Category: Philosophy

Preservation or Petrification?

On By kittycalashIn History, Living History, Museums, Philosophy5 Comments

For almost ten years, I’ve been working on the re-interpretation and re-presentation of the HHM that is part of my employer’s stable of properties. We’ve had mixed results: guides who refuse to look me in the face, guides who quit because a piano got moved, guides who hissed “hedonism!” at the site of a lounging mannequin, and guides who were made incredibly sad by the representation of a sick (dying) child.

James, recovering from a party the night before
James, recovering from a party the night before, angered some guides (2007)

Me, I consider all those things successes.
The people who had to deal directly with that fall out, maybe not so much.

Change is hard and scary, and every one has a different tolerance for risk. As you have probably guessed, mine’s fairly high. I blog, I go out into the world in some pretty funny clothes, and inhabit characters I am not. I expect to fail regularly: it’s a reliable way of learning.

Change is hard to maintain, it’s hard to continually evolve and push an interpretation forward. It takes time, focus, and money; it takes cross-disciplinary collaboration and communication between curators, educators, and docents or guides.

Taking risks in spaces full of very expensive furniture is particularly daunting, but especially rewarding when you see how a house looks, inhabited and, to a degree, used.

Alice receives the mantua maker's letter
They’re sitting in real, accessioned chairs. (2014)

The job of museums is to preserve, but we sometimes seem determined to petrify, to freeze a perfect moment in amber, to freeze our visitors with fear of touching, photographing, asking, and to freeze and understanding, all in a fluid world.

If we reject the beautiful and untouchable past to embrace the messy human past, we can juxtapose the fine mahogany-furnished rooms of the merchant elite with the work to create those rooms and make the picture more whole by including slaves, servants, workmen and tradesmen.

More of us would have been working than lounging
More of us would have been working than lounging (2006)

Most of us would not have lived the way the merchants did: to a degree, our historic house visits are backwardly aspirational, as we wish for nostalgia that is more false than most nostalgia.

I am not advocating favoring the smelly past, or descriptions of unpleasantness, over exultations about carvings and upholstery—except that I am—because I see these pendulum swings as a part of the process of creating more complete and honest representations and recreations of the past, in museums, at historic sites, and in living history presentations.

It’s past time for me to work again on re-imagining the house under my care: I acknowledge that. Synthesizing what I learn in living history with the work I do in museums, and vice-versa, will improve and enhance the public experience of history inside and out.

Pushing Interpretation Forward

On By kittycalashIn Events, History, Living History, Museums, Philosophy, Reenacting7 Comments

Dare I say progressing?

servant mannequin in 18th century room
That’s no ghost, that’s my kid

In the past decade, museums, particularly historic house museums, have been challenged to refresh and reinvent their interpretations and presentations. The most notable challenge has come from the Anarchist Guide to Historic House Museums (AGHHM), and the Historic House Trust of New York’s executive director, Franklin Vagnone.

I re-read a number of Vagnone and Deborah Ryan’s papers recently (including this one), thinking not just about What Cheer Day in a historic house, but about reenacting, living history, and costumed interpretation.

To make a historic house museum (HHM) seem more inhabited and real takes a lot of stuff: clothes, dishes, shoes, stockings, toys— all the stuff that surrounds us now, but correct for the time of the HHM, and arranged in a plausible manner, not like a sitcom set, where chairs before a fireplace face the visitor and not the hearth.

Man with cards, glasses and pipe in 18th century room
Stuff makes a house

To a degree, this is set-dressing, but set-dressing for a still-life, or real life, if the habitation will be by costumed interpreters. It has to be accurate to be authentic, whether it’s a HHM or a living history event that is striving to create a moment, or series of moments, in time– immersive moments.

We cannot step into the past unless we believe the representation we’re seeing, and that’s true no matter where we are: that’s why fabric matters, sewing techniques matter, tent pins and kettles and canteens matter. The world is made up of tiny details that we do actually notice without even knowing it: we see more than we realize, faster than we think. We’ll trip on the different, and stop.

A variety of coats can tell a variety of stories
A variety of coats can tell a variety of stories

But what we want to do, as interpreters, is to have the visitor catch the right difference: not the one about which canteen and why, but the larger interpretive point. In one hypothetical example, wooden canteens are a way to talk about defense contracting and supplying the American army, just as over-dyed captured coats are a way to talk about the American Revolution as an international, and not just a civil, war.

An encampment is, in a way, a neighborhood of HHMs turned inside out, with each regiment a separate family within the larger neighborhood. Each regiment tells a story about itself and its history, and is a lens through which visitors see the larger story.

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That’s why accuracy matters: you don’t want to debunk Ye Olde Colonial craft in camp, or cotton-poly polonaises (poly-naises?) worn by purported women on the ration: you want to focus on the larger interpretive point. When not everyone plays by the same rules, it is better to focus on your own accuracy and authenticity and to ignore Ye Olde Annoyances.

Tell the larger story, the story of your own regiment’s people: that’s your interpretive goal.

A Matter of Interpretation

On By kittycalashIn Events, History, Living History, Museums, personal, Philosophy, Reenacting

On the way to Southbridge, Mr S and I were discussing the last “big” event for the year, and whether or not we wanted to go. It’s an annual event grounded in ceremony, and somewhat repetitive.

The landing of the British forces in the Jerseys on the 20th of November 1776 under the command of the Rt. Honl. Lieut. Genl. Earl Cornwallis. Watercolor, attributed to Thomas Davies. NYPL

Mr S would like to go if he had the proper wool coat– it will be easy enough to make, once he gets a kit– but which he does not now have. I find it’s usually a day alone wishing I was across the river in a museum or fabric shop. In the end, it’s a long drive to a day spent in the cold and wind followed by a dash home in the dark, with Sunday spent catching up on chores and cleaning muskets, and now with an added measure of homework stress.

I have painted this as a grimmer day than it usually is, but considering that it’s been 7 months since we had any non-medical time off from work, squeezing this into a busy and stressful schedule is not as appealing as it once was. In part, I think it is because there is a lost opportunity in the interpretation, which is surely limited by the size and nature of the site, and by the loss of the historic fabric of the area.

Nestled in a densely settled and very urban area, the park site has a block house, hut, and fortification as well as a museum. Sutlers and others set up in the museum for the day, including some demonstrations of women’s work…like spinning. Spending the day inside spinning is not for me: not only can I not spin, I cannot imagine fleeing the British with a spinning wheel, which is an annoying contraption to move even with assistance, plenty of time, and a Subaru.

The Young Mr hides

But more than my impatience with Ye Olde Colonial Spinning Wheel at too many military camps this past year, I think what stops me from wanting to go is the repetitive formality of the interpretation, with the the march to the monument and the post-prandial “battle” for the blockhouse, with the Americans sometimes winning, despite the fact that the fall of this site marked the beginning of Washington’s retreat to Pennsylvania, and despite the fact that three days earlier, when the companion fort across the river fell to the British and Hessian troops, nearly 3,000 Americans were taken prisoner in 1776, and of those, only 800 survived. In what way is this ritualistic commemorative event remotely authentic? And if the only way people get the actual history and importance of the event is through the event narration or museum exhibit, hasn’t the reenactment or living history portion then failed?

Ritualistic, commemorative.

The more I think about interpretation and presentation, the more Ye Olde Colonial things annoy me and the more important I think it is to be accurate and correct.

Forcing a passage of the Hudson River, 9 October 1776. oil on canvas by Thomas Mitchell from an original by Dominic Serres the Elder. Royal Museums Greenwich

That does not mean that I expect a naval engagement (though a girl can dream) or a cross-Hudson rowing affair, but I do think it could be interesting to see troops at a fort packing up and evacuating the site, with the confusion that could result. But it’s not my circus, and not my monkeys, and in any event, I shall probably stay home to make sure that homework and housework alike are done in this current century.

Authenticity Measur’d in Moments

On By kittycalashIn Events, Fail, History, Living History, Philosophy, Reenacting10 Comments
Chopping wood: it takes a lot to cook and to keep warm in 1799
Chopping wood: it takes a lot to cook and to keep warm in 1799

In the post-What Cheer Day aftermath, when I was very tired and two houses were very messed up, I started thinking about why I bothered with living history. What exactly is this thing, and why I do it? Those questions made me think about the very best moments I have had in this business of re-creating the past in cloth and smoke and time.

In no particular order:

1. Going up to the field at Coggeshall Farm to call the boys down to dinner after spending all day in the kitchen. I was desperate to get out, and finally knew first hand how limited women’s lives could be in the 18th century, especially non-elite women.

2. Running upstairs at the John Brown House with Eliza, giggling over a joke to be played on Mr Mason. I don’t know what Mr C thought of it but I felt twelve years old, silly, carefree and light. John Brown’s housekeeper surely never felt that way, but a naughty maid might have, and for an instant I knew what it was to have no responsibilities.

We didn’t even notice the background at the time

3. Chasing the Young Mr, a wayward apprentice, across the street; mobbing Mr Howard’s house; and arguing with the Stamp Inspector, all during the Stamp Act Protest in Newport It was not until I looked at the photos that I realized we really had been in front of a theatre, and that there were actual cars! A friend confirms that he, too, forgot about the cars, to the point of nearly being hit whilst running to Mr Howard’s house.

4. Assembling with a group of friends to take tea with Mrs Silsbee in Salem, sorting ourselves into a group on the sidewalk and venturing out, only to meet Mrs Silsbee on the street. That is the most Jane Austen/Mrs Gaskell I have ever felt. The wretched cobblestones do not count, as they were from the 20th century, but walking out on the wharf, and meeting a friend who brought an umbrella as the rain began was also very Austen-esque.

Perhaps more Gaskell than Austen, here
Perhaps more Gaskell than Austen, here

None of these are military events, and the majority of them happened this year, in past three months. I think this may be because we have been to fewer military events, and I expect the concentration is due, in part, to finally getting better at this practice. They are also site-specific, and trending toward first-person interpretation.

Coats
Those coats.

For reasons explained better by the NPS and in the excellent study of NPS-Reenactor relationships, no battle reenactment can ever capture the truth of the war it attempts to recreate, and that is true even when the battle takes place on the same site, at the same time of year, and even when soldiers are dressed in as-close-as-possible replicas of the uniforms worn at that battle, on that field, on that date, 236 years earlier, and no one has brought a spinning wheel or tent chandelier to camp.

I respect the notions of moveable monuments and performances as commemoration. I like military history, I like war memorials: there is not a competition between civilian and military reenactments. But military events have not yet had the power to transcend experience for me.

My best guess as to why military events are not transformative for me is that, to this point, the business remains too much like camping in funny clothes. As I experiment more with 18th century methods of cooking appropriate rations, and as I strip away the gear we carry into the field, the military events are better (as at Bennington). But I already know how limited women’s perspectives could be (see item 1), and while Bennington was instructive in how ridiculously different the experiences of men and women could be, the military events remain more instructive experiences for the men.

18th century camp
Domesticity in the Field

Why? Because the specificity of site plays out at those events in the battle, and not in the camp. The point at Bennington and at Saratoga and at Stony Point was to use the site as it had been used. The men experienced the landscape in ways as close as possible to what soldiers and militia had actually seen. And women stayed in camp and got smoke in their eyes, cut up vegetables, or washed clothes, which is pretty much what happens at any outdoor event where we can have a fire and, with differences in technology, is pretty much what I do when I get home from work every day.

All that leaves me wondering what to make of military events, and what I want to do in the coming year. No matter how much of this is “for the public,” it still has to be rewarding for the practitioner.