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.
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!”
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.
Today we offer another of our “Guest Post Wednesday” extras, with some meditations on Rambo from Aaron Urbanski. Yeah, we’re not kidding... Rambo. Aaron is a graduate of the GMU American History Masters program and alumnus Ranger of the NPS.
For me, Sunday evenings are typically a nice time to relax, reflect on the weekend that was, and ponder the week ahead. This past Sunday, I participated in none of those activities. I was distracted, distraught, and, due to the late hour I ultimately found myself still awake, a bit disheveled. Rambo 4 was on television. Now, one does not typically watch Rambo 1, 2, 3, or 4 if he or she is looking to discover some profound, eye-opening message or theme. I was largely distracted, as anyone who watches a Rambo film surely is, by the over-the-top violence and profanity. I am not knocking the Rambo series in any way here. But what ultimately made me distraught as I watched the a large number of arrows fly and throats opened was the fact that I was trying to figure out the meaning of it all. Can John Rambo teach us something about quantifying history?
According to one online source, the time at which the first person is killed in Rambo 4 is 3:22. After that, the number of people killed per minute until the end of the film (not including the credits) is 3.04. So, basically, three people die each minute in Rambo 4. These are some pretty good stats. Hats off to the person who discovered them.
Rambo looks something like this
(**note: not to scale**)
Math is fun. It can be applied to an abundance of situations to make them seem more interesting. Want some more Rambo stats? In Rambo 3, the number of bad guys killed by Rambo with his shirt off is 45. This is one less than Rambo 2. I suppose he preferred to be clothed in Rambo 4, because the number of people he kills without his shirt on is 0. Math is also hard and oftentimes quite frustrating. Once the numbers get large, decimal points are thrown in, and we have to begin rounding, we get further away from the true answers to mathematical equations. This plays out time and again in American history. John Rudy touches at this a bit in his post, “Dead is Dead: Why 20% Doesn’t Matter”. How do we conceptualize vast statistics about an event that happened 150 years ago? In other words, what do the numbers of dead on a battlefield mean to visitors of an American historical site? How can we get true meaning from math?
Suppose an interpreter tells a visitor 5,000 men lost their lives during a particular battle of the American Civil War. This is a graphic, harrowing number. Can it ever be an exact number? No. We can never know exactly how many individuals lost their lives on any given Civil War battlefield. Nothing can pinpoint that sort of precise statistic. The numbers get more real and vivid, however, when we begin to learn the individual stories of the men who comprise that group of 5,000, just like John suggested in his April post. These numbers start to get easier to work with when an interpreter helps visitors find true value in statistics. We are able to move from Rambo numbers to meaningful numbers. Each of the men that make up that group of 5,000 matter. Each person who hears that number is going to find meaning in each individual story in a different way. So, if one person discovers 5,000 different meanings, then 30 people on an interpretive program will discover 150,000 meanings. Is my math right here? That is an astounding number of meanings. Math is fun.
Now, we can’t expect 150,000 meanings to ever be reached on an interpretive program, thanks to limitations of time and energy. But its rather impressive to see the power of numbers play out on any American historical site. Heck, we don’t need a battlefield to find meaning in the Civil War. The metrorail system in Washington, DC, is the second busiest rapid transit system in the US, after the subway in New York. According to metro sources, there were 215.3 million trips taken during the year 2008. In March of 2012, more than 760,000 people rode the metro each day. There are 86 stations in the DC metro system. One of those stations has the name “African American Civil War Memorial”. I don’t know exactly how many people look at a metro map each day and see the name of the stop, or even get off at that stop and see the modest memorial it is named for. But based on metro’s calculations I’ve listed above, it’s safe to say a large number of people in and around DC each day are reminded that African Americans played a part in the Civil War that deserves to be memorialized.
If we could more accurately pinpoint that number, though, would the value of this kind memorialization increase? What do most people do in the morning as they wait for their preferred mode of public transportation to whisk them away to their jobs? Some catch up on a book, a good number probably listen to music, and even more stare into space with glazed eyes that read “why do I have to be awake this early?”. Can we offer them a few moments of something else to do?
What if it was determined on average 6,000 individuals enter the metro station that has “African American Civil War Memorial” in its title per day. What if some sort of sign, gesture, or notion was presented to each person as he or she waited for a train to arrive, reminding him or her why the station holds the name it does? Can this be done? Would something like this be an effective way to help individuals find meaning in their surroundings during something so routine as a commute to work? That is another huge batch of meanings waiting to be brewed. And these are meanings that catch people off guard, meanings found during an activity they have to do each day.
So in the end, let’s not forget the importance of numbers when we strive to share history with others.
Because one day I’d like to know how many times any famous Civil War leader committed a gallant, Rambo-style act. While shirtless.
I trust people who sound like me. I trust people who speak the same language as me. Part of this comes from a simple fact of understanding. I speak very little Spanish, even less French.
But I also speak other languages, and trust people who speak to me in those languages.
First, I speak geek. I am an unrepentant lover of science fiction, native to personal computers since the era of the DOS prompt, frequent quoter of nerdy movies and television, admirer of the beautiful simplicity of physics and the amazing symmetry of maths. Geek is a second tongue for me.
I also speak the language of popular culture. Frankly, we all do to greater or lesser degrees. I know what Mad Men is all about. I 'get' a good number of the gags when Saturday Night Live lampoons MTV, BET or Lifetime. I have enough of a working knowledge of the Twilight series, The Jersey Shore and much of modern popular music to understand a passing reference to them (and know they hold no real interest for me).
But when I interpret, I am told to dress up my language. We struggle in the public history world with this awkward concept of 'agency voice.' We quake in fear at the concept that we as individuals speak in some mystical, disembodied voice on behalf of our agencies or institutions. But this gussying up our prose, this abandonment of a cultural vernacular for some perceived cultural high ground could be severely destroying our ability to communicate with a modern audience.
We can't speak to an audience in a language they don't understand. Speaking more slowly and louder doesn't work. Just because an audience might listen to Lady Gaga doesn't make them unable to understand, appreciate and come to care for large historical concepts and truths. Sometimes we need to speak in the very words our audiences share with each other, that we share with each other everyday.
So what might this look like? Simple: imagine if Lady Gaga performed a power-anthem to accompany the women's suffrage movement of the late 1910s...
From the folks who brought you Too Late To Apologize, the latest in vernacular public history.
This video is nothing new per say. Yet it is still powerful. Watch it ten times, twenty times, a hundred times. Each time you'll find another small, powerful detail. Did you catch the note from the Senator's mother telling him, "Huzzah and vote for Suffrage"? Did you catch the doubt in the woman's eyes as she proudly declared she didn't need to vote? Did you notice how the protesters in front of the White House were a spot on match for the real women who stood there fighting for their rights? The piece is outrageously powerful, even on the hundredth viewing.
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But it is only an evolution, not a revolution. It joins a long lineage of style and straight parody incorporating history and civics into a modern vernacular language. Who from my generation and the one preceding doesn't recognize the line, "I'm just a Bill, Yes I'm only a Bill..."? I learned the preamble to the Constitution thanks to Schoolhouse Rock! as well, and still need to hum the tune to keep the pieces in the right order in my mind. Even Schoolhouse Rock! took on Women's Suffrage, with another power anthem about gaining the right to vote.
How can we foster more creative ways of sharing the vast world of history with the public in the language they speak instead of the stilted and foreign voice we think our institutions should speak with? How can we reach an American public where they already are, instead of fruitlessly demanding of them that they try to understand a language they don't speak natively?
I'm not sure. But I think it looks something like a tribute to Lady Gaga featuring Thriller-esque suffragettes, a brooding Woodrow Wilson and a struggle for freedom embodied by men and women acting to make the world better. I think it looks like Ben Franklin wearing a mock AC/DC tee-shirt and shredding the guitar while Thomas Jefferson sings his grievances to the King. I think it speaks in the language of the modern world, the vernacular of the culture we live within. That history will gain far more traction than anything in 'agency voice' could ever hope to, I guarantee.
