Your Fortune: Fried Rice and John Brown

Fortune cookies usually disappoint me.

I had Chinese food Sunday night and it got me thinking. I know that's a very random thing to say, but it's the truth. We don't usually consider Chinese food to be brain food, but for me it can be very powerful stuff. I like the stuff they serve up from the back of the Giant Supermarket here in town. The people who work the counter are always very nice and it tastes just clean enough. I like a bit of mystery in my pork fried rice.

But the thing that gets me thinking the most in any meal of General Tso's or Sweet and Sour Chicken is the fortune cookie. These little nuggets are always so poorly named. They rarely actually try to tell the future, which bugs me a bit. A fortune cookie never warns me I'm about to trip or about to be hit by a speeding train. Platitudes and weird horoscope mumbo-jumbo can only carry this mind so far. That and a few, "...in bed," jokes made with friends while munching after some Beef and Broccoli.

My fortune cookie on Sunday night had a Franklin-esque aphorism which really got the gears turning in my head: "Listening, not imitation, may be the sincerest form of flattery."

My brain turned back to this past summer. I've mentioned a few times that I piloted some experimental programming down in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park, trying out some wild and different interpretive experiences we don't necessarily see that often when we visit historic sites. I let the visitors speak.

We so often paint our museums and institutions, our historic sites and interpretive programs as passive experiences, where the visitor is either explicitly or implicitly told, "look, don't touch; listen, don't talk" That's one of those phrases I hate, right up there with, "no photography allowed." Nothing makes me want to snap a photo more than a small pictogram of a camera in a no-smoking red circle. And when I hear the words, or get the vibe off of a docent or interpreter that this is a, "look, don't touch," moment, or the dreaded and condescending, "touch with your eyes," my fingers begin to twitch. My understanding of the world is based quite a bit on spacial relations and tactile space. Chock that up to the prime toy in my life having been LEGO.

I'm also a talker. Look over on the right-hand side of the blog for proof: a year's worth of back catalogue of rantings, ravings and my inability to keep my big, fat mouth shut. So telling me, "listen, don't talk," is the surefire way to drive me batty.

How many mes are out there in the world, itching to express themselves in environments we typically rope off for listening and observing only? And what could they have to share?

This past summer, I offered one example of what happens when we shut up for a few minutes and let our visitors talk. The results were simply amazing. I would take the crowd on an abbreviated John Brown program, hitting a few key points but not worrying about being completist. Give them a few key pieces of the story: the tales of Dangerfield Newby and Thomas Boerly, along with a piece about why someone might want to own a human being.

The engine house as it appears in
the MOLLUS scrapbooks at
USAHEC (Vol. 134, p. 6858) / PD

Then we would step into the magical place, the sacred, inviolable space. Every site has that place. At Harpers Ferry, it is the four brick walls of the armory fire engine house, known in later years as "John Brown's Fort."

The key to the whole moment was my demeanor. Over the course of the preceding half an hour, I have mostly presented to the crowd in a typical, everyday Ranger style. Moving into the Fort, I change my mannerisms. I sit down, lean back against the wall. I take my hat off and set it on the bench beside me. I speak more softly, not presenting but just chatting. I ask an open ended question: "Was John Brown right? Was violence the answer?" And then I shut up.

Magic would happen. On one tour, within minutes of the visitors beginning their tentative conversations, one man piped in that John Brown was, "just the same as Osama Bin Laden." I could have jumped in. I could have pushed and prodded. I didn't. The crowd did. Other visitors challenged the man in a respectful way. They pushed and pulled back and forth on Brown and his character. They chewed this man who used violence to try to end violence, this man who killed American citizens in order to make a race of men into American citizens. They truly tried to taste Brown.

On another tour, a nice British couple on holiday in the 'States compared Brown to both Nelson Mandela and the American Revolutionaries. That gave the crowd pause as they took in the moment, stirred it into the melting pot of ideas within their brains, and tried to see Brown from that point of view.

We would spend half hour in the Fort some days. Others, the conversation would stretch more than an hour and a half, with new visitors drifting in and out as the topic suited them. In all that time, I probably said five or ten sentences. That's it. The visitors talked, and I listened.

I listened. I bestowed upon them the same respect they had offered me for the past half hour as I tried to unfold a few key moments in Brown's raid. Then I imitated them and listened as they tried to unfold their personal Brown and wrangle with his meanings in our modern land.

It wasn't hollow flattery, though. I listened, sitting in the calm cool of the Fort to show sincere respect. The marketplace of ideas is a powerful thing, if only we are humble enough to let it flourish. Every time I walk into that Fort now, I don't simply think about Brown in 1859. I think of the faces of those people who went on those journeys with me this past summer. I sincerely hope they're doing well.

And I sincerely hope they are still struggling with the morality of Brown. It flatters and humbles me to think that they might still be thinking of his struggle just because I had the crazy idea to shut up and listen.

Interpretive Vernacular: Pop Culture is a Language

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.

Add caption

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.

Confederates in the Dorm: Hidden In Plain Sight

By late June 1863, Penn Hall had all
but completely emptied of students. /
Harpers Weekly 22 June 63

You can imagine the terror in the young 21-year-old's eyes as he realized who was charging down the Cashtown Pike into Gettysburg on the 26th of June. You can feel the chill that might have run down his spine as he realized that the rebel army he had deserted, the one he had escaped by running to the Federal lines, was crashing down upon him again. And the deserter's fate during this war was simple: execution.

Last week I cancelled office hours. Cancelled might be a strong term: I delayed them from 7:45pm to 9:00pm. I know, it broke the solemn vow of my professorial duties. But I left a nice note on the office door and headed to Special Collections on the fourth floor of Musselman Library.

Gettysburg College's Special Collections never ceases to amaze me. Every time I wander through the doors on some wild lead or another, I find the most dumbfounding artifacts of a past long forgotten. Wednesday was no different.

Students living within the main edifice in 1863 at Pennsylvania College were required to be back in bed by a certain time each night. The college's tutor, Mathias Richards, performed bed checks. He kept meticulous notes on who was tardy, who was absent and who caused particular trouble in what otherwise were supposed to be quiet halls.

Who has looked at the Record of Absences from rooms or building for Pennsylvania College in 1863 since Mathias Richards penciled in the notes in tight block letters? I would wager very few eyes, more than likely a few interns writing a catalog record or two. Other than that, I would guess no one has spent much more than a moment to glance at the register.

Richards, with many of his classmates, joined the local company of volunteer militia bound for Harrisburg to defend the Commonwealth against the rebel invasion. The register became haphazard after his absence, with a long column of ditto'd observations that a majority of the college left on the 17th of June, either to fight or to flee. Of the 102 college and preparatory students who lived in the college edifice, only 19 students remained on campus after June 17th - 5 Seniors, 3 Juniors, 1 Sophomore, 1 Freshman, 2 Partial course and 7 Preparatory students. That's a scant 16% of the whole student body still living within Pennsylvania Hall.

One of those who remained behind was a partial course student named Arthur Markell. While his classmates evacuated to the safety of their homes, and other joined the Pennsylvania Militia, Markell found himself stranded. His family home in Winchester, Virginia was very much inaccessible, behind Confederate lines. Even if he could have made it to his family in the Shenandoah Valley, his welcome mightn't have been so warm. Arthur Markell was on the lam. He had broken a sacred vow. He was a wanted man.

First Lieutenant Arthur Markell had deserted from the 5th Virginia Infantry in March of 1862.

For one Confederate, the watchful
gaze of Mercury became home for a
short respite from war.

In 1861, as war was looming on the horizon and Virginia's fate was yet to be decided, Arthur Markell was a student at Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia. But the Old Dominion's hesitant decision to leave the Union would change that quickly. The young student returned home, and was instructed to join up with his local militia company at Harpers Ferry. He eventually found himself coerced into service in the 5th Virginia Infantry, Company A.

Arthur Markell ran from the army in March of 1862. He made his way between the lines, surrendering to General Banks at Charlestown, Va. He was sent to the Old Capitol Prison in Washington City, where he let fly every piece of information he had on where the Confederate forces were situated in the Valley. After signing an oath of allegiance, he was let go.

Markell wandered northward, ultimately ending up in Gettysburg just two months after he had skedaddled from the rebels near Winchester. Pennsylvania College, like Roanoke College, was a Lutheran college. Markell would have fit in perfectly among the Pennsylvanians and Marylanders who dominated the school's population. He settled down to his studies once again.

Until June of 1863, he was safe. But as soon as Markell got wind that Confederates were setting their sights on Gettysburg, he headed south. His friends in town had begged him, "to seek a place of safety," from the oncoming tide of Confederates. If Markell was caught, he clearly knew his fate. Deserters were low scum in the Civil War. Traitors who revealed secrets to the enemy were doubly vile. Markell was running for his life. The Federal army, he wagered, was his best bet for safety. Down the Emmitsburg Road he ran, until he was stopped by a curious officer. When questioned, the young, naive and scared man more than likely told the truth. He was a Confederate deserter seeking protection from his own former countrymen. The officer arrested him.

Markell found himself once again imprisoned, this time held at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. He begged the Commander of the Middle Military District General Robert Schenck for his release, explaining his story in a detailed letter. Many prominent citizens of Gettysburg banded together and vouched for Markell's loyalty in their own letter to General Schenck. The young man was finally released in early August after signing another oath of allegiance. He never returned to complete his studies in Gettysburg. Pennsylvania College's rebel deserter had escaped once again, this time from a much more awkward fate than marching and fighting. He had escaped both the executioner's bullet and the Federal prison.

Prominent citizens vouched for Markell,
including Robert Harper, David
McConaughy & College President
Henry Louis Baugher.

My biggest question is how this all went undiscovered for so long. The Battle of Gettysburg, out of every topic within the Civil War, has had more eyes passing over more documents in more archives than any other. The gaps within the scholarship though, particularly in the civilian end of the story, are huge. Not simply huge, they are drive-a-Mack-truck-through-them huge. It is frightening how little even some of the experts on this field know about the citizens who lived here before it became a battlefield.

This whole tale emerged from one line in the attendance register buried away in Special Collections. Markell, unlike the rest of his fellow students who, the ledger explains, "Left after 17th," is instead listed as, "Left as Refugee." Those three words were a tiny thread. They were tantalizing words waiting to be pulled. Am I weird that these types of dangling threads nag at the back of my skull until I yank them and run the lead to ground? Am I odd that this type of thing keeps me up culling databases until 2am on a Saturday night, bleary-eyed and hunched over my laptop's glowing screen as I marvel at some long-dead deserter's paper trail?

Jake and I have a mutual friend, a colleague in the world of public history. Invariably when we're around her we start spouting random historical tales we've recently run across in our research. Invariably, her response is the same: "Where do you guys find this stuff? Don't you have a life?"

Yes, yes I do have a life. But I also have an unquenchable thirst for discovery. I want to see more new things, touch more undiscovered documents, see more pieces of the 'true cross' that no one has ever laid eyes on before. I have an insatiable curiosity for historical tidbits. I think that curiosity is the prime tool for any historian to posses. I want to be the first person to the pinnacle of this or that historical mountain. But I want to climb that mountain not to brag that I was first, but simply to see how weird and wild the view is from up there.

Meaningless Landscapes Yield Meaningless Graffiti: Are We All to Blame?

Who did this? Who caused this?
Are they the same people? /
Photo provided by Kendra Debany

It is a juvenile bit of graffiti. Someone has slathered spray paint across the chest and mustache of one of those iconic Gettysburg monuments: the 2nd company, Andrews (Massachusetts) Sharpshooters monument along "the Loop" just to the west of the Wheatfield. The news hist Facebook for me yesterday afternoon, when local historian and house history sleuth Kendra Debany posted the shocking photo on her wall. The kneeling figure now has two cartoonish blue female breasts and a blue handlebar adorning his lip. It is ridiculous. It is uncalled for.

And we should have seen it coming.

Why do I say that? What impels someone to commit such an act of wanton vandalism? The comments that bubble to the surface invariably when these things happen are, "Kids today, no respect for the past!" and, "This is sacred ground where men gave their lives for what they believed in!" But how helpful are these sentiments? Is shouting "Get off my lawn!" truly the right image we as a Civil War community need to portray to help prevent these types of crimes?

I'd submit that the vandals in this case found no personal meaning in this (or any) Civil War landscape. And it's not because they're dumb or young or products of a broken educational system. They find no meaning in this landscape because we so often fail to let them find it. We lock landscapes into our personal resource meanings. "This place must be important because and only because two valiant armies bled here for their own beliefs," we shout from rooftops and the crests of rocky, wooded hills. And as we shout, we alienate.

When someone tells you exactly why you must find a place important, in rote language lining out the meaning like a mathematical equation, how invested in that place do you truly become? Now imagine slowly unfolding the meaning of that place yourself, bit by bit, discovering piece by piece why that place belongs in your soul, how and why it plucks your heart.

I didn't hold the spray paint can when the monument was vandalized. But I'm responsible; we all are.

I feel a twinge of shame in my heart. I didn't reach these people. None of us reached these people. We failed to reach them not because they were unreachable, but because we are so often too bullheaded to see that someone might care about this place or that place for a different reason than we do.

Maybe they were a young woman, who saw the trees at the base of Little Round Top as a nice place to read their algebra quietly, but had an interpreter come up and inflict interpretation in them in a vain attempt to make them care about a landscape that already had value to them as a quiet respite. Maybe they were a father and son flying a kite in the fields of Pickett's Charge who were told by some interpreter or law enforcement officer that this type of valuing of the resource was a "disrespectful" or "wrong" use of that place. Or maybe we never got the chance to speak with them, turned off because they assumed, because of the Civil War world's bad reputation of telling the same old 1960s 'valor and shared sacrifice' story over and over, that they'd never find meaning in this place.

The monument in better days
/ CC Michael Noirot

They could have found meaning somehow, I am sure of it. But because this place meant nothing, they meaninglessly graffiti'd it.

So how should we now respond? Should we damn them? Alienate them? Extradite them to a foreign land where torture is legal? One comment on our Facebook page suggested stringing them up by their thumbs and bleeding them from their feet, before throwing them to gators (frankly, I'm hoping that was simply an enraged momentary misremembering of the 8th Amendment).

I think that's all useless. Threats and fantasies of torture build no new audience. They don't explain why we as a community find this reprehensible.

What's the best way to deal with this? Tell some universally meaningful stories about the Andrews Sharpshooters, maybe juxtaposed with the photo of the graffiti'd monument. Who were those men? What were their dreams? What were their passions? Who did they love? Eleven of them died over the course of this war. Where were they wounded? How loud were their screams of pain? What did they write home to mother as they lay dying far from home in some hospital? And how did mother crumple to the floor in agony over the prospect of never seeing her darling boy again?

Humanity, empathy and finding universal meaning in these landscapes - our best tools for helping others to care about and thereby care for these special places. But they need to come to their own meanings, whatever they may be, or every monument on the field will be simply another granite tabula rasa for a spray can and idle hands.