Whig Hill

review

Unproofed.

Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)

The primary foil of A Spirited Resistance is the traditional view of Shawnee leader Tecumseh as the paramount instigator of the largest pan-Indian coalition in American history. Dowd creates a more important context for Tecumseh’s early Nineteenth Century movement in the generations-long Indian religious and political reformation. Of course, the story in this book is much larger than one man. Dowd endeavors to describe the movement toward a pan-Indian consciousness in the Eastern Woodlands beginning in the 1750s and continuing until the War of 1812 when American power stood unchecked east of the Mississippi. This movement cannot be understood, says Dowd, without considering the role of Indian religious developments.

Just another day in the dirty dirty

I had to make a list.

• The news about Dad, mentioned below.
• Drove over to Bennett Place for a special event and discovered that they had changed the date, but I had forgot to fix it on my calendar. Walked the dog around their nature trail.
• Marched in the NC Pride parade. I played bass drum this time. That was fun. SOC Rovers won "most colorful walking group". That's quite an accomplishment in a gay parade. Saw Randy Jones and walked up and gave him a great big hug. Turned some bears' heads, as usual.
• Learned that Scott Riggs will (most likely) be in the #66 HAAS/cnc Best Buy Chevrolet next year. Hopefully, he'll be reunited with Harold Holley, his crew chief from when he was winning races in the Busch series. Go Scott!
• Went to the Occoneechee Speedway car show. Some amazing stuff. Some amazing people. I'll have pictures up soon.  Didn't get to see  Miss Occoneechee  as she had appeared only in the morning. 
• Took a nap.
• Read a good deal of this week's book.
• While in Hillsborough, ran into Dave Southern, who regaled me with the hair-raising tale of his recent brush with TORIES! And he's got the scar to prove it.
• Saw Lightnin' Wells do his sound check.
• Saw Twelfth Night at the Bare Theatre. It's really good, and hi-larious, too.
• Some other things
• And, as usual, some things I'm not telling you.

The man will live forever

Dad just called. He went up to Johns Hopkins to begin leukemia treatment. Based on what they heard from the doctors at Walter Reed, they admitted him right away for a month-long course. But after beginning preliminary tests, they said, uh, we're pretty sure you don't have leukemia. Then they said, this mds thing you've got? We can put that into long-term remission. No problem.

He was talking a mile a minute on the phone, and had more verve in his voice than I've heard in a long time.

Exhibit development

This comes from Janette Griffin, "Students, Teachers, and Museums: Toward an Intertwined Learning Circle" in John H. Falk, Lynn D. Dierking, and Susan Foutz, eds., In Principle, In Practice: Museums as Learning Institutions (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2007), 31-42.

Fellow curators*...based on experiences in your museums, does this resonate?

"There has been an assumption that school students in museums passively receive the given wisdom presented through the exhibitions or by museum staff. There has been a long tradition of exhibitions being developed by curators and designers then "handed over" to the museum educators to "interpret" these exhibitions for the audience. Fortunately, there are increasing numbers of museums that develop exhibitions and programs using a team of experts from many fields. A less common practice is sharing expertise through genuine collaboration between teachers and museum educators to enhance learning for students. The responsibility for providing successful museum learning opportunities fall on the shoulders of museum educators..."

*That's not rhetorical. I mean Pete, Dan, Ashley, Leslie, Jann, Andrew, and anyone else who works in a museum that reads this.

Relevancy

Not just a buzzword. It is a long-term sustainability plan. Fellow curators... how does your museum answer these questions? (From Emlyn Koster, "The Relevant Museum: A Reflection on Sustainability", Museum News (May/June 2006)

1. Is your museum's mission statement explicit about the way(s) in which the institution aspires to be of tangible social and/or environmental value?

2. Has your museum conducted market research to benchmark its optimal niche and then used the results to arrive at a distinctive brand promise that informs all of its advertising, communication, sales and development activities?

3. Does your museum periodically assess its mission in relation to changes in the external environment so as to identify better ways to direct its expertise and resources to areas of beneficial learning by the primary audience(s)?

4. Does the demographic composition of your museum's governance, staff and volunteers reflect the surrounding region and the particular nature of your institution's work?

5. Does your museum actively merge its thinking about new exhibitions, programs and outreach with external advice and review the evaluation of their impacts?

6. Does your museum actively research and pursue entrepreneurial opportunities to advance its mission?

7. Does your museum have an accountability framework measuring both internal efficiency and external effectiveness?

8. Does your museum monitor and apply research findings in self-guided and mediated learning styles, and in allied and competitive fields such as formal education and other learning experiences?

9. Are your museum's funding sources diversifying to include an increasing number of long-term, mission-aligned investors and partnerships with both the private and public sectors?

10. Does editorial coverage of your museum comment on its nature and purpose in gradually different ways? Does it perceive the museum as concerned about its usefulness as well as its popularity?

Should we do CW 150?

This grew out of a discussion elsewhere. Kevin L. has already posted his answer. I’m late to getting mine up.  This is also brainstorming for a presentation I'm giving next Spring.

Should there be a 150th anniversary commemoration of the American Civil War?

Some personal thoughts.

The answer shouldn’t be a simple yes or no to start. We must consider a variety of factors before we get to that point. Information from audience surveys and “environmental scans” will inform the decisions regarding visitor needs, expectations, and the development of appropriate and relevant programs. I am personally unaware of this type of information being collected specifically for the sesquicentennial. So, I’m bringing this up partly to see if anyone else has done this work.

A quick scan shows that we are in the thick of commemorations. The CW 150 will be during the years 2011-2015. Currently, we have the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial. Two years past the CW 150, America will most likely be commemorating the First World War. That will be large. Most importantly, we are, right now, in the midst of the fifty-year anniversary of the Civil Rights movement. And that is just historical anniversaries. Other factors ought to be considered, including the national mood in light of Iraq, and the state of heritage tourism.

Information on the later is abundant and not encouraging. In this decade, living history museum attendance has plummeted. Two compatible factors feed this decline. First, family leisure time activity is, more than ever, decided by children—not parents. And since cultural heritage is seen as the spinach of vacation, we’ll have difficulty attracting that core audience (families). Related is relevance. Having a relevant program or site means having a product that engages visitors and connects site history to their (and others’) daily lives in meaningful ways. History organizations are notorious among arts and cultural institutions for not doing this.

When designing a commemorative program (or series) we should do so with the results of audience research in hand. Who are our visitors? What are they like? What characteristic do they share? Why do non-visitors not visit? What part of the population thinks about the Civil War? How can we gain a foothold in their imagination? What might people expect from a Civil War commemoration? Are visitors or non-visitors even interested in this activity? What would they expect from this activity?

May turn out that no one is at all interested in an anniversary commemoration. May turn out that everyone is. Do we know? Can you prove it?

This is not a problem just for Civil War commemorations; it is a problem for history organizations all over:

“…This lack of research will continue to impede the decision-making capacity of history museum leadership as they attempt to position their institutions to navigate the demographic and financial realities of an approaching new era. Without solid research on which to base sound decision-making, history museum leaders are at a significant disadvantage.”

Stories of declining interest in historic sites are cause for concern and attention, but not despair. We would make a mistake in thinking that because people don’t consume history in the traditional manner, they don’t care for history. David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig note the variety of ways folks engage with history or otherwise have a relationship with the past. Americans, they find, consider school history dull and bland nationalist history irrelevant; yet, they “…make the past part of their everyday routines and turn to it as a way of grappling with profound questions about how to live. [They do]…not view the past as distant, abstract, or insignificant…People pursue the past actively and make it part of everyday life.” (18)

That’s a hopeful thought, right there.

Our job as museum and historic site people is to appreciate how our current and potential audiences use the past, its disposition toward a Civil War commemoration, and craft particular ways to exploit that information. With that information, we can better address the question, “should we have a Civil War 150th commemoration?”

I meant to include some thoughts on relevance and this particular anniversary here, but I’ve waited long enough to get this up and don’t have that part ready yet. Make sure I do this.

One personal observation here as a visitor/participant and not a museum person. I’ve been a Civil War buff (yeah, I said it) for as long as I can remember and I have attended every anniversary reenactment of every notable battle since the 125th First Manassas. I’ve done the 125th Gettysburg, the 130th Gettysburg, the 135th Gettysburg, and so on. (Bentonville included.) This five-year cycle of anniversary events has thoroughly desensitized me. And, as many of my friends will testify…as they have become blandly routine, the quality—and therefore our interest in participating—has bottomed out.

What do you think?

Anyhow, I drew on the following.

Carolyn Singer, “The Future of History Organizations,” History News 61 (Autumn 2006): 18-20.

Emlyn Koster, “The Relevant Museum: A Reflection on Sustainability,” Museum News (May/June 2006): 67-70, 85-90.

David Farenthold, “Living-History Museums Struggle to Draw Visitors,” December 25, 2005, Washington Post.

Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)

I could just cry. I mean it. 

review

The Loyalists in the American Revolution. Claude Halstead van Tyne. New York: The MacMillan Company, 1902.

In 1902 Claude Halstead Van Tyne made, perhaps, the first post-Revolution attempt at a monograph devoted to describing and analyzing the experience of American loyalists across the continent. Van Tyne came well suited to the work, a University of Pennsylvania Fellow with a bright publishing future in Revolutionary War topics. Despite the promise, The Loyalists in the American Revolution is a bit of a disappointment in both content and research.

Whew

Wow, I finished both books and reviews by Saturday afternoon. Now I've got a whole day of nothing to do and that makes me fidgety. Getting anxious when I don't have something to feverishly work on.

That's not exactly right. I'm up in Virginia now. Dad has leukemia. That's to be expected if you survive long enough with MDS. He's doing alright. I think the diagnosis spooked him a little, but he's getting over it. Right now he's reading in disbelief this article about wayward nuclear weapons. See, this was exactly his job in the Marines. (Supervising the loading of bombs onto planes, among other things.) "Complacency breeds mistakes", he says. He also called it "a whole succession of dumb".

Anyhow... soon, he's embarking on a grand tour of east coast leukemia doctors to figure out how to approach this thing. Apparently this is the fast acting kind of leukemia. Mom says the doctors give him three months to a year. Honestly? He's had three months to a year for the last three years so that kind of news doesn't bother me any more.

Have you been following the Scott Riggs anxiety? Good God, man. Scott's team, Evernham Motorsports, is now owned by George Gillette, a very rich man. He's also a real ass. Ray Evernham likes Scott and would like to keep him around. Gillette has been making off-handed remarks to the press about the #10 car that indicate he's happy to see Scott go. That would free up a seat for one of Gillette's Canadian open-wheelers. Gawd. This sport is lousy with them these days. The new owner is handling this in a very poor (and revealing) way. Well... we Riggs fans are quite nervous and testy right now awaiting the outcome. Wherever he ends up, we just want him to be in a position to win races. Boy deserves it. Race is at Dover today where Scott had his best Cup finish; and he qualified sixth!...!!! Way to step it up while under the gun.

Last week was so crappy. I didn't get to the gym. I ate bad. My glucose numbers went way up and I felt bad all around. Fat and immobile is no way to go through life, son. I really do feel better after going to the gym, now. Just stretching out muscles and being limber is a great feeling.

I'll be back in God's Country later today.

Go Redskins! Go Scott!

review

The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.

This book’s importance and influence can barely be overstated. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution crowned a major historiographical shift in our understanding of the Independence movement. Crudely put, Whiggish scholars up to the Twentieth Century described the Revolution as a fight over principles of government. Then, with the concepts of Marx and Freud in hand, Progressive historians denounced stated ideals of the Revolutionary generation as simple rationalizations of a movement to protect and secure power and property. That trend might have been nourished in the 1960s by further exploration of the usual race, class, gender, and materialist studies beginning in that decade. And it was. But Bernard Bailyn (and others, including Edmund S. Morgan) dramatically championed the authenticity of ideas and ideology in considering the “sources and character of Revolutionary thought.”