Public Library. It was a lot of work to do the initial research, but after a while I found joy in the repetition of looking through the old books and directories that offered their information to me. To some degree, I also enjoyed researching my house and synthesizing the information that arose.

I learned a lot about archives, collections, and ownership rights of artifacts. I actually enjoyed the 'Nearby History' book because it outlined great ways not only to display history, but to do it as well. I wish we could have talked more about public history professions and had a more realistic idea of what it means to apply and work in a  public history sphere outside of a typical museum setting. We could have practiced cover letters, resumes and how to find out about those types of jobs and internships because ultimately in public history, experience is the real teacher.

I really think that this class could be an awesome May Term class because then it would allow time to travel to more museums and experience archives. I'm a little curious why we didn't spend more time in the Mennonite Church USA archives because they are on campus. As an off campus May Term class, more field trips with more opportunity for research and different kind of exhibits could be explored. I would have loved to go to the Natural History museum in Chicago and I think it would have been more beneficial than Conner Prairie for a field trip. As we've stated before, this class would be a great class for a May term or even a fall term.

I took public history because I'm considering interpretation work for a career, although it will be more of a natural history/environmental education path. Overall, I thought the class was helpful, but did not change my mind either way in terms of what kind of career I'd like to do. I do think it will help on a resume though. I learned a lot and am generally happy I took the class.

Anglo Pioneers and ECHM

Today we visited the Elkhart County Historical Museum. I've gone there a number of times for my junior seminar and also for this public history class, but today we were "set loose" to explore and critique. ECHM has some good exhibits and some great small-town heart, but I couldn't help but to think of ways that it could be improved.

As a typical local museum, ECHM is small and most of the exhibits do not have much interpretation to go along with them. I did notice some good steps in adding to the educational aspect, such as dress up bins and interactive cards. I understand the struggles of the curators working to please the board of directors as well as the Elkhart community that are hesitant to change. What if there was an "I-Spy" list for each room? That would encourage children and adults to really look around the room. It's an idea that works well with the type of collections and displays that ECHM has in place now, and adds the next step of interpretation to the exhibits.

Natalie and I briefly visited each exhibit except for the train room and the Partly Dave exhibit. We spent  a few minutes looking at the geological display in the Native American collection and wondered why there were samples from Wyoming, Utah, and other far away states. We were impressed with the samples that were from Indiana, however. I don't think that Elkhart County Historical Museum has the most accurate or best way of representing the Native Americans or the Anglo people that followed them.

The pioneer representation of the museum is based mostly on objects and less on interpretation, as with the rest of the museum. While it's nice to have the freedom to interpret exhibits how you will, I felt like more direction could be given for each room. The two downstairs exhibits, The Cottage and The Schoolhouse both had one board that gave some interpretation. And it didn't leave the Native American's out.

Overall, ECHM is probably doing some good things with the community and as an archive and local history center they are excellent. As an interpretive museum, they could use some work. I think the curators and managers have some big ideas and I'm excited to see the direction of the museum in the future.

"The Indiana Way" on Native Peoples

The first three sections of  The Indiana Way: a state history by James H. Madison explore Indiana before it was a state, dealing with Native Americans before the white settlers arrived and their relations with them after they arrived. The first chapter explored the native people before Europe had settled North America. Some of the tribes in the Indiana area were the Potawatomis and the Miamis. Madison notes that there is not a lot of archaeological evidence about the Paleo-Indian people (up to 8000 B.C.), but that there definitely were people in the area. The four prehistoric traditions each increase with more information about the prehistoric peoples and the last one, titled the Mississippian Tradition (A.D. 900-1600) has the most information due to recency (5). 

A few years prior to the American Revolution was The French and Indian War fought between the British and French colonists in America. The Native American people played a big part in the war through trading and economic agreements. The French had a more consistent relationship with the Potawatomis and the Miamis through the fur trade, but it was not necessarily nonviolent. The British did not have as great an opportunity to form a relationship with the Indians because of their victory in the French and Indian War.

Madison acknowledges that his history is not a reference book and that he has tried to include both the glorified and nonglorified parts of Indiana's history (xiv). This non-glorification comes out strongly when Madison writes about the relationship between the white people and the Native Americans during the end of the 18th century. Since "Indians did not fully understand or share American concepts of land ownership and transfer of title to land," Harrison was able to exploit and take advantage of them in order to take their land (38). He used the conflict in between tribes and within tribes to coalesce them into change. Along with that, missionaries and federal agents tried to 'civilize' and 'assimilate' the Indians that they encountered with harsh treatment. As a result, there were strong anti-anglo feelings in the Native American nations and those feelings translated into war acts. William Wells was a Indian-American translator who was born in Kentucky but was kidnapped by Indians at a young age. When given the chance to return to his Kentucky family, he refused and stayed with the Indian tribe as a part of their community and militia. Later in life, he translated between the government and the Indian nation, but was not fully trusted on either side.

In the Indiana area, slavery was a controversial issue. Prominent people had held slaves for years, and in the early 1800's, Governor George Harrison pushed for the legalization of slavery in the Indiana area. In 1805, a bill was passed that legalized indentured servitude, but not slavery. The loophole through this was that the indentured servants would have sentences longer than their lifespan, making them slaves (49). The Quakers in southeastern Indiana were against slavery. When Indiana became a state in 1816, slavery was abolished except for already existing servants/slaves, and then that policy was overruled in the early 1820's.

My reaction the The Indiana Way is that it is quite a bit of information crammed into one book, but that's to be expected in a state history. State history books tend to glorify the state's past, usually because they are written by people from that state, or because the authors care about the state. I'm happy to see that Madison addresses his own bias in the introduction and writes in a way (so far) that is not overly romantic nor overly critical. 

particular and universal -- how they relate to our final exhibit

In Nearby History we read two chapters: 'Research, Writing, and Leaving a Record' and 'Linking the Particular and the Universal.' From the first chapter, I found a few things that I thought related to our public history final project, although most of them were more helpful for when I consider my research plan for my undergraduate thesis. I appreciated the emphasis on organization and back-up files, simply because those are two things that I don't excel at when I am researching. The authors suggest different methods of organizing notes and research as well as explain how to leave your work behind in archives, libraries, or other types of repositories. I think for the exhibit project, a folder or binder as well as a google document between our group would be sufficient for notes, but for larger papers like my thesis, I plan to use color coded index cards for categorizing sources  and their citations along with a 3 ring binder for drafts, peer-reviews, hand-written and typed notes along with anything else that I need.

The second chapter, 'Linking the Particular and the Universal' was especially helpful as I consider our final project. For the exhibit, we plan on juxtaposing particular pieces of Goshen history with broad American cultural movements. This chapter speaks almost directly to what we plan on doing. By considering the 'new social history,' academic and public historians can come together to research and give a voice to the marginalized people in society. The authors cited a few paragraphs worth of studies, and there were two that interested me. First, was Philip J. Greven Jr.'s Four Generations: Population, land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts where he "used vital, town probate and deed records to determine family characteristics and land-ownership patterns (235)." This is exactly what our house history project and our final project entail!  The second part I liked was an acknowledgement that Native-American communities are indeed worthwhile to study and deserve a detailed investigation concerning European displacement (237).

In the latter half of the chapter, the authors address the authors address issues of geography and community as well as social-economics, especially in relation to immigration. They address also institutions, postmodernism, and the importance of family history to local history. Our final exhibit project will hopefully be a combination of the small, local, 'new social' history with the broad American history. I believe that 'new social history' has been the combining factor between public historians and academic historians. While they may approach it with a different viewpoint, the understanding that the marginalized and underrepresented people deserve a part of history is a step in the right direction for the grand scheme of human history.  It will be really interesting to see how little Goshen relates to big America. I'm excited to pursue our project further.

ethics and public history

Public history, as a relatively new field, means that the ethical codes written for them are also relatively new. While I read through the codes of conduct for the SAA, NCPH, AAM, and OAH, I was also curious about what the American Historical Society had to say about ethics. I perused the code, focusing primarily on the Public Realm section. From my experience in the public history class, I thought that the AHS would be ultimately a little apprehensive to accept public historians as worthwhile to the field of history, but from their website, it seems that this is not so. Perhaps the scholars involved in the AHS are apprehensive of public history as a field, but I think that ultimately, being a part of the field of history requires general respect.

From AHS Public Realm:

 "for when historians communicate with a wider public, they must represent not just a particular interpretation or body of facts, but the best practices of the discipline of history itself. This means they must inevitably walk a tightrope in balancing their desire to present a particular point of view with their responsibility to uphold the standards and values that underpin their professional authority as historians." 

The main point of this excerpt is to display that public historians walk a fine line ethically. As we have learned, part of public history is social activism, at least to some degree. Presenting and interpreting information in the public sphere is a different game than writing a monograph. You can't close your office door to the public as a public historian.

The codes of ethics from the organizations that we looked at were generally related. They differed in the specifics, as is expected because the organizations have different objectives. The NCPH lays out what the ideal public historian will uphold, ethically and the job of the public historian. The SAA Code of Ethics focuses on professional relationships, judgement, authenticity, security and protection, access and use, privacy, trust. The code of ethics for museums focuses on the display, preparation, collections, and governance of those museums. For the Oral History code, more focus is on the process of interviewing because interviewees are living human beings. Oral History involves consent, old material does not. Interviewees are of equal authority as interviewers. Oral History Ethics gives specific outlines of how to go about following the ethical rules. Other codes do not give such suggestions, just relatively vague outlines.

Overall, I think the individual codes were pretty similar in their objectives. The main issues raised in the articles and in the ethics codes are those of representation and respect as well as professionalism and public interest. For a public historian, it is important to represent history in an accurate, but interesting and thought-provoking way.

Immigrant Teens Tell Their Story

Immigrant Teens Tell Their Story is an article written by Douglas Simpson published in Exhibitionist that explains the process of creating a student-curated exhibit in the Newton History Museum in suburban Boston, MA. The idea came from the acknowledgment of immigrant population in Newton as well as the desire to expand on recent immigrants. The museum prompted the idea of a teenage-curated exhibit to draw in younger viewers and identify personal stories. Through an application process, they chose seven individuals representing Hong Kong, Russia, Korea, and Mexico. Those students worked for 6 months with museum curators to design and produce an exhibit. The budget was fairly small, so the team thought of ideas to represent their ideas in a low-cost way. Cut outs of each individual were juxtaposed with seven exhibit cases, full of personal items, photographs, and narrated by text. In order to give access to people of each nationality, translations were provided in a hand-out exhibit guide.

This article is almost exactly what I think we need when considering the East Lincoln Crossroads. A small budget, individual, story-telling exhibit. It's even about immigration. Working with a small exhibit in a local history context, it's important to have an exhibit theme that is outlined by personal narratives that the community can connect to. In Goshen, I think this theme is latino immigration. They kept the exhibit simple because they did not have the funds to do otherwise, but I like it that way. It gives the focus to the individual stories. I also like that this article is about a student-curated exhibit, because that also directly correlates to our own project.

Simpson, Douglas. “Immigrant Teens Tell Their Story,” NAME Exhibitionist, Fall, 2009, 51-54.

finally, some understanding.

For the final project, we are doing an exhibit project. I think the best way that oral history can contribute to our exhibit proposal is through digital media and through displaying text and photographs. If we conducted interviews with people that live in the neighborhood, we could film them and create a video that could be a part of the final exhibit. The interviews and the people themselves could be a prominent part of the neighborhood. Depending on the information that surfaces through our research, oral history could definitely be utilized as a tool for a physical exhibit.

I was interested in looking through Jan Shetler's Mara Cultural Heritage Digital Library, a project where she is digitizing her personal research so many people, including her interviewees, are able to access it. but the link we had was corrupt. More on that later.

Through reading the chapter on oral history and unpublished documents in Nearby History, I came to better understand the process of interviewing. I feel well introduced to the unpublished documents and the basics of interviews, but I have never actually conducted one. Joe Springer also spoke about the interview process with his work on the Veteran's History Project.

As I think through it more, I am excited to see what my classmates have uncovered with their own house histories. Perhaps it will finally lead to a 'big picture' understanding of the neighborhood. We have talked about a large Latino presence, but I have not seen any real data supporting that in my own research. I wonder how that data can be accessed? I'm sure that there are tools, but I haven't stumbled upon them yet. I think the thing that I am lacking from this research is a story. I'm not as interested in a name, or an occupation as I am in a story. Who were these people? How did they live their lives? Who's lives did they touch and who touched theirs? What were their heartaches, their happiness, and their life's purpose? Those are the things that I am looking forward to teasing out further through this project. Maybe with some more work it can get to be a little bit more personal.

A section from Nearby History, page 113:

"'...the new social history,' that is, the history of the nonelite, of men and women in ordinary walks of life. Some individuals among them stood out from others, of course, and they should receive the attention they deserve, but historians of the nearby past should not ignore the opportunity to draw composite sketches of anonymous folks who though the years have played important but unheralded and so far unrecorded parts in the communities, institutions, and families to which they belonged."

I think I finally understand.

oral history

Conducting and oral interview takes skill. It isn't enough to simply walk into a room, sit down, and ask questions. Questionnaires must be created prior to the interview, the recording devices must be fully functional, there must be consent forms, and the relationship of the interviewer/interviewee must be kind/respectful among many other things. Conducting an oral interview isn't like going to an archive and reading sources; interviews are with living sources, human beings. Unless of course you're interviewing a dog, in which case, I commend you on your canine translation skills. So many delicate factors go into oral history, and it's important to know the rules, social conduct, and procedural factors.

The Veteran's Project seems fascinating. It is interesting that it's a collection of interviews with people of all ranks, civilian and veteran. Oral history research requires good interview technique, a clear research strategy, should try to obtain as much personal memories as possible, and to acknowledge that as an interviewer you are both an 'insider' and an 'outsider.' The reading from Public History by Diaz and Russell, Oral Historians: Community Oral History and the Cooperative Ideal, has to do with the processes of oral history. The part I found the most interesting was about oral history as a collective entity, dealing with administration, partnerships, and community. As Diaz and Russell say, the oral historian 'wears many hats.' The oral historian is a link between the public, other professionals, and the project itself. I think sometimes it's easy to forget how important oral history can be. It gives voice to those who may not have the ability to speak for themselves. It can often be 'history from below' or 'common history'. This is a lesson I need to learn from my house history project because it isn't a spectacular house. It's an ordinary one, and there is intrinsic value in it, just as there is value in a grand old house. Life happened in my house just as it happened in the big houses. So while a house history project isn't oral history, the two types of history share a goal; to tell the story of the minority, the common person.

The Goshen College CIIE research uses studies, oral interviews, academic data, and other types of sources and forms those sources into research projects involving latino people in higher education. It's interesting for Goshen particularly because there is such a large latino presence in the city and in the public schools. I really had no idea that Goshen College was doing this type of research, and I think it's pretty cool. It also makes me a little ashamed that I walk by the CIIE office every time I get my mail, and I have never known what happens in there. This connects to oral history because it requires project grants, research and interviews, and also happens to be a kind of 'minority' history.

Digital Archives

The 9/11 Digital Archive is a powerful tool of collecting memories, images, oral history, and recollections of a massive event in recent history. The site, described by James T. Sparrow, is simple and easy to use. The portal format lets users and contributors easily navigate the site. Besides the surface level organization, the search bars are helpful to find a broad subject of topics/words. I don't think that I have really ever looked at a digital archive before. The benefit of something like this is that it can collect so many people's memories at their own discretion. However, it takes a lot of planning and careful consideration from the authors of the website about how to collect these objects. Using an open source format helps to ensure that the sources will be attainable in many years, once the format and coding of our technology has advanced past recognition.

Public historians have to adapt to this new format of attaining and collecting information. Public digital archives place a lot of value on the individual's experience. The people who create these archives have a responsibility to the historical profession but also to the public who submits and reads the content of the archives. The work of the historian in the future will become more digitized and less physical documents. Interpreting online sources will become a prevalent part of primary sources involved in research. With advancing technology, historians will need to be trained to discern between fiction and fact, and without contextual information always, they will have to rely on their training and competence to figure out how to portray the information they read. It is certainly a changing profession.

On a different note, visiting the Elkhart County Historical Museum again and then talking with Matt Schuld gave me some insight to how exhibits are set up and how to design one. It will definitely be a challenging project to figure out what parts of the East Lincoln neighborhood we want to include in an exhibit and how to represent them.

photographs, artifacts, and internships

As someone who has spent many, many, hours in a darkroom herself, I loved Chapter Seven on photographs. Because I have a relatively complete understanding of what it means to create and preserve an image from film, I found it fascinating to read about how museums use photographs. I was lucky (and talented) enough to take four semesters of film photography in high school, working from the beginning with a standard 35mm SLR film camera, developing my own film, using negatives, enlarging the images, and developing the image onto photo paper. After the first introductory class, I began experimenting with more complex processes like medium and large format, box cameras, pinholes, brownie cameras, holga cameras, and post-processing editing in the darkroom as well as diving into digital photography and digital post-processing. I have an eye and an innate love for photographs and the processes that create them. A photograph will captivate my mind for much longer than other types of artifacts do. Interpreting an image takes a lot of work and a trained eye. I had never thought about the complications that come with digitally storing images. Hard drives and CD-ROMs are fairly unreliable.

Artifacts have lives. The journey from being created from the hands of a human, being used and handled, to eventual preservation and being labeled an 'artifact' signifies in itself the importance of preservation. Artifacts can be living examples of the experience that someone has had with that object. I thought it was great that the artifact chapter mentioned Conner Prairie because we will get to visit that in March.

Upon viewing Nina Simon's blog, I was struck by the guest blog by Michelle Millar Fisher on unpaid internships in the museum/history/arts field. Millar Fisher argues that unpaid internships are unethical within the field and that interns should be compensated somehow for their work. I agree. Reading the comments from the post, the student voices stood out. Student interns shared that in an unpaid internship for college credit, the student is paying sometimes up to four or five thousand dollars to work 25 hours/week for free. And that is just not financially responsible for many students, who may also be balancing a part-time job to help pay for tuition. I fit this mold. I am a full time student, work 20 hours/week part-time, and I am a student-athlete. I would be financially unable to give up 20 hours of paid work for 20 hours of unpaid work. I am an athlete, partially because I enjoy the sport, and partially because my athletic scholarship helps me pay to come to school. An unpaid internship is simply not an option for me.

Unpaid internships are a form of discrimination against minorities and poor students. Since we are often unable to pay for travel and living expenses, we are denied opportunities for amazing internships that would further our careers. It is unethical and unfair of the profession to hire unpaid labor. Just because these students are unable to afford to participate in an unpaid internship does not make them any less hard-working, committed, or intelligent.

Millar Fisher suggests these options for a national Museum Internship Ethics Charter that would make three core promises to any museum intern:

1. a stipend 
2. a clear written statement of expectations given at the beginning of their internship 
3. a final face-to-face evaluation with the internship mentor at the end of the internship 

Maybe someday, hopefully soon, these ideas or others can be implemented and more students can have access to great internships.

a combination of topics/museum curation

This week was a week full of public history. I tried on multiple occasions to work on my house history project. The guide is step by step, and I've done a lot up to Step 5. We drove to the Elkhart Offices, only to find that they closed at 4pm and not 5pm. We were three minutes late because of bad roads. This was on a Thursday afternoon and because we missed the first part of the step, we had to cancel our plans to go to Bristol on Saturday, which Liz had never confirmed anyway. It was frustrating because I had made the plans to complete the research, but because of time and weather restrictions I wasn't able to, and now I feel like I'm further behind in my project than I want to be. Trying to accommodate office hours of 9-4 when you're a full time student takes a lot of planning, and when that planning goes awry, it makes things so complicated.

On Friday evening, Anastasia, Natalie, and I went to look at the Goshen Historical Museum. It was freezing outside, and so there weren't very many people around. We went inside around 7:45 and stayed for 25 minutes, looking around and asking questions. The museum, to be honest, really wasn't that impressive, although I did enjoy looking at the photography equipment and the massive safe that hasn't been moved in over 100 years. I felt as though some of the novelty of the museum was over my head because I'm not a Goshen local. To those who grew up in Goshen, I bet that the museum would be more interesting. The Goshen Historical Museum definitely fit the local history museum typical model. I didn't see any arrowheads, but there was a stained glass native american head.

I'm excited to go back to the Elkhart County Historical Museum and look at the exhibits, especially because my final project is the exhibit project. I think that the reading from Public History on museum curators has opened my eyes to how much work goes into a museum. I read that in local museums, the curator often does the job of many, and I thought of Liz, who is the collections curator at ECHM.

documentaries... true history?

In Public History this week, we read about public history and the arts. There were three readings, one from Public History and two journal articles: "Theatre: A Neglected Site of Public History?" and "Histories and the Public: Legacies of the Progressive Era." I will focus mostly on the chapter on film medium and documentaries. 

As a history major, one of the things that frustrates me the most is when I am telling someone about a subject that I am working on, and they say, "Oh I watched a documentary on that last week!" As if that makes them an immediate expert on the whole subject. Now, I love documentaries, don't get me wrong. More than once over Christmas break I spent the day on the couch with Blue Planet, Ken Burns' National Parks, a variety of climbing documentaries, and a bowl of ice cream. But I understand that watching those hour and a half long programs is not the final word on the subject. I have some training that allows me to watch those documentaries with a disciplined historical lens. One of the main distinctions between film and history is that history seeks the truth, while film seeks to appease the viewer. Film is made to be understandable and engaging by the general public. To some degree, public history does this also.  The two are not synonymous, but there are some pieces of overlap.

Some of the limitations of documentaries are these:

• It is often the only introduction to history that some people have
• Most viewers are not privy to the intricacies of historical debate and find the historical themes confusing or boring
• The filmmaker must address the historian's concern for historiographical context or framework
• They present historical analysis as static, which misrepresents the complexity of historical work
• The evidence can be skewed by oral reports and casting
• There is not always visual evidence to support the film's vision

Documentaries are films that have a historical story line and use historical evidence to tell that story. Historians and filmmakers have to collaborate equally to ensure that history is represented in an honest and compelling way. I think that it's good to introduce the general public into the world of history, so long as they remember that watching The History Channel doesn't make them a Civil War expert. There are a lot of lay historian's in America, who are passionate and love history, but aren't professionally trained. As with any representation of history, it's important to critique the sources and take it with a grain of salt. This is particularly true when the medium has an agenda such as film does.

“The historian takes the available evidence, evaluates its significance, and provides some contextual meaning and broader historiographic insight. The goal for the filmmaker, on the other hand, is to first and foremost engage the audience in the principle of the “suspension of disbelief”, i.e. to create a filmatic reality that allows the audience to believe a story as if it were true – whether or not the story is factually correct in the whole part 118."

In response to the other two articles, I just have a few thoughts. I don't think that theatre is an appropriate medium for history. There are wonderful plays, like John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath that accurately and emotionally convey the hardships of the Depression era, but those things aren't history in truth. It's the same artistic representation that is expressed in historic novels and movies. Ah, but isn't the point of history to represent it? To tell the story? I'm conflicted. I guess as a history discipline we have to strive for truth, and leave the art to others. 

I do believe that there is a way to actively, theatrically express history though, as the article suggests. Topics that are essential to public history such as "memory, identity, agency, archive/source, time and space, re-enactment, representation, and performance" are fantastic things to explore in theatre. I guess I'd say that I'm open to theatrical history, but I'd like to see it first hand. 

In the archives...

It seems like a lot happens in archives, even when nobody really knows it. Without this integral part of our society, historians and administrators alike would have a much harder time functioning. Archivists are like the hidden gems of information science, and I wouldn't call thems nerds, just enthusiastic information-buffs. To dedicate one's career to the preservation and care of information is a pretty cool thing, in my opinion.

Today's reading was out of Public History from the chapters, 'Archivists and Records Managers' and 'Administrators' as well as two public addresses from former Society of American Archivists (SAA) Presidents John A. Fleckner (1989-1999) and Steven L. Hensen (2001-2002). 

With the changing technology, the archival field has also changed. The introduction of computers and internet into everyday life has created a challenge for archives. Electronic data is easily lost to the black hole of cyberspace, and so it takes extra care to preserve it for future use. Electronic data also creates a larger amount of paper files that need to be housed in archives. The systems and formats for records needed to be completely redesigned to fit the new and changing information. Another challenge that archivists are facing is the lack of credibility (according to some) that their profession has. Graduate programs in library sciences and archival work have been on the rise, but that is a relatively new education path. In the past, archivists, like public historians, would have been trained by apprenticeship or not trained at all.

Administrators deal with a whole other realm of difficulties in their professions. Administrative positions can span across many disciplines, but in the field of public history, they prevail. In some situations, public history administrators will oversee a few dozen people, and in others, they will oversee only a few people. Regardless, their duties are similar. Being an administrator requires patience, passion, dedication, social-skills, and a commitment to seeing a job through. It's not easy work to be in charge of others or of a facility.  

Public History says this about administrators:

"Good administrators enjoy working with people; they are willing ot listen to various points of view and work hard to resolve conflict. They are successful in building consensus among staff, governing boards, and funding entities, but they are also capable of making tough decisions and taking decisive action when necessary. They are willing to put in a great deal of time and effort; they are resilient, streetwise, patient, and persistent. Above all, they know history; they love history; and they want to share their enthusiasm for learning about the past with wide audiences."

The two SAA addresses that we read were written in the same style; as letters to their graduate interns. Both were highly complementary of those particular interns. Fleckner and Hensen used that model to address a wider audience about their jobs as archivists and their love for history. Hensen, the president of SAA in 2001-02, addresses the technological innovation happening within the field. Because this address is now 12 years old, we can look with retrospect and see how the field has responded to new technological innovation.

I will end with an excerpt from Steven Hensen's address, to summarize this reading:

"But as I look at the new archivists that are coming into the profession..., I am struck by two thoughts: (1) your are by far the best-trained, most diverse, most technology adept, and committed group of archivists that I have ever seen; and (2) I'm certainly glad that, with my antiquated degrees and credentials, I'm not applying for a job today."

504 E. Jefferson

Because of inclement weather and subzero temperatures, Goshen College cancelled classes for today and tomorrow, but we were still assigned a blog post about our house history projects. Since I have written about almost all that I've done, I just decided to include my observations and experiences in the field from my Google drive folders.

Experience from the Field: 

1/24/2014 

It was snowing. I drove to Jefferson street and parked right by 504 E. Jefferson. I got out of the car and took a few pictures of the house when a woman [presumably the woman who lives there] came outside. Dialogue: Woman: Why are you taking pictures? Me: I’m doing a history of the neighborhood for a class project. Is that okay? Woman: Yeah, just curious. Goes back inside.I continued to take some pictures down the block, then turned around, got in the car, and drove away. There were two men who were watching me from across the street. The woman seemed grumpy.

Observations/Research

1/24/2014  

I did a little bit of googling and found out that the house was constructed in 1880 and was purchased by Barbara and John D. Gorsline for 70,000 dollars. I suspect that the Gorsline couple rents 504 e. Jefferson out. I looked up Barbara Gorsline and she was not the woman that I saw emerge from the house. There isn’t record of rentals on the property data from Elkhart County, however. The address that Google gave me for the Gorsline couple is 1609 S. 15th St, Goshen, Indiana. I also think the house may be Queen Anne style because of the porch, and the asymmetry, but I will have to look into architectural style further to be sure.

After reading Colleen's comment from my last blog post, I started to think about the historian's role in public records. All of the information that we are researching for this project is public. This blog is public. A public historian's whole career revolves around public information and presentation. I don't feel as bad anymore about researching an individual person's home.

experience and ethical debates

Well, it's good that I'm taking a class called 'Public History', because I don't think I have actually ever done any public history. Aside from class assignments, I have never synthesized information to present for public viewing. My experience with history as my major has been strictly for professors, term papers, and maybe an occasional presentation. I have worked with the community in other ways, but never to write or provide a history of a place or people. For my undergraduate thesis, I am planning to write a history of Merry Lea Environmental Learning Center of Goshen College. Reading through Nearby History: exploring the past around you has given me tips and more of an understanding about documents in the public sphere. The history of a place is different from other types of history.

We're using Nearby History for our house history projects. Chapters three, four, and five focus on documents and acquiring information. The published sources that I thought would be applicable for the East Lincoln Crossroads neighborhood are these: directories, maps, government documents and newspapers. The unpublished sources: census records, federal records like draft records, city records, deeds, property records, wills, and genealogy. That's a lot of stuff. Since I have very little experience with actually researching an area, it was great to read an outline of  essentially how to do it. So much information is available about this neighborhood, but it takes time, effort, and love of history to dig it out. I finished reading the chapters with this thought. Public history is a lot of things, but it's definitely not easy.

I took a trip to the East Lincoln Crossroads neighborhood this weekend. I snapped a couple pictures of my assigned house before a seemingly bothered woman came out and asked me why I was taking pictures of her house. I was a little flustered, but explained that I was doing a history of the neighborhood for a class project and asked if it was okay. She said that it was, but she was just curious. I tried to be inconspicuous by taking pictures of other houses on the block, but I don't really think it worked. I'm struggling with the ethics of this project. It seems odd to me that I would research somebody's home without telling them that I'm doing it. I'm looking into a significant part of their life, how much they pay in taxes, what they paid for their home. Houses are so intimate. I'm looking into their neighborhood as an outsider. I'm criticizing it at face value. It seems wrong. I think that next time I go back to look at the house, I will introduce myself. I'd rather have consent to write on somebody's house than feel guilty for invading their privacy.

Here is a picture of 504 E. Jefferson street.

a buried treasure: flatware

My initial thoughts while reading chapters 9 and 10 in Nearby History were questions concerning the differences in types of preservation. Luckily, those differences are outlined in chapter 10.

For my own sake, here are those definitions.

• Preservation focuses on the maintenance and repair of existing historic materials and retention of a property's form as it has evolved over time.
• Rehabilitation acknowledges the need to alter or add to a historic property to meet continuing or changing uses while retaining the property's historic character.
• Restoration depicts a property at a particular period in its history, while removing evidence of other periods.
• Reconstruction recreates vanished or non-surviving portions of a property for interpretive purposes (200).

The government does play a large role in historic restoration in America, but I cannot imagine it any other way. Without government involvement, there would be nothing left to protect. This is outlined by our national parks. Without Teddy Roosevelt's decision to block off large sections of land, they would be exploited for natural resources and development. That's not to say that there is no exploitation within the NPS, but compared to the private sector, they've done a pretty good job at keeping the space available for all of America.

At the beginning of the 65 page National Historical Preservation Act of 1966, part of the description states:

(5) in the face of ever-increasing extensions of urban
centers, highways, and residential, commercial, and
industrial developments, the present governmental and
nongovernmental historic preservation programs and
activities are inadequate to insure future generations a
genuine opportunity to appreciate and enjoy the rich
heritage of our Nation;

I interpret this section to mean that in the midst of 'progress,' the NHPA of 1966 was put into place to counter this progressive movement for the good of the next generation and the preservation of history. It states that the contemporary policies weren't good enough to keep progress from interfering with history.

I found it interesting to read chapter 9, on landscapes and buildings, and to compare it to the work we will be doing for East Lincoln Crossroads. To be a true historical preservationist, I think you have to have a very detail oriented mind. Looking for specific details in the community, like differences in streetlights, manholes, counting churches, and viewing the neighborhood by night and day. It also mentioned the 'backyard archaeologist' which I found to be an intriguing delight. At one point, the book stated that flatware was a great thing to find because it's easily dated. I wonder how many spoons and knives of my parent's wedding silver could be found in my old backyard? What would that say about my childhood? About 1987 when they were married? I distinctly remember using them as digging tools, to my mother's extreme discontent.

The book mentioned the cycle of construction, abandonment, conversion, and demolition. I think that this is the natural process of life, and includes the lives of buildings and land. Things are born, live, and die, and from them, new life emerges. In the case of buildings, that death can come from neglect, abandonment, or in pursuit of better things. In ecological terms, human beings have a somewhat mutualistic relationship with buildings. We depend on them for our safety, warmth, community. They depend on us to keep them in good condition. But buildings stand much longer than humans live, and degenerate after we are gone or are changed in ways that we aren't in control of.

I really do wonder what happened to all of my mother's flatware.

east lincoln preservation project

For a house history project, it's tempting to select a beautiful, old, relatively kept-up house. But if you really think about it, that choice would lead to a selective history - a history of the elite, most likely. And how is that really different from the centuries of history that already exist? One of the best parts about public history is that it shows history from many different angles and perspectives. East Lincoln Crossroads neighborhood is a diverse collection of stories waiting to be told. Why should we focus just on those whose stories are the most beautiful? To be a true public historian means to look at history of the commons. That's what I think we're going to explore this semester.

I noticed a few houses that I would be interested in studying, but decided to take my own look later on before I made a decision. The houses I noticed at first were older and bigger, but not necessarily those that are in the best condition.  I liked the ones that had been split into multiple apartments, because that is a sign that changes have been made in the house's life story. George W. McDaniel used an interesting metaphor in his chapter of Public History to describe the value of a house history. He says that the 'skin' of a house, the shell and the reality of its story, comes from an accurate and intriguing presentation. The skin of the story is what makes historic houses real and tangible. McDaniel says that "they put skin on the abstraction of time past." The way they are managed, maintained, and their interpretation and presentation of that history - a combination of both the academic historian's and the public historian's work - is important.

Whichever house I choose, I'm sure that it will have a story to tell me. Whether it is a story of grandeur or the slow deconstruction of greatness, there will be something. In East Lincoln, I believe that the houses which have a dynamic history, both great and plain, should be preserved, valued, and restored to their former greatness.

house history

For today, our class took a field trip to the East Lincoln Crossroads Neighborhood in Goshen, Indiana. Located just a couple miles away from the college, it's astonishing how much houses and the neighborhood changes. I noticed that as the streets move toward the railroad tracks, the houses become a little bit more beat-down and it looks like socio-economics get a little lower. The houses themselves were beautiful once, and still hold incredible value to the neighborhood as a district. They are unique and beautiful, each in their own way.

The East Lincoln Crossroads Neighborhood, Goshen, IN

I remembered some of the questions about neighborhoods from Nearby History as I was walking around with my classmates.

How is the neighborhood defined? What is it's central focus? How and why have the size of the size, shape, and image of East Lincoln Crossroads changed over the years? When did it shift from grand, big, houses to run-down reflections of those same houses? How were the houses remodeled? What does socio-economics have to do with it? Why did these shifts occur? Who even lives in these houses? Who did once? What are the social dynamics of the neighborhood?

I came with questions, and left with even more. 

My own house, Kenwood House is owned by Goshen College, and while it is not in the East Lincoln Crossroads, continues to spark my interest in house history. We live on 8th street, and on our walk today, I noticed that 8th was more kept-up and had more beautiful and grand houses. They were generally clean and large. I love the house I live in for its character. We have bay windows, an ornate staircase, and high ceilings. The house is entirely made of wood. We also have a fireplace that had carved wooden detailing. I don't actually know if it functions, because we aren't allowed to have fires.

"Hanging Out"

Kenwood House

  

Houses and neighborhoods offer such a rich and wonderful aspect to public history. Why wouldn't we study these? They are both history-from-below and elitist history. They show the ornate and the disheveled. The beautiful and the plain. Neighborhoods carry significance. They are the places where people are born, mature, marry, grow, play, learn, socialize, grow old, and die.  They have their own lives and stories. They are life. 

What Is Public History?

Patricia Mooney-Melvin seeks to redefine the field of history. She says that history should be introduced in schools, not in a fact-memorization stagnant way, but instead as an interactive and question-seeking manner. Children should learn how to synthesize and understand history in a way that is meaningful to them. Instead of so rigidly defining the career paths of the history undergraduate or the history graduate, she wishes to see history as a broad dynamic of opportunities, rather than simply following the path to academia. That's where public history comes in.

Public history is the erratic and quirky child of academic history. It thrives from a multitude of sources and colors outside of the set lines and standards. Public history engages the young, the old, the student, the life-long learner. It is how history is made common. That said, public history is not a "weak" history. In fact, public history takes considerable effort and thought. It is interesting that the development of the field started after the so-called "period of crisis" in the 1970's where the historical community lost its sense of common purpose. There were too many professional historians, and not enough jobs for the graduate scholar-historians. Public history emerged as an option for those who were already employed as historians in nonacademic settings. There was a lot of debate in the following years about what makes a historian a professional, and if public history could be included under the umbrella of 'professional.' 

Ultimately, the Public History Movement took hold, and began to shape the way that history was viewed and interpreted. There began to be graduate programs specifically for Public History as well as continued on-the-job training for interpreters and archivists as well as others. Apprenticing Public Historians usually partner with a close-by museum or independent institution where they can build relationships and work toward success. Public History programs differ from Academic History programs, but they all utilize the same basic historical principles. 

The National Council of Public History, as stated on the homepage, was created to:

"inspire public engagement with the past and serve the needs of practitioners in putting history to work in the world by building community among historians, expanding professional skills and tools, fostering critical reflection on historical practice, and publicly advocating for history and historians."

Their website features all of the basic information, but is uninviting to the non-professional. The interface of the website is boring, and although they have attempted to spice it up by adding recent social media interaction, like tweets, it could be a much more engaging website. The colors are bland and the layout is out-dated. At first glance, it looks like a website from  2005, straight from the HTML code. I think that with some up-to-date interface work, the NCPH website could be much more appealing to different people while conveying the information they want to in a clear manner.  The "What Is Public History" headline gives very basic information about public history as a field. Instead of outlining the information with headings and text, the interface could be interactive, with pictures and animations to draw the eye and catch interest.