We’ll be discussing the Heart of the Matter report and the state of history at the AASLH annual meeting this week, first at today’s CEO Forum chaired by Kent Whitworth of the Kentucky Historical Society, which will include presentations by Conny Graft and Pharabe Kolb and discussions facilitated by me. Tomorrow, Tim Grove of the Smithsonian Institution moderates a general session with Conny Graft, Pharabe Kolb, and Kim Fortney. I’ll be sharing the results of those meetings in the weeks that follow.
Charleston, South Carolina has one of the most active convention and visitor bureaus in the nation and it has embraced the value of history and historic preservation in its promotion of the region. This past year they launched a series of videos on different distinctive aspects of Charleston, including “History Lives,” which features interviews with George McDaniel of Drayton Hall, Kitty Robinson of the Historic Charleston Foundation, Charles Duell of Middleton Place, and Robert Russell of the College of Charleston. At 5:41, it’s a bit longer than most videos I’ve shared previously but it’s a good example of content, production, and pacing. If you’d like to see all of their videos, visit the Charleston Area Visitors and Convention Bureau website or their channel on YouTube.
History organizations choose the impact they want to make. Sometimes the choice is intentional and brought in by a visionary leader or strategic plan, but it can also come about through organizational confidence and maturity. These transitions can occur quickly or over many years, and unlike puberty, there’s no guarantee that an organization won’t return to its previous condition. In my work with dozens of history organizations over the past thirty years, I’ve witnessed three typical turning points that resulted in extraordinary activities and programs. Two turning points–doing history with passion and making history meaningful–were discussed previously.
The third turning point for history organizations occurs when they adopt an aspirational vision for improving society. Imagining a better America, museums, historic sites, and historical societies can follow examples set by such visionaries as Ann Pamela Cunningham. She believed that George Washington’s exemplary service during the nation’s formation would urge a “bond of Union and political regeneration” during a period of increasing conflict in the 1850s and that the preservation of Mt. Vernon would Continue reading →
History organizations choose the impact they want to make. Sometimes the choice is intentional and brought in by a visionary leader or strategic plan, but it can also come about through organizational confidence and maturity. These transitions can occur quickly or over many years, and unlike puberty, there’s no guarantee that an organization won’t return to its previous condition. In my work with dozens of history organizations over the past thirty years, I’ve witnessed three typical turning points that resulted in extraordinary activities and programs. The first turning point–doing history with passion–was discussed last week.
The second turning point occurs when history organizations become more meaningful and relevant to their audiences. Good writers always have the reader in mind and are continually asking, “will they turn the page?” History organizations can ask similar questions such as, will they return? Will they recommend us to their friends? Will they be convinced to support your organization? That means understanding your visitors, a knowledge that continually changes because visitors are continually changing.
Recording attendance is a good place to start, but that information often lacks sufficient detail to inform decisions. It’s like a restaurant noticing that sales are down, but not knowing Continue reading →
History organizations choose the impact they want to make. Sometimes the choice is intentional and brought in by a visionary leader or strategic plan, but it can also come about through organizational confidence and maturity. These transitions can occur quickly or over many years, and unlike puberty, there’s no guarantee that an organization won’t return to its previous condition. In my work with dozens of history organizations over the past thirty years, I’ve witnessed three typical turning points that resulted in extraordinary activities and programs.
The first turning point occurs when history organizations practice history. If we are in the “history business,” history should permeate and inspire everything we do. Fifty years ago, historian Barbara Tuchman asserted that, “Being in love with your subject. . .is indispensable for writing good history—or good anything, for that matter.”
If you’ve ever been involved in researching or interpreting an historic site, you’ve no doubt assembled a timeline to keep track of events and understand connections between the site, region, and nation. After you assemble a lot of data, managing those relationships becomes incredibly complex and you’re continually updating charts and reshuffling cards. Help may be on the way through Aeon Timeline by Scribblecode, a timeline tool for fiction writers which can be easily adapted for historical research and interpretation. It’s currently only available for the Mac for $40, but next year they will introduce a version for PC.
Like any timeline, you can plot dates of events, put them into categories (e.g., local or national), and display them neatly and chronologically. Even better, it can zoom in or out so you can examine the details or see the big picture. That’s nice, and you might be able to figure out how to manipulate a document, spreadsheet, or database to do this for you. But Aeon Timeline goes further by allowing you to tag events and add notes to provide depth, and you can add layers for people or places to visually keep track of what happens to whom or where. If you’re exploring narrative non-fiction or using storytelling techniques in historical interpretation, it will help you construct arcs and identify turning points. Watching the introductory video can explain the features better than I can, but if you’re creating a tour, exhibit, or article, this might help you organize ideas much better than the traditional outline or stack of cards. You can download a 20-day demo version for free but if you want to buy it, Aeon Timeline is available for a 20 percent discount until June 14 at http://www.scribblecode.com/summerfest.html.
Visiting Annapolis a few weeks ago, I had a chance to see the nearly completed installation ofFreedom Bound: Runaways of the Chesapeake, a year-long exhibit about the resistance to servitude and slavery in the Chesapeake Bay region from the colonial period to the Civil War. Heather Ersts and Ariane Hofstedt of the Historic Annapolis Foundation graciously provided a personal tour of the exhibit, which is installed in several museums and historic sites around the city. It’s an exhibit worth seeing not only for the content, but also the design, and several items jumped out at me:
1. The exhibit looks at the varied experiences of people through nine persons. Seven of these persons were enslaved Africans, but two are white–a convict servant and an indentured servant–which will surprise most visitors. It complicates the usual narrative that only Africans were held in bondage (of course, being owned as a slave is very different from being incarcerated as a convict) and it’s by encountering the unexpected that people are more likely to learn. The typical exhibit about slavery trots out the same 1850 drawing of the slave ship Brooks, a pair of iron shackles, and perhaps a tag from Charleston. Yes, those are all authentic and true, but the constant repeat of these items renders them Continue reading →
Take a break today and be inspired by this video on the Mast Brothers, a small chocolate maker in Brooklyn. It’s a combination of craft, history, and biography in a well produced short film by The Scout. For historic sites that interpret processes past or present, such as food production, building construction, archaeology, or historical research, this might be an engaging approach.
On April 18, I enjoyed a sneak peak of the restoration underway at Clara Barton’s Civil War-era office and warehouse on 7th Street in downtown Washington, DC–where she worked and lived before founding the American Red Cross in 1881. The historic site opens to the public as a museum in fall 2014.
From the street, you’d never imagine that this was a nationally significant historic site. It’s a simple three-story brick building surrounded by restaurants, towering condos and offices, popular museums, and a major sports arena. Indeed, it was overlooked by those who were searching for it because it didn’t fit their image of a warehouse. Its historical significance was forgotten for most of the century until 1997, when a nightwatchman hired to keep vagrants out of the vacant building noticed a document jutting out from the ceiling. It turned out to be part of a cache of artifacts belonging to Clara Barton that had been stored in the Continue reading →
For your Friday break, Shaping History, Shaping Tomorrow is a video commissioned by Kieo University that explores the contrasts in Tokyo between new and traditional, historic and modern, young and old. How would these topics be presented at your site or community?
