Broken Record. Broken Record. Broken Record.

Definitely not a face driven by
facts alone, eh? / PD LOC

Lately I've felt like a broken record.

I've been helping a friend workshop some posts for an upcoming anniversary (surprisingly for me, not a Civil War event but a deviation into the land of the Revolutionary War). And again and again, I find myself repeating some variation on a single nugget of interpretive wisdom. This is no fault of my colleague. I am often a broken record.

So what has my advice been? It's simple, really. My friend has been following the historian's impulse, trying to share a complete story. She's been trying to include vivid detail, lush explanation, full proper names of British Generals and American Privates alike. It's such a natural impulse, too. You've gone to such amazing lengths to gather knowledge, to amass expertise, to become a bonafide know-it-all on a subject, you just need to spout that knowledge like a perverse history fountain. When you cram too much stuff into your head, of course you want to let everyone know everything everyday.

But the fire hose is the cardinal sin of interpretation, the first pitfall which all interpreters are warned against. Interpredata, as David Larsen coined the concept, is not interpretation. It's simply chaining together fact after fact.

So what to do then? If you can't tell a complete story, what could you do?

My broken record chimes in: tell a meaningful story.

Those two aims, telling the whole story and telling a meaningful story, are so often mutually exclusive. The completist impulse leads towards overloading the visitor, overburdening them with facts, figures, names, places and dates. Overloading them with precisely why they hated High School history in their teens: lists.

But if you unlink the daisy chains of dates and the flow of events, if you pluck out small occurrences, tiny vignettes, little moments which can stand in for the whole, which typify the larger narrative, then you stand to begin helping visitors forge connections.

I've written before about Anton Checkov and his potent rule of narrative. And so you might see this moment as another leap into that same old groove of the record. Eliminating the superfluous helps drive more keenly toward meaning and away from interpredata.

But this is more than eliminating the useless facts and unfired guns. It's about even eliminating the semi-useful facts that might not have all too much bearing on the interpretive moment. Does a visitor need to know the unit a man served in? Maybe not. Do they need to know the Corps or name of the army his unit served in? That might not even have bearing.

Anyone who speaks to me for more than a few minutes about interpretation likely hears another of my favorite phrases, another broken record: good history is just true fiction.

I'm not advocating making things up. What I mean is that interpreters need to seek out stories and moments with the same potential impact as fiction. Using the tools of fiction, the construction of a narrative driven by suspense, drama, irony of situation and, above all else, vibrant characters.

In most good fiction, things don't just happen, people do them. But we so often describe an army's actions in a largely detached and massive way. Armies don't march though. Men march. Armies don't fight. Men fight. Armies don't die. Men die.

When I mention your favorite novel you probably don't remember scenes and actions as much as remember the vibrant characters who inhabit those scenes and make those actions happen. You likely remember who they are, how they think and how they bend when put under stress. And isn't that really a route to relevance moreso than intricate detail of 18th century combat's small actions? In the end (another broken record here), today's visitors will never need to command an army of a couple thousand farm boys from Connecticut and Massachusetts as they wield muzzle-loading smooth-bore French flint lock muskets against long neat lines of enemy force. Time doesn't move backwards; if it did, historians would be quickly out of a job.

But today's visitors can find inspiration in the thoughts of the people of the past. They'll likely be under stress, and can draw inspiration from how the people of the past bent or broke under immense stressors. If the interpreter builds real people, crafts real character and lets audiences get to know them personally, today's people might begin to care.

Remember, success in interpretation is not defined by, "did I include every last little detail?" Instead, it's typified by the question, "did they find a reason to care?" Education, if ever a goal of interpretation, is always a secondary impact rather than a primary motivation. Helping visitors find their own personal meanings in a landscape, to find a reason to love a place, to provoke them viscerally and emotionally within a landscape is the aim of interpretation.

So breathe. Just keep reminding yourself that you don't have to tell the whole story, you just have to tell a meaningful story. Everything's going to be fine.

Pride Overcometh

Sorry, there is nothing on earth that screams "America"
louder than Ben Franklin and Mark Twain having
a discussion on the torch of the Statue of Liberty
at daybreak.
Nothing.

A couple weeks ago I got the chance to wave to Ben Franklin and Mark Twain. They waved back from the stage as the curtain dropped.

Jess leaned in to me. "I didn't realize that this is what history is to you," she said, with a bit of derision in her voice.

I understand my wife's derision. Disney World is not the first place that comes to mind when most people think of powerful and meaningful history. But for me, it is where I began to find the magic in history.

I say magic because that's what history is. History is that moment you can wave to Benjamin Franklin and he waves back. It's that moment you can watch Mark Twain softly knock ashes off of his cigar.

When I was a kid, that was embedded in my psyche as the ultimate expression of what history can do. And it's fundamentally what I try to do through my study and interpretation of history. I don't build animatronic figures or construct massive theme parks. But I do try to breathe life into the past for fleeting moments. Those moments are too often so fleeting, tiny whiffs of what the past might have been like. But when the stutter of the authentic experience, the reality of yesterday, seeps through, it's magic. Like waving to Ben and Mark.

And it's not all antiseptic. Ben and Mark, their pneumatic actuators wheezing as they loll in a rocking chair or walk into Jefferson's loft, have a few tricks up their sleeves for the interpreter. The American Adventure raises some very potent moments of introspection for the American interpreter.

At an early moment in the show, Mark Twain quips to Franklin, "Well, listen to the proud elder statesman."

And Franklin replies with, as you'd expect, an apropos aphorism: "Mr. Twain, pride is one of our national passions. Even those who overcome it, are proud of their humility."

My gears have been turning since I heard that line again. I must have heard that line in that very theatre at least a half-dozen times in my life, at different stages and ages. But it still gets me. The complexity of that moment in the script, when an imagineer chose those words for that pseudo-Franklin, is amazingly powerful to me.

Americans are proud. It is almost the single most powerful defining element of our national character. Americans are a proud people.

But what does pride mean? And what does pride do? Can it poison the story, tilt it? Does pride cause us to trivialize history?

Maybe. Perhaps our pride clouds our collective perceptions of the past. Americans have good ideas, make good decisions, craft good inventions. Might our pride make us less likely to investigate the ideas of our forebears? Might pride make us less likely to doubt the wisdom of the decisions our ancestors made? Might that pride mean we embrace outdated innovation simply because it's our own ingenuity? Does pride mean we are inherently biased from the start?

It has always boggled my mind that many of the same Americans who embrace and display the Confederate flag proudly and (sometimes) defiantly also underline their stalwart patriotism and pride in the Stars and Stripes. Perhaps even love of the Confederate Flag, a symbol of the very antithesis of the United States, is borne of American pride. We are proud of the decisions of Americans. And it was, afterall, an American decision to attempt to dismantle America itself.

The Confederate flag argument is a facile one, I know, but it points to the large bias we don't always address. Can Americans ever interpret America, or is exceptionalism always going to haunt our forays into meaning-making because it is embedded in our cultural DNA. Interpretation is about multiple perspectives playing off of one another. But when you have a horse in the race, can you really be an honest broker of all of those opinions?

Denying women the right to vote:
another of the sins of the past we must
rededicate ourselves as too good to repeat.

But maybe there is hope. Remember bionic-Franklin's Americans who are, "proud of their humility." What if we can harness our belief in exceptionalism and use it as our very window of investigation?

Ultimately, there is a major difference between these two types of pride. One, the facile pride of blind flag waving, is simply asserting that America is so good, we could never have made a mistake.

But imagine churning the pride into something else. Imagine a pride that says to each American, in their heat, that America is so good that we must, as a society, acknowledge, publicize and atone for every moment we've made mistakes in the past. We can shift pride from a blind reaction to a powerful moment for healing and adventuring into a better future.

It's the reason we should never forget crimes like American slavery or Indian removals. Each generation must relive those sins, from now until eternity, precisely because we should be a better nation than that. We should strive to be better than that. We should be proud of a nation that can overcome yesterday's sins today, and avoid them tomorrow.

Afterall, we aren't making a nation for today. America is the promise of tomorrow. Or as Ben says perched atop the torch of the Statue of Liberty as the sun rises in the east:

"I may have invented these bifocals I'm wearing, but I can assure they are not rose-colored.
Mr. Twain, the golden age never was the present age, but with human liberty we can fulfill the promise and meaning of America. To everyone a chance, believed Thomas Wolfe, to all people regardless of their birth, a right to live, to work, to be themselves, and to become whatever their visions can combine to make them. This is the promise of America!"

For Gods' Sake, Copy-edit that Textbook on the Wall

The Stuka in Question. / CC nathanm

So, my social streams flooded on Monday with an article from the Denver Business Journal, a weekly Colorado publication with a circulation rate of about 16,000 issues. The internet is an amazingly powerful force for magnification. It can make a rant from one irate museum goer with very-close-to-nihl circulation seem like a meaningful and broadly held opinion.

In his ramshackle screed, and there's very little else it could be called, David Sneed, owner of a fence construction company in Denver, rants about the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

But after all that waiting, most visitors didn’t even notice the Stuka... because they were too busy smashing their pudgy hands against a filthy red button to hear the T-Rex roar.

I understand on one level Sneed's frustration. From a few photos I've gleaned online, the main transportation hall where the Stuka hangs seems to have little in the way of interpretation or context, the German dive-bomber hanging awkwardly beside a Boeing 727's fuselage and a steam locomotive.

The problem is much the same as I have with the Enola Gay's current berth at the Smithsonian's Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, VA, where, stacked like cord-wood atop other planes of the World War II era, it loses all context and meaning. I much prefer (unlike the members of the VFW) the 1995 exhibition and its original script delving into what that plane did for and to the world.

Likewise, there the Stuka hangs mute. It, as far as I can tell, doesn't tell its own story very well.

OK, so Sneed has a point. The Stuka isn't all that striking.

But that's about the only point he has which is sustainable for the future of public history. A sustainable future requires one key thing: helping everyone find a reason to care about the past. Everyone needs an access point. And access points which work for the largest percentage of "everyone," which, in the terms of interpretation, strike toward the universal, are the best investment.

What would Sneed replace the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry's interactive weather and dinosaur exhibits with? "I want a museum that bores the children and scares the old people," Sneed muses, "Learning takes time and effort; it’s boring; and kids should know that from conception."

If this Stuka had an audio track, and dramatic
lighting, and a bright red button to push
putting that frightening diving prop into action,
then it might strike fear into everyone's heart.
/ CC H. Michael Miley

Learning is not painful. It's not boring.

It can be boring. It can be torturous. It can be a process of pouring facts over the stifled and cuffed captive, like water over the nose and mouth of a victim of water-boarding.

And God knows I've been in plenty of exhibits where that's the case. I call them, as do many of my colleagues, a textbook-on-a-wall. They're those exhibits which stretch on interminably, taking literally hours to read ever bit of text. The designers decided that every fact, every detail, every nugget of minutiae needed to be printed on a panel somewhere and slapped on the wall. And once you've already paid your admission (or ridden the Metro for an hour), you feel almost honor-bound to bang your head against each and every panel until blood trickles from your furrowed and overstuffed brow.

This is Sneed's answer to the accessible museum: make it tortuous for everyone. And what will that yield?

No one will go.

When I say, "no one," I specifically mean, "not everyone."

Museums and historic sites are tasked with being relevant to everyone, not simply the already interested. If we preach to the choir, the choir can never grow.

So what is my answer? I want a museum that scares the old people, scares the young people, scares the middle aged. That's something that happens from visceral experience, not exhibit text. I want a museum that helps everyone understand the fear of a Stuka, not because of a textbook's worth of text, but from the object's placement, from the way it's lit, from the soundtrack playing alongside it.

I want a museum that makes people laugh like a soldier reading a comic in Playboy in the rice patties of Vietnam, just before a firefight erupts. But old, young and middle laugh at different things. The important learning moment is not getting the specific joke in that 1960s era magazine, but feeling that tough-to-replicate feeling of giggling in the midst of abject terror. So make them laugh, then shock them. Give them the feeling. But an exhibit panel doesn't do that, whether it's a 4th grader or a 80-year-old reading it. Experience does that.

In short, museums need to become more experiential, not less. Learning is not something we suffer through. We, as a species, have learned best from experience since the first man discovered fire. No matter that his wife told him, "hot," he only learned when he singed his own fingers.

Damning museums for trying buttons and sound effects is not productive. Lauding them and pushing them to do better is.

A thumbnail example: when my mother and I first visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, I was barely old enough to go through the exhibits (back when they had an age limit). I remember getting in the elevator, dimly lit with heavy, riveted walls. She leaned into me and with real, palpable fear in her voice whispered, "it's a gas chamber," as the attendant pushed us into the elevator and it rumbled up.

It was that moment the holocaust became real to her. The text we read for the next three hours was unnecessary.

Intentionally wanting history to be boring is elitist and antithetical to what our profession is meant to do: unearth the past to make the present a better place.

-----

(And before some pedant comes along, yes, I know the difference between copy editing and general editing. But I also know what makes a catchier title, and something with four syllables rings better than two.)

Only Hindsight: Where are the Historian Futurists?

A friend who is planning a pie-in-the-sky conference (about which I'm super excited) texted me today with a quick question. "Who would be a good 'Historian of the Future?'" he asked, adding the bonus that I could dream big. "Money no object," the next text read.

I was at a loss for a few minutes. Who is the historian of the future? Who is trying to visualize that skill-set, categorize that life, read the trends of the past and plot the course of history yet to come?

My work with the NPS, and my penchant for soaking up Sci-Fi culture and fiction, has led me into contact with that interesting field known as Futurism or Futurology. No joke. It's a thing, look it up.

The revolution will be published...
just probably not on paper.

Futurists, in short, try to look to the future by studying the trends of yesterday and today. They are plotting out the probability lines for where mankind might drift.

I love this chunky sentence from the Wikipedia entry on futrists:

More generally, the label includes such disparate lay, professional, and academic groups as visionaries, foresight consultants, corporate strategists, policy analysts, cultural critics, planners, marketers, forecasters, prediction market developers, roadmappers, operations researchers, investment managers, actuaries and other risk analyzers, and future-oriented individuals educated in every academic discipline, including anthropology, complexity studies, computer science, economics, engineering, Urban design, evolutionary biology, history, management, mathematics, philosophy, physical sciences, political science, psychology, sociology, systems theory, technology studies, and other disciplines.

Historians are on that list, buried in there with their brethren sociologists and anthropologists. But where I see the sociologists trying to puzzle out the future, where I see the anthropologists attempting to see where man might move next, I don't see historians practicing futurism as futurists, simply as historians of futurism. A quick Google survey confirmed this inkling.

On one level, it makes perfect sense. Historians are chiefly concerned with the word of the past. We hunt sources and documents, read ancient letters and granite monoliths as texts left behind by a race often long gone, sometimes by decades, sometimes millennia. Historians, though, taken as a group, tend to be wholly retrospective. We look back at closed systems, oftentimes ceaselessly complex systems, but still inherently closed with a finite amount of data in play.

The best historians play those systems off of the modern era, helping to use the complex system of the past to show that where we are today makes sense, that all the effects have a cause somewhere.

Even when we are studying the field of history, we section off the past into eras and epochs. The Dunning School, though it may express itself in dribs and drabs today, was the 1910s to the 1950s. It is a fixed point in time, with impacts on the present, but often simply studied as an event like every other chunk of history.

Futurism has had an influence on the field of history, but seemingly that influence has been mostly epistemological and functional. Asa Briggs summed up his view of how futurism might influence the historian's craft in a very good 1978 article as, in essence, a framework to investigate problems in the past, using the thought processes of the futurist. But that's not quite what I mean either.

So many books on the history
of the Civil War. But so few
among them about the theory
of the history of the Civil War.
And even fewer on the future
of the theory of the history
of the Civil War. Dizzy yet?

So what am I hunting, then? Futurists use the trends of the past and present to outline where the future lies. Where we have a great dearth of work among historians, particularly in the Civil War field, is in applying futurism exactly as it is wrought, what I would term Historiographical Futurism.

OK, I just made up a useful concept, but play with me for a moment before I layer yet more frosting on the funky cake.

Where is the study of history, where are the trends and (to put it in a vulgar sense) fads which express themselves today heading? What might the act of studying the past 5 or 10 years from now functionally look like? How might technology and shifting social structures alter how we study the past next year, next decade, next century? What is the future of history?

These are the futurist's questions about history, not within the flow of history. To put it quite succinctly: whither the craft?

OK, on to that added frosting.

If there are inherent questions framed around Historiographical Futurism, then there can also be those revolving around Public Historiographical Futurism. Where is the practice of history with the public heading? What might the act of interpretation 5 or 10 years from now functionally look like? How might technology and shifting social structures alter how we interpret historical resources with the publics next year, next decade, next century? What is the future of public history?

And there we his this funky wall. Historians are very busy living in the present, crafting understandings of the past today. I'm not quite sure, in either ends of the historical house, we're very concerned with the future of our profession, only it's base, short-term maintenance.

There are glimmers of hope.

Ed Ayers, now the president of the University of Richmond, was very big in envisioning public usable pasts and vibrant databases, trying to chart the course to a future not yet created. The Valley of the Shadow project was truly earth-shattering when it hit the web in early 1990s, thanks to Ayers' inspiration and the work of the Institute of Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. Ayers has hopped into one future of history in co-hosting BackStory, one of few historians leaping on the podcast train in an engaging and meaningful way.

Nina Simon, too, is piloting the future, both with her physical work as director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and her virtual futurist way-finding work at Museum 2.0. Some of her ideas are amazingly precient, and the shifts she's made in her museum's offerings have shown real changes in numbers and participation, data validation that perhaps some of her visions of the future might be feasible.

Larry Cebula rounds out my list, prof. at Eastern Washington University and editor of Northwest History Larry talks shop in nearly every aspect of the future of the field, particularly virtual visitor experiences and digital archiving. I first met Larry when I bummed around the OAH conference in Milwaukee last year, where he was pimping the Spokane Historical app.

Those were my three names for my friend when he asked, "Who would be a good 'Historian of the Future?'"

When there are only three prominent names in the field which immediately float to mind for someone in the thick of public history and interpretation, perhaps we have a problem...

Plunge into Shonash Ravine: Thinking 4th Dimensionally in Interpretation

This piece was written for NAI's annual workshop this coming fall, but not everyone will have the chance to be in Reno to hear my presentation come November. So, why not give you a sneak peak of what I'm planning on discussing in Nevada?

This piece was written by me at work, so it's firmly in the public domain. Adapt away, enjoy the read and share as often and wherever you'd like.

CC / Jay Bonvouloir

There is a moment in Back to the Future III where the transitive nature of time in that fictional universe becomes crystal clear. As the time-traveling DeLorean rolls to a stop in 1985, railroad crossing gates drop and the time machine passes a sign: “Eastwood Ravine.”

The scene is the payoff for one of the movie’s time-travel conundrums: the mutability of the past. Marty knew that same chasm as “Clayton Ravine.” When Doc Brown and Marty McFly look at a map in 1885, they are befuddled by its label: “Shonash Ravine.”

“Clayton Ravine was named after a teacher. They say she fell in there a hundred years ago.” Marty tells Doc.

“A hundred years ago?” the ageless Brown exclaims, “That’s this year!” The pair had just saved Clara Clayton, Hill Valley’s new schoolteacher, from plunging into the ravine. The past was changed. Then, when Marty’s time-machine plunged into Shonash Ravine, the locals of 1885 gave the gulch a new name: Eastwood Ravine, named after Marty’s “Man with No Name” moniker.

Shonash Ravine is an intriguing case study in one landscape holding multiple realities. We all have Shonash Ravines in our special places, resources which we usually view from one distinct perspective, with one distinct event in mind.

When we begin to think fourth dimensionally, inspecting landscapes from multiple chronological viewpoints, they can become amazingly rich places which offer new, novel and amazingly powerful connections.

“…the temporal junction point for the entire space-time continuum.”

For humans, time moves in one direction. Sir Arthur Eddington, the British collaborator who helped confirm Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by photographing a magnificent eclipse from the island of Príncipe, coined the term, “time’s arrow,” to describe the fluid motion of time as we march inexorably forward. Eddington’s 1919 trip to Príncipe (just like Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which it helped to confirm) was all about discovering the nature of time and how physics can play havoc with what we perceive as fixed.

Light travels at a fixed speed in beams. We can simply see it.

But Eddington went further. Light, for Eddington, was the key to understanding fundamental laws of physics and grasping the nature of life, the universe and everything. As the photographs he took of a solar eclipse showed light from twinkling stars bending around the sun, their beams altered by its gravity, how the world works simultaneously fell apart and fell into place.

If light could be altered by gravity, it seemed like anything could. Maybe even time could be bent.

“Is there a problem with the earth’s gravitational pull?”

Events have gravity as well, not in the physical sense, but in the metaphorical sense. Historic resources capture events in a physical format, much like Eddington’s plates captured Einstein’s theory in tangible form. When you look at a specific resources, there is usually one moment in time which drags you toward it.

For battlefields like Gettysburg, it is a few short hours of conflict. Focus draws down, pulls you toward the 1st, 2nd and 3rd of July, 1863. The gravity of over 100,000 men gathered in one place, tearing at each others’ entrails, captures the imagination.

In the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, the bloodshed stretched-out as a streak across time, with nearly 13,000 men dying in about a year between 1864 and 1865. On the bloodiest soil of the American Civil War, those specific months molded a place forever.

On the tarmac at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama, black pilots struggled for four years against two foes: cruel gravity and even more cruel human hatred. In the middle of the “Black Belt,” these men worked against raw American hatred as they attempted to defend the world against Nazi tyranny and Japanese imperial dominion.

Blood flowed across the pavement at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965. Bloody Sunday is the gravitational object, when protesters, still crusading against American hatred, christened that bridge with blood ejected from beaten bodies and bashed skulls. Those few minutes when Alabama State Police truncheons met activists’ skulls hold the gravity of time.

“Marty, it's perfect, you're just not thinking fourth-dimensionally!”

CC / Jay Bonvouloir

In Douglas Adams’ immortal The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the Hitchhiker’s Guide notes that, “the whole fabric of the space-time continuum is not merely curved, it is in fact totally bent.” That slang double-entendre is nowhere more present in our daily lives than in good, four-dimensional interpretation. What if we bent the universe of interpretation, intentionally looking at our special places from different chronological perspectives? Would the meanings still be there? Would new meanings appear?

What if we told visitors more than the story of two days in July? What if we also shared how, in the same landscape where soldiers marched wearing gray in 1863 fighting for a slaveholder’s republic, men marched wearing white robes in 1927 for the preservation of the White Man’s right to supremacy?

What if we told visitors more than the story of 1864-1865? What if we also shared how, for the black citizens of nearby Americus, Georgia, the prison site at Andersonville was not simply a horrid place, but one of celebration through the 20th century of the time when men died for their very freedom?

What if we told visitors more than the story of the 1940s? What if we also shared how white men in uniform marched out of Tuskegee, Alabama eighty-years before in a military crusade to hold bonds on black wrists, a racial war which still raged on as the airmen flew.

What if we told visitors more than the story of March 7, 1965 and blood on the pavement? What if we unwrapped the tale of Edmund Pettus himself, the Confederate General and slaveholder in whose name the iconic bridge of Civil Rights is named.

When events become four-dimensional, when we break the dictatorial bounds of the one specific historic period of significance, new meanings begin shaking loose. And those new meanings only serve to underline the original event.

“Well, good luck. For both our sakes. See you in the future.”

On an island in the Atlantic Ocean just off of the Gold Coast of Africa, Sir Arthur Eddington took a simple photograph of the sun and helped propel mankind toward an understanding of how time, space and the universe are mutable and less concrete than we can imagine. The beam time’s arrow, though it flows one direction, can be spun and shone on many different events. Man was making immense progress on that tiny, volcanic spit of land.

Centuries before, the island and its neighbor São Tomé were colonized by the Portuguese, allowing Eddington safe travel to the remote rock. The islands’ chief function was as a way station for slaves on their journey to the new world. That tiny, volcanic spit of land was helping man, or at least man of a certain color skin, to make immense progress in his universe.

As Eddington exposed his photographic plate, the slopes of São Tomé and Príncipe were still being worked by slaves, even in 1919. Man always seems to make immense progress at immense costs.

Birthday Party, Cheesecake, Jelly Bean, Boom: The Easy Sesquicentennial Ends

This brand of sesquicentennial doesn't
sell; there's nothing sexy about man's
inhumanity to man.  But of anything
in the war, it's the most important
thing to confront.

There's been a good deal of digital ink spilled recently over whether the sesquicentennial is over. A provocative question can erupt into a torrent of thought.

But those thoughts have been brewing in my mind for a while now, since the whirlwind here in Gettysburg died down to a dull roar from the fever pitch of a few weeks ago. The tourist tide has subsided. The streets are easier to drive.

But most importantly, the press inquiries have died away. Nearly every day of the anniversary week, I had an e-mail or a voice-mail asking me to help a reporter with a project here or there, reporters who were clambering for some way to cover the sesquicentennial from a unique and intriguing angle. It was an amazing feeling, to have my vocation suddenly in the spotlight.

But that stopped July 4th. The press stopped beating down the doors, stopped calling the college's press contact list. The story was over.

Is the sesquicentennial over? From one perspective, of course not. Brooks is right; there are still two years of war left to fight, to commemorate (hell, even to celebrate if that's your bean). The war is far from over.

But what is over then? Because this sure feels like over if ever there were an over.

The end of Gettysburg means the spotlight, that powerful beam shone by the collective national attention, is gone. From April of 2011 until now, we in the Civil War community have had the benefit of that bright spotlight of attention, as the whole nation has been (to greater or lesser extents) focused on the war. Media has been seeking out the story. Culture has been buzzing. Hollywood has been filming and premiering.

But the war after Gettysburg morphs into that long, bloody, messy slog across Virginia or Tennessee and Georgia. It changes from prisoner exchanges into prison camps and the bloodiest ground on the American continent. Politics gets ugly, as Peace Democrats make a true, concerted effort (and nearly succeed) at unseating one of modern America's most beloved historical figures. Battles become racialized, as men are massacred in battle not simply because of the color of their uniforms, but because of the color of their skin. The war gets ugly.

And ugly doesn't sell.

So, the Sesquicentennial is over. The era of the media or culture shining a spotlight on us is at an end, for the sheer fact that they know that what that spotlight will show is bound to be ugly.

Glory gets replaced by horror after
July 1863. But even 150 years after, is
America willing to choose to confront
Fort Pillow or the Crater?

That spotlight we had was an amazing opportunity to sell the relevance of the war in amazing and powerful new ways. We had the opportunity, with little to no effort, to help Americans see the war as relevant to their daily lives, to who they are as a people and to what their nation is today. We can debate whether we squandered that 2-year-spotlight or not, and likely will for decades to come.

But the fact is, the spotlight has likely been doused.

This doesn't mean the commemorations stop.

It simply means the work gets infinitely harder. Where before culture and the media were amplifiers for the message that the Civil War is relevant to the average American, now we're going to need to make our own megaphone. The new messages will be harder to spread; the new audiences harder to draw. But the world can still go on turning if you let it.

As for me, I plan on continuing to keep trying to help Americans, all Americans and not just the folks who already come to our Civil War sites, to find their own personal relevances in these places. That battle just becomes infinitely harder, and the odds seem set against us as the last few days of July fade away.

Sort of like it did for a 87-year-old nation on the brink of collapse 150 years ago.

A New Theory for Battle Landscapes: Toward An Interpretive Future

There's a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding has been long and deep. It goes something like this:

Your crusade to destroy the current practice of military history on battlefields is a form of fundamentalism just like the supposed fundamentalism of military history you aim to change.

That's not a quote, it's a paraphrase of a very long and understandably upset missive from more than a year ago. I've heard similar criticism since I've begun evangelizing a different model than the one we've been practicing within military landscapes in the public sphere.

One of the phrases I've used on and off to describe the problem with the current state of military history as it is practiced on Civil War landscapes is "boxes on a map" history. Presentations and interpretive offerings tend to bog down in the details and minutiae of troop movements and tactical shifting across a landscape.

The argument is, admittedly, a strawman. But strawman arguments allow for discussion around the grand challenges that face us by looking at pure expressions of problems we all have to greater or lesser degrees. No one is always a sinner. No one is always a saint. To even intimate that I don't understand that (or anyone for that matter) is not fair.

So the strawman of "boxes on a map" history in Civil War landscapes doesn't exist in its pure form anywhere within the modern expression of Civil War interpretation. On the flip-side of the same coin, though, the "boxes on a map" model is expressed to greater and lesser extents everywhere on the landscape.

I went to a short orientation talk at a Civil War site a couple months ago. The talk was solid historically, discussing rebel forces striking a Federal defensive line in correct and honest detail.

But that's all it was. The battle was taken as significant as a foregone conclusion. The crucial argument was never advanced that we should care about that place personally. This battlefield was significant, the interpreter seemed to vainly say, because it was a significant battlefield. This battlefield deserved to be preserved, they said through the program they presented, because it was a battlefield worth preserving.

I'm not convinced this sort of argument from inherent relevance and significance will work with a modern audience worried about how their state and federal governments spend precious dollars. Why does this or that battlefield deserve to be preserved using tax dollars? Why should I contribute to a private preservation organizations' coffers? Why, in the basest form of the question, should I care?

So what does a new model look like?

At its heart, it is not throwing out military history like a baby with the bathwater. It's not even damning that baby as belonging to Rosemary. The model and shift is far subtler.

The argument for that shift has been forceful since I started this quest of talking about what the future of Civil War Interpretation needs to be over two years ago. To some extent, that has been because the problem seems so intractable and entrenched. To a greater extent, that's just my personal way of finding new ideas. I'll argue strongly for one philosophy, hoping and praying that others will do likewise. Then we can dialogue, discuss and start hashing and lashing our philosophies together into a workable whole.

But when it comes to talking craft, it seems like very few are joining that conversation. Maybe they feel it is improper to discuss how we do what we do. Maybe they simply have never thought about it, and doing some deep philosophical soul-searching is so foreign as to frighten. Most likely, they are simply tired at the end of a hard day.

Sometimes this blog feels like screaming into a void. One reaction (maybe the sane one) is to stop screaming and move on. My reaction has been to scream louder.

But the change I have been progressively screaming louder about isn't that radical or new, just an evolution of where the field of heritage interpretation has been heading as a whole for over half a century.

The new model for a truly meaningful and interpretive future for Civil War landscapes is about leveraging the military story in a way that is meaningful to a broad American audience personally and deeply. In the past, I've used the metaphor of a painter's canvas. The factual and functional elements of history, when one is practicing interpretation, is the canvas upon which the interpreter helps to paint diverse meanings using the paint of the visitor's heart.

Metaphors are really nice because they can make you feel warm and squishy. But what does this look like in practice?

It's about leveraging the past toward a meaning. It's about thinking interpretively first and foremost. It's not about stepping into a program with the stated goal of a visitor walking away knowing something, but instead feeling something on a visceral level.

An example helps. Take these two short pieces. Both talking about the same landscape. The first closely approximates the type of interpretation I've heard from a number of folks within a particular place, in this case Bolivar Heights, lurking above Harpers Ferry, WV. It will more than likely sound very familiar to those who lurk in the back rows of interpretive programs on any Civil War landscape:

In the darkness of the night of September 14th, 1862, Confederate General Thomas Johnathan "Stonewall" Jackson ordered A.P. Hill's to move his division of approximately 5,800 men around the left flank of Dixon Miles' defensive line on Bolivar Heights. Hill's men traveled by a wagon road and railroad tracks along the Shenandoah River, moving infantry and artillery into position for a final assault on the morning of September 15th. Lieutenant Colonel R. Lindsay Walker's brigade of artillery, comprising batteries from Virginia and South Carolina, unlimbered their guns in the darkness on the fields of the Chambers Farm.

When fog lifted the next morning, Confederate artillery opened up from Loudon Heights, Maryland Heights, Schoolhouse Ridge and now the left flank of Miles' men at the Murphy Farm, completely enveloping his force. Infantry moved forward on Bolivar Heights from the new position on the Federal left flank, Branch's North Carolina brigade and Gregg's South Carolina Brigade putting pressure on the 125th New York Infantry and the Third Maryland (Potomac Home Brigade). Shot and shell rained down on the defensive lines that the Federal forces had established on Bolivar Heights and Camp Hill, trenches filled units from New York and Ohio.

Cut off completely from escape and their line of supply, Miles and his 12,500 men were forced to surrender to the superior Confederate force. Along with Miles' captured Federal soldiers, the Confederates also seized around 5,000 Contrabands and took them back south.

This is the story of the final phase of the battle at Harpers Ferry, a relatively straight forward affair. There is movement, there is outflanking, there is what some have described as Jackson's most brilliant victory of the war. But fundamentally there are boxes and bars, both red and blue, moving across the map in a tactical ballet.

And there is no meaning. There is no reason to care.

But it doesn't have to be that way. Taking the same moments, the same timescale, some of the same players and the same situation, you can find and present something truly powerful and moving toward a deeper feeling of the war's experience. You can move toward meaning by using the tactical flow simply as a canvas for the larger narrative:

War is dangerous. It's destructive. It tears people apart. As darkness fell on Bolivar Heights on September 14th, 1862, Federal commander Dixon Miles' men were in a tight spot. But it wasn't inescapable. There was still hope that their compatriots commanded by George McClellan might come to their relief. They might escape to fight another day and, God willing, to return home to their wives and sons and mothers in New York or Ohio or across the Potomac in Maryland. The sleep that night, with rebels surrounding you on three sides, would have been fitful if you got any at all.

The next morning, you would wake up. Thomas Johnathan "Stonewall" Jackson's men are still there in your front. To your right, they still loom on the crest of Maryland Heights, they still hover over you in the rear on Loudon Heights. But they are hidden behind banks of fog. The sun comes out, the fog begins to burn off. You glance to your left and see something new. There, on a low ridge, are batteries of artillery and infantry. Flapping above their shoulders are flags, not the Stars and Stripes, but a blue cross on a red field. A.P Hill's 12,500 men have outflanked you, gotten onto your left side and cut you off from the only possible escape. You've been out-thought, out-maneuvered and out-matched.

The guns open up on your lines. The fire is so tremendous and panoramic that you feel like the only safety would be to crawl under the earth. Now, you know your fate: either death or capture. White flags begin flying from hundreds of upturned muskets, swords and sponge-rammers all across the ridge. You're safe now. But for how long? Only your captors know.

And what about the nearly 5,000 men, women and children, former slaves who have run to your lines for safety?

War is dangerous. It's destructive. It tears people apart: soldiers from their wives and children and mothers with cruel bullets and red-hot iron; mothers from their children and lovers with the whip and the manacle.

This piece is moving toward meaning, toward attempting to feel and experience the place versus simply understanding it. In my professional work with the NPS, I've been advocating that interpretation is, at its heart, all about the emotional connection. Pure fact cannot be considered interpretive in any meaningful sense of the word. This is not revolutionary, it's a concept that Freeman Tilden piloted in 1957 with his Interpreting Our Heritage (“Information, as such, is not Interpretation”) and David Larsen echoed again in Meaningful Interpretation using the words of Tanaka Shozo (“The care of rivers is not a question of rivers, but of the human heart”). But it's key.

This is my fight. I am not Andrew Jackson. This is not a crusade where I earnestly scream platitudes (I may scream them in jest or for dramatic effect) like "The Bank Military History: I will kill it!"

This is a canvas model, a re-appropriation of military history for a grander cause. It is leveraging knowledge of military history as a canvas upon which a broader personal meaning for a landscape is painted for all Americans and not just a subset. It is broadening and finding a reason people should care about troop movements. Most times, that comes through personalizing them and finding the human dimension of the story in deep, pervasive and meaningful ways.

But it's not a baby-and-bathwater argument.

Inside the Resource: Interpreting is Pointing at Things

Ranger Fox pointing at things...

We preserve the places of the past for a very specific reason: they are places. They are physical manifestations of the past, either landscapes where that past was played out or the remnants of the people who made that past happen.

That was clear to me last week as I watched David Fox, one of Harpers Ferry's premier interpreters, twiddle a shaving mirror in the sunlight and shine a twinkling beam on the gravestone of Rev. Alexander Morrell in the cemetery at the end of Fillmore Street.

We preserve places because of their place-ness, their raw physicality. And in that cemetery, David was conjuring Alexander Morrell for us from beyond the grave, using his tombstone as a stand-in for the reverend and teacher who died in 1885. Without that tombstone warmed by a beam of sunlight, Morrell would have remained dead for us as we stood in the cemetery.

This all swims into mind because it's getting to be that time of year, when interpreters head out into special landscapes and talk history with the public. It also means I've been soaking up some interpretive programs over the past few weeks and they've started my gears turning.

I've seen a few programs that used some decent techniques, but lacked the magic of David's tour through the cemetery. Many of the interpreters were telling what could have been compelling stories. They were really trying to show that their landscapes are relevant.

But something wasn't working quite right. I started recognizing it because when I'm excited or "on a roll" I fall into the same trap. The story was drifting away from the resource.

I have to stop myself sometimes and ask that crucial question every interpreter should ask themselves every single moment they are helping people move through a resource: "Why did I choose to stop here? Why am I standing right here?"

Everything in an interpretive program is a choice. And choices are supposed to be deliberate. It's not enough to stand in front of a landscape and lecture. It's not enough to stand in front of a house and talk about the man who lived there. It's not enough to be proximal to the resource while talking history.

We have resources so that we can be immersed in the past. We preserve places so we can visualize the past recreated on those landscapes.

In short, interpreters and rangers need to point at things.

It's not a joke. If the presentation I choose to give in front of the President's House at Gettysburg College or atop the crest of Camp Hill in Harpers Ferry doesn't reference that landscape, use it as my primary tangible to help the people I'm speaking with connect with the past in a visceral manner, I'm not doing my job.

Doesn't that landscape just beg
to be pointed at and interpreted?

So I point when I speak. I move. When I'm in front of the President's House, I intentionally gesture toward the door as I tell the tale of Robert E. Lee's July 2nd visit, touch the doorknob when I mention that a letter arrived at that door in 1862 warning that a beloved son was dying in far-off Illinois, I gaze in the windows as I'm recounting the tale of a College President and his student cum rebel soldier sitting down to a cordial meal in spite of their hatred for the beliefs of the other.

I bend in the National Cemetery and touch the stone of an unknown soldier as I talk about the black men who found opportunity in digging those graves. I grasp the pipe railing of the Rostrum as I tell my students about LBJ's radical 1963 speech advocating a new birth of freedom in a divided nation. I point and use the landscape I'm standing in nearly every sentence of every stop of every tour I conduct.

We have resources for a reason: we should explore them, point at them, imagine inside of them and touch them when we can to feel the past.

Sometimes you touch that landscape with your hands. Sometimes with your mind's eye. And sometimes, it just takes a simple pocket mirror to help illuminate these special places.

An Unexpected Hiatus and a Few Remarks

After a hiatus I've felt guilty about for days, I'm returning to the keyboard to rejoin the blogosphere. A bout of my own sickness and some family sickness kept me away from the keyboard. But I return, turning up once again like a bad penny.

I've got plenty of things in the works, from Twitter to the New York Tribune, from the proto-Scott-Joplin to continuing my deep dives into Gettysburg's past. But for now, I wanted to take you inside the late, great Future of the Civil War conference held this weekend at Gettysburg College. My battle with a nasty chest-cold abated long enough for me to participate in the Working Group on Training Seasonal Rangers in an Era of Holding the High Ground. What of the conference I could participate in before I had to whisk myself away to Wilmington was excellent, and I'm hoping Peter Carmichael and the crew down the street at CWI make this an annual gathering of the minds.

So, below is my own bootleg audio of my remarks at the conference. It's not the greatest quality of recording, but the words intact. I will eventually take the time to transcribe them and clean up the edges a bit, giving them a permanent home here on the blog. For now, however, the audio is available for you to squint your ears and attempt to hear my ramblings. I'll be back next week with more crazy ideas from the bleeding edge of the odd and wild world of Interpreting the Civil War.

MP3 Audio of my remarks at the Working Group (6 MB, approx. 6.5 minutes)

Loading Chekhov’s Gun in 9-Times: The Fundamental Disconnect in Historical Interpretation

Today's post is somewhat unique and calls for a different sort of introduction.

Thursday night brings into Gettysburg an avalanche of historians (both public and academic) to discuss the Future of Civil War History for a whole weekend. That means I'll be taking some annual leave from work and participating in a working-group investigating "Training Seasonal Historians in the Age of Holding the High Ground." It's still unclear who will be able to attend our panel thanks to sequestration and a moratorium on NPS travel. Still, those of us who can make it will soldier on.

But I didn't want just the folks who find themselves in Gettysburg this weekend to join the conversation. So I'm posting a truncated version of my position piece for the working group. Some of it's a bit out there; I know my positions on how we could make visitors experience better can seem a bit fringe. Because it's a position piece, it's a bit longer than my typical blog post. But I think there's some interesting concepts here that need to see the light of day.

We do have a relevance problem in our Civil War sites. We're not speaking to America. Here are some of my thoughts on how we might start doing that...

Anton Chekhov, famed 19th Century Russian playwright, died of Tuberculosis in 1904. I like to envision Chekhov’s parlor. I have no clue what his parlor looked like or where it even was. I would presume it was in Russia, or perhaps the Ukraine. In my mind, it looks like the set to his play The Cherry Orchard that my college theatre department put on while I was an undergrad. The shape of the room, though, doesn’t matter.

What matters is that on the wall of Chekhov’s parlor in my imagination, displayed prominently on one wall is the absence of a gun. It’s not there. It is not neatly hanging on the wall. There is no fouling piece cradled from two hooks. There aren’t even two hooks from which to hang a gun at all. And (obviously) because it’s not there, it’s not loaded. It’s not ready to be fired. The hammer is not cocked and waiting. Chekhov’s parlor in my mind has a floating empty space on the wall precisely where a gun is not. There is no gun.

....

Seventy-five percent of National Park Service interpreters were classed as, “Walking Encyclopedias,” in a recent study by Clemson University’s Marc Stern and Virginia Tech’s Robert Powell of personal-services interpretation. These types of interpreters were wholly, “focused on conveying a large volume of facts.”

First and foremost, that is not intended as a positive assessment. Those words should sting. They should sting with all the weight of words hurled by a fourth grade bully at a book-toting, glasses-wearing pre-teen as he ambles down the hall of the school. Because in the end that’s what those words mean: just like the classic stereotype of a nerd, the label, “Walking Encyclopedia,” is not a damnation of knowledge but fundamental social skills. The “Walking Encyclopedia” Park Ranger is aloof, unreachable and unrelatable. They are principally not an effective communicator.

This class of primary interpreter identity, the report went on to show, correlated negatively with visitor outcomes. In short, the more like a “walking encyclopedia” an interpreter is, the less likely the visitors are to have a positive behavioral change because of a program.

Encyclopedias have one key goal, be they the traditional kind which sit on library shelves, the new digital encyclopedias of the internet age or the walking variety: imparting knowledge. But imparting knowledge as a goal is not necessarily the most effective tactic when it comes to interpretation. “Interpreters who expressed that a primary goal of their program was to increase the knowledge of the audience about their program’s topic,” the Stern & Powell report concluded, “achieved lower visitor experience and appreciation scores than others.”

Setting out to teach facts and figures, information and events, tactics or biographies is simply not as effective as other more noble endeavours. When an interpreter intends to increase visitor knowledge, when she desires to cram facts into their heads, programs begin to become less effective on the whole. “Those aiming to change their audience’s attitudes, appreciation, understanding, and/or desire to learn achieved more positive attitudinal outcomes,” Stern and Powell continued, “Interpreters who explicitly aimed to increase their audience members’ levels of concern or change their behavior were more likely to achieve more positive post‐program behavioral change than others.”

Knowledge is power, as the adage from Francis Bacon and 1990s Saturday Morning Cartoons exclaim, but it certainly is not the key predictor of success in Interpretation. Setting out to impart knowledge to visitors, setting out literally to teach them facts, is not as powerful or pure a motive as the myriad other options an interpreter has when stepping out into the field to give a program.

Yet one of the key metrics for success in both National Park Service interpretation training and beyond is the measurable outcome. These types of goals and objectives are typically phrased as a, “by the end of this tour/talk, visitors will be able to…” formulaic phrase. Often, the next few words are something akin to, “name three generals who commanded troops at Cold Harbor and explain their significance,” or, “list two of the three major branches of the Army during the war and explain their utility.”

....

A whole wall of Chekhov's Guns
/ CC Chris O'Donnell

When we let our primary selection criteria for guides or interpreters be raw knowledge and when we eschew the ability to process that story into a more powerful meaning, then we will find we have hired am extremely knowledgeable corps of interpreters who have not a lick of skill when it comes to the basics of storytelling or molding a narrative. We find ourselves with a workforce composed primarily of researchers and not communicators, primarily of brains without mouths, of minds without meaningful vocabularies. And the most apparent expression of this, in our Civil War landscapes, is the proliferation of interpretive programming which concerns itself heavily with the facts of the historical events at play, but nearly always ignores the broader scope of the narrative and its personal significances to the audience in front of us.

It seems one of our most desperate fears is that one of our visitors might know more than us. Culturally within the National Park Service, we have a deep-set fear that we cannot possibly survive that type of scenario. So we arm our staffs, both temporary and permanent, to constantly play a game of ‘stump the ranger.’ We focus our seasonal training initiatives on cramming as many facts about our park narratives, predominately battle tactics and movements at Civil War sites, into a budding ranger's head instead of turning the focus toward technique and delivery methods. It is not a sin to turn to a visitor who is trying to engage in a game of ‘stump the ranger’ and say, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer to that one. But here's a good book to try." And if that visitor persists, it is not a sin to tell them that an interpreter's job is not to know every fact, but simply to help visitors have meaningful experiences using the facts the interpreter does know.

Facts and knowledge are important, just not paramount. The raw stuff of history is wheat and chaff waiting to be separated at the mill of the mind. This much the interpreter shares with the historian. Both take the raw material of history, the documents, letters, censuses, notes scribbled in the heat of the moment, and do something with them. The historian runs all this through the grist mill of the mind, grinding the facts and figures against the wheel and bringing forth massive 50 lb. bags of fine ground flour. The historian captures every viable grain of wheat, leaves behind the chaff and crams the fine flour into the larders of knowledge. That's not a fault, it's simply a definition.

But History is to Interpretation as a fifty pound sack of flour is to a cupcake; they partly comprise the same basic materials, but one takes a lot weirder fine grain control. The interpreter, the truly skilled interpreter like Larsen, runs that same grist through the mill of the mind and comes out with 50 lb. bags of fine ground flour as well. But the interpreter looks for the one cup in that fifty pounds, the one scoop of flour that will make the perfect cupcake, a scoop that will make the most amazing meaning. Then they politely dump the majority of that flour into the hog trough, not to be used for human consumption but not decried as entirely useless.

Interpretation is a fundamentally different philosophy of research and construction. The Historian amasses the aggregate of the world's knowledge. The Interpreter combs the world's knowledge for one or two amazingly meaningful tastes.

What does this look like? The Interpreter digging through history seeks out resonances, not complete bodies of knowledge. Resonances are the echoes of the past forward into the human soul. So instead of worrying about learning an order of battle or a table of organization, the interpreter's job is to build a small but ever-growing toolkit of meanings and stories, small morsel ready to whip out and build greater meaning in a place.

So what does a future for Civil War Interpretation look like, then? First and foremost, it is not a rote listing of facts. It is not taking visitors onto a battlefield and endlessly explicating minute movements of company level bodies of troops with no sense of meaning or purpose. It needs to be something more, something truly interpretive. It needs to not focus on imparting facts as much as inspiring wonder and curiosity within the visiting public. It needs to be personally relevant to the whole American people, and not simply those visiting our sites. In short, it needs to be conveyed by Park Rangers who identify themselves as interpreters first and historians second, as servants always to the meanings of the past and not solely to the facts.

....

And so we return to that first damnation of Stern & Powell’s report: the Walking Encyclopedia. This is the ever flowing font of knowledge. It is not so much a font as a fire hose, spewing out a constant, blistering stream of water. This is our primary character trait as interpretive park rangers at National Parks. We gather our crowd near the fire hydrant that says, “Ranger Programs Begin Here,” hook up a hose and kindly ask them to drink, before open the nozzle on them at full bore. And the rules of narrative have an answer for the Walking Encyclopedia as well.

In a letter to fellow playwright Aleksandr Lazarev in 1889, Anton Chekhov noted about exactly how much detail he intended to include in a play. “One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it,” Chekhov mused. Muscovite businessman and art collector Sergei Shchukin purportedly remembered an even more descriptive maxim from Chekhov in his own memoir: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” The gun is detail. If it will never go off, it is simply an adornment on the wall. It is a distraction for the audience. Hand the gun on the wall and someone, even if it is just one mind sitting in the balcony, will forget that the entire rest of the play is happening and wait for the flash and the bang.

The literary principle of Chekhov’s Gun is one antidote in a medicine case of many waiting to be applied like a poultice to Civil War interpretation. Does this or that fact contribute to understand? Does it lend meaning? Does it throw an amazing light on a truly meaningful opportunity for the visitor to connect with this place, with the real? No? Were you just including it to show the depth of knowledge you have and nothing else? Lose it! Don’t hand the gun on the wall if it will never go off. Don’t establish where a man is from if you never bring it up again? Did this soldier have four children? Was he a carpenter? Are you going to do something with those facts more than just hang them on the wall and forget them? Will you churn them into meaning later on? If not, don’t go to the bother of hanging them on the wall. Strip the story to its meaning, so that no one’s eyes or ears are waiting for the bang that will never come.

The simple tools of communication are the greatest antidote we have to the grand disease that is the Walking Encyclopedia in the National Park Service. The cure is simple; we simply need to stop being historians and start being communicators and partners in our visitors’ own discovery. When we help them to find meaning, and not a litany of facts, then we will be relevant to the whole American people. Right now, our relevance is in a downward spiral and there aren’t many parachutes hanging on the wall of the plane. Someone, anyone, needs to pull up on the yoke.

The parlor in my imagination, the one Anton Chekhov left behind inside his villa in Yalta in 1904, has no gun on the wall. It’s not waiting to be fired. No maid lightly dusts the cocked hammer. No cap sits atop the cone. No hammer falls down. A plume of gun smoke doesn’t drift through the air. The playwright is not stunned by the lack of an explosion. He does not clutch his stomach; there is no gaping hole in his gut. There is no gun.

Anton Chekhov, famed 19th Century Russian playwright, died of Tuberculosis in 1904.

This work contains material based upon or wholly the work of a National Park Service employee, created during the course of official duties. As a work of a federal government agency, such work is in the public domain and free to be redistributed, reused or remixed by anyone for any purpose.

Consumptive Use History

The Library and its books / NTHP Photo

It's been five years since I was living in DC and working at the Lincoln Cottage. I don't often talk about my short stint in DC at American University (let's just say that the University and I didn't quite mesh philosophically) and working with the National Trust for Historic Preservation at President Lincoln's Cottage right as the site was opening. My time at the cottage was a blip on the radar; barely any digital footprints still exist from then.

The fact is that I wasn't the most beloved tour guide during my time in the Cottage, chiefly because I consistently stepped outside of the relatively tightly-defined box of the tour outline. Fellow Cottage alum Allison Hermann (cum Jordan) can attest to that. I broke nearly every rule of visitor experience that was strenuously laid out by management in those first tenuous months of the Cottage being open. I was breaking the rules chiefly for visitor understanding, appreciation and enjoyment, but I was still stepping outside of the box left and right. My free-form interpretive philosophy didn't really jibe with the NTHP's very strictly controlled and scripted philosophy.

That's not to say I didn't get things out of my time there. There are chunks of my interpretive philosophy which spring nearly full-formed from both the great and shabby things I saw at the Cottage. There are ideas which started rattling around in my head five years ago and which are still falling out of my mouth, often unbidden.

One of the most interesting concepts the Cottage employed (they may still employ it, it's been five years since I've visited) was in the library. On the table sat original, mid-1850s editions of some of Lincoln's favorite books. Part of the explanation given to staff as to why these were real, original editions of Lincoln's favorite books was the simple fact that finding originals in used book stores was far less expensive than having custom reproductions handmade.

Regardless of why these books were there to be touched, the fact is they were there to be touched. They were classified as consumptive use. They would eventually wear out and then-curator Erin Carlson Mast would need to find new ones. The books were intended to be used, touched, handled and eventually destroyed for the sake of the story.

My collection of books which
will eventually be destroyed.

That idea has always stuck with me. There's something so pure about that idea. We so often see artifacts as prisoners behind sterile glass walls, never to be touched by soiled visitor hands. They are sainted objects beyond our reach, better than our feeble, mortal hands deserve to touch.

But these books were there in service of making real, visceral connections to the past. They would be touched. There was no glass. They would be abused. There was no barrier. They would ultimately be destroyed.

But that destruction would not be a loss. It would be a gain for the thousands of fingers that touched the pages, felt the leather, rubbed the cloth and weighed history in their hands. They would feel Lincoln by feeling his favorite books in their own hands.

So I've begun to amass my own collection of consumptive use books. They're intended to help tell the story. They're books that soldiers borrowed from professors to wile away the hours of boredom. They're books that professors obsessively crafted in the months after the battle then obsessively sold to a slavering American public. They're books in which bored Confederates inscribed their names, forever to be graphite prisoners in a Yankee library. I'll carry them around, walk to the places around the Pennsylvania College campus where their cousins, books that looked and smelled and felt just like these, met with the people of the past. I'll tell their tales again. I'll hoist them in front of eager eyes. I'll pass them around through sweaty, dirty hands of the people who can feel the past through their pages. And someday, they'll fall to pieces.

And I'll head over to Abebooks.com and replace them. And then replace them again. And again.

You see, this destruction is all about meaning. Because if there's anything that the Lincoln Cottage taught me, it's that sometimes the best way to preserve the past is to destroy it in slow increments.

That's me, leading Gettysburg Semester students around the Cottage. / NTHP Photo

On Larsen: Friends, Philosophers and Historians

David's interview from "Discovery 2000"
that's been making the rounds lately.

It's been a melancholic week for me. My boss Katie's blog post on Tuesday set my mind spinning back to a friend we lost two years ago. When the Civil War Institute noticed some video footage of Larsen that's on YouTube, it only cemented those thoughts into my mind. The video started racing around the blagosphere, and the thoughts percolated. And the words used to describe Dave were daggers to my heart: "National Park Service historian."

David wasn't an historian, he was an interpreter. I know that distinction isn't clear in the Civil War world, but it should be. David's American University degree was in Philosophy. Yes, he worked his entire life back and forth with history. But he was a philosopher first and foremost.

The raw stuff of history was wheat and chaff for Larsen, waiting to be separated at the mill. This much an interpreter shares with the historian. Both take the raw material of history, the documents, letters, censuses, notes scribbled in the heat of the moment, and do something with them.

The historian runs all this through the grist mill of the mind, grinding the facts and figures against the wheel and bringing forth massive 50 lb. bags of fine ground flour. The historian captures every viable grain of wheat, leaves behind the chaff and crams the fine flour into the larders of knowledge. That's not a fault, it's simply a definition.

But History is to Interpretation as a fifty pound sack of flour is to a cupcake; they partly comprise the same basic materials, but one takes a lot weirder fine grain control.

The interpreter, the truly skilled interpreter like Larsen, runs that same grist through the mill of the mind and comes out with 50 lb. bags of fine ground flour as well. But the interpreter looks for the one cup in that fifty pounds, the one scoop of flour that will make the perfect cupcake, that will make the most amazing meaning. Then they politely dump the majority of that flour into the hog trough, not to be used for human consumption.

This is a fundamentally different philosophy of research and construction. The Historian amasses the aggregate of the world's knowledge. The Interpreter combs the world's knowledge for one or two amazingly meaningful tastes.

An Interpretive Dialogue, the story of an
historian struggling to find meaning,
is the heart of David's 2003 book
Meaningful Interpretation.

What does this look like? The Interpreter digging through history seeks out resonances, not complete bodies of knowledge. Resonances are the echoes of the past forward into the human soul. So instead of worrying about learning an order of battle or a table of organization, the interpreter's job is to build a small but ever-growing toolkit of meanings and stories, small morsel ready to whip out and build greater meaning in a place.

This is an entirely different research skill set, fundamentally connected to that of the Historian but focused entirely differently.

Tuesday morning, on the way into work, I was listening to WGBH's archived real-time coverage of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It is an amazing living document; an entire day's radio coverage as reporters try to find the words to describe the momentous scene.

And a few tantalizing pieces stood out.

George Lincoln Rockwell and members of the American Nazi Party were protesting south of the Lincoln Memorial that August day. Major Karl Allen, Rockwell's assistant, was arrested and arraigned for demonstrating without a license. He reported to ERN's Mike Rice that, "the March is instigated by Communist trained people." Even when the Lincoln Memorial was being used as a laboratory for democracy by A. Philip Randolph's march, it was being used as such a laboratory by his opposition.

Rick Lee, reporting national headlines from Boston back to the ERN, read an obituary for W.E.B. DuBois. The famed activist for civil rights in his own era and founding voice of the NAACP, died the day before the March on Washington. DuBois was the Malcolm X of his own struggle for Civil Rights. The Black Civil Rights movement was not a unified front in any decade, but a fractured and piecemeal drive toward true citizenship.

Two tidbits. Your eye begins to search for them automatically, your ear begins hearing them in the chaff that is 15 hours of broadcast coverage of a major American event. They are small resonances with the modern era, many that don't need to be explicitly pointed out. You don't need to say "Westboro Baptist Church" to draw the modern connections. You don't need to hear "Washington gridlock" to think of divided political minds coming together for a greater good.

It is approaching research for a fundamentally different purpose. History aims to chronicle the arch and trends of the past. Interpretation aims to make the present and future better, and just so happens to use history to do that sometimes.

Interpreters are not, cannot be, never should be historians. They carry an historian's toolbox, but they need to approach history in a fundamentally different way.

They need to instead use those tools of history like my friend David did. They need to be philosophers. We are sages for a modern era, we are the voices trying to make the world a better place. We don't chronicle the past, we use it to help people find their own lessons within.

The past is the interpreter's and philosopher's paint set and his canvas is the future. At least it was for Larsen.