Taylor Stoermer

“Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero,” said Andrea, with resignation.

Galileo sternly replied, “No. Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

Bertolt Brecht’s extraordinary biographical play Galileo was first drafted at a time when heroes were desperately needed by the world: 1938. It was a kind of plea for men and women of rationality to stand up against the supermen who were then attempting to sink the world into a sea of cynicism and destruction. He wrote the English version seven years later when, just as those forces were about to be vanquished, they seemingly found a new home when Harry Truman ordered nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. It was the story of a man, the eponymous astronomer, who fought for truth, science, and reason. And it’s about what heroes really are.

Public Historians need no reminder that their role in an increasingly problematic global community appears to become more central to its civic health every day. As people — the ever-shifting “public” that we serve, whether we work in a museum, give heritage tours, make movies, or create podcasts — feel more and more disconnected from their governments and each other, our publics are reaching for the one thing that has always bound individuals together, providing common identity and shared purpose: our stories. Today, those frequently involve superheroes, or wizards, or creative mythologies from a galaxy far, far away, as if we are collectively reaching out for someone or something beyond us upon whom we can place our hope that things can be made right by extraordinary figures from elsewhere, for what are certainly extraordinary times here.

But, for the most part, we know that won’t happen, and no amount of committed cosplay can change that. Mjølnir will forever be out of reach. So, instead, we grasp for the seemingly extraordinary among us, the people of the past who achieved things apparently as bold and unbelievable, even miraculous, as anything accomplished by Captain America or Harry Potter. These are, some would say, the most important of our stories, the ones that make — and unmake — nations. And their names are as familiar to us as those of our dearest friends: Washington, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams. These are the men who supposedly made America, creating, so the master narrative goes, an exceptional country based on the noblest of principles, shaped for the highest purposes and destiny. The City on a Hill, a beacon to all others. Or so we’ve been told.

And who are the keepers of those legends, the ones that, ostensibly, tie our country together in the here and now, constantly straddling the distance between yesterday and today as we, with every tick of the clock, get farther away from what really happened? Public Historians. In the war that’s coming for the hearts and minds of a rapidly disintegrating body politic, in which history has been weaponized by all sides, Public Historians are on the front lines, speaking for the dead, for all who cannot speak for themselves, even as their spirits are invoked all around us. Many of my colleagues would say that the war is already here, and has been raging since at least 2016, if not longer. And they wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

But when it comes to impeachment of a divisive president, in a fractious, dangerous era   characterized by alternative facts and “information wars”, in which the enemies line up on social media to hurl fiction at the uninformed, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Before I became a public historian at Colonial Williamsburg, I went to law school and then spent what felt like a lifetime in politics in Washington. I worked in the Senate and House, on campaigns for both, on special projects for the White House, as Communications Director for a national political organization, and far too much time as a talking head on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and CSPAN. I saw, firsthand, the effects of the last impeachment battle over President Clinton, the incredulity that followed the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, and lived through the September 11th attacks, watching as smoke rose over the Pentagon and swirled with rumors of a strike at the Capitol, just four blocks from my home. It is there that I learned the real power of stories to influence behavior, and the responsibility of skilled tellers entrusted with it. I learned how people consume those stories, with their eyes and ears, through words and music and images — and in only 30 seconds. And I learned how fear can be more powerful than hope when that power is in the wrong hands. These lessons have never left me, as I now try to impart them to my students at Johns Hopkins Museum Studies and to audiences through digital storytelling at Størmerlige Films.

Impeachment this time will, I strongly suspect, require even more from America’s Public Historians, as the means of telling our stories, of recreating or twisting our national myths, can be distributed wider and faster than fallacious, feckless memes about Black Confederates or Irish Slaves.

That’s why Public Historians must put aside political partisanship, of whatever sort, and pick up a more important — and heroic — banner: that of truth and, more importantly, the means for others to find it.

Such a call to action might seem fatuous, at best, but consider how this war will be waged against our publics — by using names such as Madison, sources such as The Federalist Papers, and words like “High Crimes and Misdemeanors”.  Politicians and their operatives will wantonly and recklessly “interpret” the past for others in order to shape the political opinion and, what’s worse, behavior of millions. They already are assuming the role of the Public Historian, without any regard for the ethics required to do it right and well, to be a good Public Historian, as well as a great one.

Of course, those Public Historians whose work directly involves the mythology of the American Founding will bear the heaviest burdens. They will be called on daily to refute, parry, and then project the knowable truth about a constitutional past that will be brought back to life in ways that the people who lived through it would hardly recognize.   The Federalist Papers were not civic scripture, but just polemic letters to the editor written during the struggle in New York to ratify the Constitution. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay were deeply flawed men (even fatally so), neither heroic nor terribly extraordinary (sorry, Lin-Manuel), except in ways that their sex, race, and situation made them the rulers, and owners, of others. The American Revolution did not create one nation founded on liberty and freedom, but two — and the United States was the less committed to those principles of them. These are antidotes to the myths about a flawed constitutional system that American jurisprudence has reinforced with 200 years of decisions that strengthened an Executive Branch already well beyond the authority wielded by a British monarch in 1776 and not connected even remotely to the concept of democracy, except in the rhetoric of the most detached from reality of its supporters.

But that is a counter-narrative, one weapon in the war that Public Historians are about to fight, and not even the most powerful. That weapon, the one that every Public Historian, at every level and every location, can and should wield, is our ability as storytellers to educate others about what makes a story true and reliable. To help our publics look beyond the images flashed at them on a screen in order to understand the nature of courses and believe in their own capacity to understand and interpret them, with our help. Encourage your audiences to closely read the work of journalists, to examine the credentials of those writers of the first draft of history, to examine the primary sources of today, and yesterday, for themselves, whether that’s the text of President Trump’s memo of his phone discussion with Ukraine’s president or the wonderful materials on ConSource, in order to engage in a conversation about checks and balances. Just as technological innovation has given our enemies — those who would twist history to accomplish dark goals — a powerful means to achieve their ends, so it has given us the same weapons to fight them, and on the best of all chosen battlefields: our own. And you don’t have to be a guide at Mount Vernon or a historian at the Museum of the American Revolution to do that.

A critic for The New Yorker emptily claimed, in a review for THE FAVOURITE last November, that “all historical reconstruction is a game and to pretend otherwise — to nourish the illusion that we can know another epoch as intimately as we do our own — is merest folly.” But that’s not true at all. It’s much more than a game, as the stakes are much higher. Leaving aside the fact that we barely know our own “epoch,” we must engage in that “folly” because others will. And to leave the field to them is to abandon our publics, allowing them to become pawns in perhaps the most important modern game of all.

But that’s not what real heroes do. Avengers, assemble.

For all of the amazing work and thinking going on at America’s museums and heritage sites, much of it currently on display at an exciting National Council on Public History conference in Connecticut, public historians face an uncomfortable truth: According to a recent study of the public’s relationship with the world of history museums, 60% of Americans visited no museums, of any kind, in 2018, and only 7.5% reported visiting a history-related site. Yes, that 7.5% is trended younger and more active, but we have to face the hard reality that any American is 9 times more likely to never set foot inside a museum than she or he is to visit yours.

But, as I have argued, and others have denied, that does not mean that Americans’ interest in history is on the decline. Fully half — a solid 50% of all those surveyed — believe that the past has a clear and direct impact on the present. Another 30% think that the past somewhat affects today. Very few, less than 10%, either think not, don’t know, or don’t care. And the vast majority wants to know more, but, in doing so, they are arriving at some troubling conclusions. For example, two-thirds of Americans oppose the removal of Confederate monuments or the renaming of places named for slaveholders. That’s a position radically different from your average Kevin Kruse follower, who — like me — tend to believe that such monuments are not fixed in space and time, intended to stand forever as symbols of oppression and white supremacy, when cultural imperatives demand a reconsideration. But we are a vocal minority.

Why such a disconnect, when tens of thousands of Tweet likes or podcast downloads represent something of a victory within the public history community?  Aren’t academic Historical Communications programs working to improve how academics talk to all those people who never go to a museum and believe Confederate monuments should stay just where they are? The answer lies in just how Americans actually consume history, and it isn’t on Twitter. It’s not even in the classroom (the survey found that only 11% of Americans credit formal education as a primary source of historical information).

Where they’re actually getting it is on demand, on YouTube, at the movies, and through the multiplying streaming services that have already come to dominate the lives of many, if not most, Americans.  So it should come as no surprise that top primary sources of historical information are historical documentaries (74.2%) and period dramas (60.2%) like Outlander, Poldark, and Downton Abbey, which, we must note, are historical fiction that need good academic advisers to keep them from doing more harm than good to their viewers’ historical literacy. Reading nonfiction books was cited by 57.9% of respondents as a primary source, but that includes the best-selling tripe from the likes of Bill O’Reilly (who seems to enjoy writing about killing historical figures, just as he tortures prose and the past) and Ben Shapiro (whose risible “The Right Side of History” is right now at the top of the New York Times Hardback Nonfiction Best Sellers List). But, in a boost for the heritage tourism industry, and a market for travel contextualization that’s begging to be tapped, almost half of Americans — 47.9% — cited travel to historic sites as among their primary sources of historical information, even if they don’t seem to be going into the museums and institutions near those sites. (Here’s an exercise for you: Go to YouTube and search for your museum or site and see what comes up. That’s how travelers are making their destination decisions these days. Do you like what you see?)

So where does the future of public history lie, if, perhaps, not in onsite visitation in the traditional sense? Is it blurry? No. It’s coming into increasingly crisp focus. It might move, but it’s all online, and it’s not a podcast.

Yes, I’m sure you’ve heard that before. Those kids and their interweb thingies. But it’s not just about generational communication mechanisms. It’s about behavorial economics or, more simply put, how almost everyone who doesn’t have a vivid recollection of having to get up to change the channel on the television relates to their world, and that includes their understanding of the past and the present. These are new audiences that are almost wholly online and can — through mediums such YouTube and IG TV and Periscope — feel more connected to the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands than to the history museum on their own street.

That’s because places such as the Rijkmuseum, and, on this side of the Atlantic (or, er, Pacific), the Monterey Bay Aquarium, get the importance of cultivating and maintaining a sustainable online audience that can be a source of funding and visibility through their canny and consistent use of social media. Even quite smaller institutions, such as the Walden Woods Project, are doing it well, within their means. And it’s not because they’ve invested in new media marketing teams, because it only takes one smart phone, one person who knows what to do with it, and one person who gets it when it comes to shareable content that creates what we used to call virtual online experiences, which in our time have become actual. There’s nothing virtual about it for digital natives.

But all that engagement is beginning to focus on one particular method: Video, mostly recorded but increasingly live. It’s one of the reasons I have almost entirely shifted my public history energy to center on filmmaking (and not the 8- or 16-hour comprehensive marathon kind) with my new production company, sponsored by a mouse that I used to advise. According to a soon-to-be-released study, funded by that company and others, video consumption, at every level of communication, is now — not next decade, not next year, right now — the main means by which audiences consume content of pretty much everything.

And you can pick apart those demographic toplines all that you want, especially as Gen Z has overtaken the spending power of Millenials as America’s largest generation. The numbers remain true. This year, 80% of all Internet traffic will be driven by video content, just as mobile video consumption increases by 100% every year. 55% of Americans watch an online video every day and 92% of them will share that video with others.  In fact, Americans are 1200% (!) more likely to share their e-mail, Tweet, or Insta, Vero, or, Heaven forbid, TikToc post, if it contains video rather than still photos (forget about text, unless imbedded in the image).

For public history pros who are business-minded, there are clear returns on any investment in upping your online video, um, game, as 64% of Americans are more likely to take action after watching a video than reading a post. In fact, live video, such as what Monterey Bay does daily and Walden Woods schedules every Wednesday afternoon, makes viewers spend three times longer on an engagement and increases click-throughs for viewers to learn more by 200%-300% over recorded videos.

I won’t belabor this topic any longer. Suffice to say, as I already have more than bit of experience in front of and behind the camera, I’m taking the plunge to a new way of practicing public history through film and video production. And, unlike most documentarians, I’m a historian first, as is much of my team, so we don’t need to spend two years in development learning about the American Revolution in order to figure out what stories needs to be told about it. We, as historians, know what we know, and we also, crucially, know who knows what we don’t know (um, yes, that says just what I wanted it to say).

So we’re taking a different approach, for both the filmmaking and public history worlds. We’re carrying an understanding of a past that matters to where the audiences are, to combat alternative facts and fake news on their own battleground, and, hopefully, we can also get those audiences to where you are. I’d much prefer that you come along for this ride. The revolution won’t be televised, but it will be streamed.

Recent senior hirings at prominent history-related museums and sites have raised some intriguing questions in my mind about the very scope and nature of “Public History”, as I plow through the prep for my Summer course on the subject at Hopkins.  It’s made me think long and hard about what we, as educators in graduate programs in Museum Studies or Public History, should do to prepare our students to compete for fulfilling, sustainable jobs when top positions are frequently going to people with virtually no — or actually zero — Public History or Museum Studies backgrounds.  I have recently met far, far too many young, talented, inspiring, and increasingly disillusioned students and EMPs (Emerging Museum Professionals), with far, far too much to offer the field, to not at least explore those questions, particularly to see whether it’s an emerging trend, standard fare, or something else altogether. So, when I have an intellectual itch to scratch, and a new study all set up for it, I spent this morning doing what I usually do when that happens (especially when a different kind of doctor tells me to stay home and be very still), which is to gather data, crunch numbers, and see what falls out.

My methodology was this: Identify the sites in the field that I think are notable for their size, their promise, or their struggles, and see who has been hired for the key public history areas, as well as at the very top.  I picked 34, all listed below.  And then I cross-referenced them with LinkedIn (I apologize now for some of the recent connection invites) and Charity Navigator’s analysis to see how those sites financially perform (19, just over half, of my selections are rated).  It is, admittedly, a highly selective and subjective process, but I tried to gather large and small sites and attempted a broad geographic scope.  I mean, it’s not my fault that most American history sites are located in the east, is it?

Here is what I found.  Of the 34 sites that I examined, with 82 executives and relevant senior staff for whom I could find data, very few of them — 13, less than 16% — were held by staff with any graduate training in Public History or Museum Studies, and only one of the executives has a degree at any level in Public History or Museum Studies.  Take a look for yourself at this list, which represents a sizable proportion of the heritage tourism market (and which I’ll likely expand and refine and correct as a sort of working document, with your help), ranked by the Charity Navigator financial rating where available (IMHO, transparency ratings artificially inflate the money numbers that really count, so I tend to leave them out):

New Bedford Whaling Museum (93.69) — Amanda D. McMullen, President, B.A. from Syracuse University; Christina Connett, Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Valencia; Michael P. Dyer, Curator of Maritime History, M.A. in American Studies from Pennsylvania State University-Capitol.

Fort Ticonderoga Association (93.45) — Beth L. Hill, President, M.A. in History from American University.

George Washington’s Mount Vernon (92.44) — Douglas Bradburn, President, Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago; Rob Shenk, Senior Vice President for Visitor Engagement, M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University; Roy Young, Vice President for Guest Experience, M.A. in Art and Visual Culture Education from the University of Arizona.

The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum (91.57) — Courtney Wilson, Executive Director, M.A. in History (African American) from Morgan State University.

The Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum (91.30) — Kristen Greenaway, President, M.A. in Liberal Studies from Duke University; Pete Lesher, Chief Curator, M.A. in History from Columbia University; Jill Ferris, Director of Education, M.A. in History Museum Studies from SUNY-Oneonta.

The Valentine Richmond History Center (91.15) — William J. Martin, President, M.A. in Public Administration from Virginia Tech; Liz Reilly-Brown, Director of Public Programs, M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Virginia Commonwealth University; David Voelkel, Curator of General Collections, M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Leicester.

Strawbery Banke Museum (91.07) — Lawrence Yerdon, President, M.B.A. from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and M.A. in History from Northeastern University; Elizabeth Farish, Chief Curator, M.A. in Historic Preservation from the Savannah College of Art and Design; Amanda Santoriello, Assistant Curator, M.A. in Museum Studies from Tufts University; Bekki Coppola, Director of Education, M.A. in Museum Education from Tufts University. [Thanks, Alix, for the contribution of the information. — TS]

Historic Deerfield (88.95) — Philip Zea, President, M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware (Winterthur).

The National World War II Museum (86.66) — Stephen Watson, President, M.B.A. from Nicholls State University; Peter Crean, Vice President for Education and Access, M.A. in Strategic Studies from the U.S. Army War College; Owen Glendening, Associate Vice President for Education and Access, M.A. in History from Columbia University.

Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (86.15) — Leslie Greene Bowman, President, M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware (Winterthur); Susan Stein, Chief Curator and Vice President for Museum Programs, M.A. in Art History from the University of Chicago; Gary Sandling, Vice President for Visitor Programs and Service, M.A. in History from Yale University.

National Constitution Center (85.99) — Jeffrey Rosen, President, J.D. from Yale Law School; Kerry Sautner, Vice President of Visitor Experience and Education, Ph.D. in Education from Drexel University.

James Madison’s Montpelier (81.94) — Kat Imhoff, President, M.S. in Urban and Environmental Planning from the University of Virginia; Elizabeth Chew, Vice President of Museum Programs, Ph.D. in Art History from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Christian Cotz, Director of Education and Visitor Engagement, M.A. in Teaching from James Madison University.

The International Tennis Hall of Fame (81.24) — Douglas Stark, Museum Director, M.A. in History from New York University; Nicole Markham, Curator of Collections, M.M.St. (Masters in Museum Studies) from the University of Toronto.

Robert E. Lee Memorial Foundation (Stratford Hall) (79.03) — John S. Bacon, President, J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law; Abigail Newkirk, Director of Interpretation, M.A. in Museum Studies from Newcastle University; Gretchen Pendleton, Curator, M.A. in Museum Studies from George Washington University.

The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (78.96) — Mitchell Reiss, President, D. Phil. from Oxford University; Ghislain d’Humières, Executive Director and Senior Vice President for Core Operations, DEA (former French equivalent of an M.A.) in History from the University of Paris I (the Sorbonne).

The Mark Twain House and Museum (78.42) — Pieter Roos, Executive Director, M.A. in History Museum Studies from SUNY-Cooperstown; Tracy Brindle, Chief Curator, M.A. in History (Public History) at Northern Illinois University; James Golden, Director of Education, Ph.D. in History from the University of Oxford.

Thomas Jefferson’s Poplar Forest (76.37) — Jeffrey Nichols, President; Wayne Gannaway, Director of Programs, Marketing, and Grants, M.A. in Historic Preservation from Western Kentucky University; Mary Massie, Manager of Programs and Education, M.A. in Museum Studies from the Johns Hopkins University (AAP).

Mystic Seaport (74.55) — Steve White, President, B.A. in English from Hardwick College; Nicholas R. Bell, Senior Vice President for Curatorial Affairs, M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware (Winterthur); Erik Ingmundson, Director of Interpretation, M.A. in History (Public History) from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Chicago History Museum (69.94) — Gary T. Johnson, President, J.D. from Harvard Law School; Russell Lewis, Executive Vice President and Chief Historian, M.A. in American Culture from the University of Michigan; John Russick, Vice President for Interpretation and Education, M.S. in Architectural Studies from the University of Texas.

James Monroe’s Highland (NR) — Sara Bon-Harper, Executive Director, Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The Museum of the American Revolution (NR) — Michael Quinn, President, M.A. in Art History from Yale University; Scott Stephenson, Vice President of Collections, Exhibitions, and Programming, Ph.D. in History from the University of Virginia; Philip Mead, Director of Curatorial Affairs and Chief Historian, Ph.D. in History from Harvard University.

The Bostonian Society (NR) — Nathaniel Sheidley, Executive Director, Ph.D. in History from Princeton; Kathleen Mulvaney, Director of Education and Exhibitions, M.A. in History Museum Studies from SUNY-Oneonta; Daud Alzayer, Revolutionary Characters Manager, M.M. in Vocal Performance from the Boston Conservancy.

Historic Bethlehem (NR) — Charlene Donchez Mowers, President, NL; Kristen Walsh, Director of Visitor Experience and Community Outreach, M.A. in Museum Studies from the Johns Hopkins University (AAP).

The National Baseball Hall of Fame (NR) — Jeffrey Idelson, President, B.A. in International Economics from Connecticut College; Erik Strohl, Vice President of Exhibitions and Collections, M.A. in History Museum Studies from SUNY-Oneonta; John Odell, Curator of History and Research, M.A. in Museum Studies from George Washington University.

Tryon Palace (NR) — William J. McRea, Executive Director, M.A. in Architectural History and Historic Preservation from the University of Virginia; Nancy Packer, Chief Curator, M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware (Winterthur); Amber Satterthwaite, Director of Education, M.A. in Museum Studies from the Johns Hopkins University (AAP).

Historic Hudson Valley (NR) — Waddell Stillman, President, M.B.A. from Harvard Business School; Michael A. Lord, Director of Content Development, B.A. in History from Amherst College.

Historic London Town and Gardens (NR) — Rod Cofield, Executive Director, M.A. in Liberal Arts and Sciences from St. John’s College; Kristen Butler, Director of Public Programs, M.A. in History (Public History) from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Historic St. Mary’s City (NR) — Regina Faden, Executive Director, Ph.D. in American Studies from St. Louis University*.

Preservation Society of Newport County (NR) — Trudy Coxe, Executive Director, NL; Lise Dube-Scherr, Director of Museum Affairs, M.A. in Art Education from Concordia College; John Rodman, Director of the Museum Experience, M.P.A. from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Conner Prairie (NR) — Norman Burns, President, M.A. in History from Middle Tennessee State University; Catherine Hughes, Director of Interpretation, Ph.D. in Theatre Education from The Ohio State University.

Old Salem (NR) — Franklin Vagnone, President, M.A. in Architecture from Columbia University.

Gunston Hall (NR) — Scott Stroh, Executive Director, M.A. in History from Middle Tennessee State University; Rebecca Martin, Director of Education and Guest Experiences, M.A. in History (Museum Studies) from the University of Delaware; Samantha Dorsey, Curator of Collections, M.A. in Early American Culture from the University of Delaware (Winterthur).

Plimoth Plantation (NR) — Ellie Donovan, Executive Director, NL; Richard Pickering, Deputy Executive Director, M.A. in American Studies at the College of William & Mary; Jessica Rudden-Dube, Deputy Director for Public Engagement, M.A. in Education from Mercy College.

Old Sturbridge Village (NR) — James Donahue, President, NL in Economics from Colby College; Deb Friedman, Vice President of Public Programs, NL; Rhys Simmons, Director of Interpretation, NL.

What does all this mean? The demographics reveal some items of interest, not the least of which is the almost total absence of racial diversity.  And it does confirm the views of many that, while women dominate the curatorial and education positions, most executive jobs still go to white men.  And you can judge for yourself any correlation between the high performing sites and the struggling ones.

In any case, the overall impression is striking, begging more than a few questions, chief among which might be this: If, in a sense, anyone can be a Public Historian, and profess to lead the field’s practice at the most senior levels, what exactly is the graduate education of Public History today for? And why aren’t Public History Ph.D.’s being given any real value outside of the academy? I am deeply invested in helping to shape a field for my students that can fulfill its massive economic promise for people on both sides of its economy, as producers and consumers, so I tend to make sure my students are ready for the reality of practice, as a pre-professional program more like my law school experience than my doctoral years. Why, for example, don’t we set up public history clinics to give our students more hands-on experience with low-resource sites that need it?

I have no answers to these questions.  And I’m sure there are more and greater implications that I haven’t considered.  Moreover, I have written elsewhere that I think experience in Public History practice matters more than graduate education beyond the M.A. level.  But I do think this is the foundation for a conversation that’s long overdue.

*Dr. Faden also holds an M.A. in Museum Studies from the University of Missouri-St. Louis, making her the sole executive of any site on this list with an advanced degree in the field.

NL = Not listed

NR = Not rated on Charity Navigator

In the course of writing a public history textbook, advising museums (and, occasionally, a fictional mouse), putting together syllabi for next year, and all-too-often railing against the demise of a venerable institution, it can become an occupational hazard to lose an appreciation of the humanity of the people of the past who are at the heart of it all, whom we are supposed to work to remember, to attempt to understand, and from whose experiences glean some lessons that matter in the present.  Too often curatorial enthusiasm or interpretative malpractice can remove the living and breathing spirit of those who gave meaning to objects and ideas, until they because matters of cloistered connoisseurship or, worse, empty entertainment.  And while we public historians, inevitably caught up in the bewildering inanity of our post-factual modern world — such as the daily madness of a president who doesn’t seem to have read the Constitution, much less respect it, or the indecorous implosion of once-vaunted heritage organizations, or constructing academic conference papers on abstruse topics that only a handful of other people will ever read — try to find new, effective ways, through efforts such as History Space, to project and protect that past, the men and women, free and enslaved, who made it, and who inspired many of us to spend a career in pursuit of their worlds in the first place, can quickly and easily become nothing more than content for exhibits, tours, costumed history programs, or daily Tweets.  In the end, instead, the stories that once captivated us become twisted into shades of what they really were, and our work has done more harm than good to their memory, thereby violating our implicit vocational charge.

How many of us have that unruly file of notes that contains all of the stories we promise ourselves that we’ll get to just as soon as this evaluation, or chapter, or article, or recommendation is done?  How many times have we heard our friends and colleagues tell us “You MUST write that!” after a few pints at the local loosen our tongues enough for us to switch from debating tired paradigms to telling timeless tales, ones made all the more powerful because their facts are not alternative?  And why does that file constantly invite us to leaf through its pages when another committee appointment or donor meeting makes us wonder just what those years in graduate school were for because, mostly, those stories speak to us in ways that we find difficult to explain, although we revel — and are renewed — in the telling?

For me, that has always been the best part of being a public historian, as an educator and as a practitioner.  If, as Denise Meringolo has trenchantly pointed out, to be a public historian is to be a builder, especially of a relationship among educators, practitioners, and, of course, audiences, than the product of that relationship lies in the nexus of scholarship, interpretation, and imagination, and which begets further inquiry.  Whenever I think of the stories in my file, I think of that relationship, of how best to tell those stories in ways that maintain our unwritten contract of authenticity and accuracy (not necessarily the same things), while ensuring a level of engagement with others.  It represents, in my view, the best of the work I’ve done at every public history stop on my C.V., from Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg, to running Historic Huguenot Street, to advising Newport, the Golden Ball Tavern, and Plimoth Plantation–the programs that result from the relationships of teams of skilled people in the present trying to tell powerful, even instructive stories about people in the past, about those who cannot speak for themselves.

Top in my folder is the story of Ryland Randolph and Aggy, a tale at least as compelling as that of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but one largely unknown and still mysterious.  It all started while I was writing my dissertation on Virginia loyalists, which revolves around that “great cousinry,” the Randolph clan (of which, only incidentally, I am one).  Many of them joined the patriot movement, but more of them did not, choosing to fight to remain British or to stay out of the contest until it was all over and the smoke cleared.  Much of my argument to explain the choices they made, or left unmade, during the crisis period centers on political culture, and a dominant shift from sense to sensibility.  That required a level of prosopographical analysis that bordered, it must be said, on the manic, as I (quite literally) mapped out the relevant individuals and traced their social relationships and cultural influences.

That led me to Ryland.

Ryland Randolph, the master of the family seat of Turkey Island on the James River, was an eccentric member of an eccentric family.  Almost nothing but the barest of genealogical facts was known of him (Thanks, Gerald Cowden).  Born about 1734, the son of Richard Randolph and Jane Bolling, and therefore a descendant of Rebecca Rolfe (the story of Ryland’s portrait of “Pocahontas,” which hung in the main hall at Turkey Island, is another one in my file), he, like many of his brothers and cousins, went to school in England, attended Trinity Hall at Cambridge and Middle Temple in the 1750s, went on a tour of the American northeast and Canada in the 1760s, traveled back to England, and then returned to Virginia in 1770 to live, seemingly alone amongst his enslaved community, on his vast plantation.  He was described by a contemporary as “a fine classical scholar, a master of the French and Italian languages, an eloquent speaker and most accomplished gentleman.”  He died, legally unmarried, in 1784.  As far as the history books are concerned, that was pretty much all there is to Ryland Randolph, and all that remains above ground of him, given that the house at Turkey Island is today nothing but lumps and bumps in the landscape near the family graveyard, is an obelisk that he erected to mark the environmental disaster that was “The Great Fresh” of 1771 and honor his parents, but even that monument is now eroding, buried in the middle of a forest that the Virginia Tidewater’s tick population defends like their last bastion.  It’s a fitting metaphor for Ryland — only the quite serious need venture closer to the core.  In the end, his story for most of the last 200 years was just another one of those tired, ubiquitous tales of the Virginia privileged class who only existed to enjoy their privileges.

But there was one book that had a tantalizing mention of him that suggested his story was something else.  Phil Morgan’s Slave Counterpoint, the seminal work on the lived experience of enslaved men and women in the Chesapeake and Carolinas, suggested in a footnote that an enslaved woman named Aggy might have lived in the manor house at Turkey Island as Ryland’s wife, along with their two children, Sylvia and Philip Alexander, and were set free by Ryland in his will, with provision that they leave Virginia for England, where funds were deposited for their welfare.  But the will was challenged by his brother and, it seemed, the provisions not enforced.

Of course, that begged the situation of Jefferson and Sally Hemings, and the other “open and notorious” interracial associations that were obvious to observers throughout late colonial Virginia.  As “no uncommon spectacle,” in the words of the Rev. Thomas Gwatkin, a member of that society, such relationships were, quite literally, unremarkable.  Yet Ryland appeared to have taken the extra steps, given Virginia’s strict legal and economic constraints to manumission, to ensure the security and liberty of his family, unlike so many of his contemporaries.  Ryland, then, at least to me, deserved a closer look.

And, as every historian worth her or his salt knows, you start seeing things just when you begin to look for them, and not a moment before.  Ryland was not just Jefferson’s cousin, he was his close friend.  It was with Ryland whom Jefferson would often stay on his trips between Charlottesville and Williamsburg.  It was Ryland whom Jefferson consulted about architecture and landscaping.  It was Ryland from whom Jefferson borrowed books and ideas, and suggested that others do the same.  It was Ryland whom Jefferson asked to draft the first rendering of the Virginia State Capitol (a document now in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society).  As for Ryland himself, he rebuilt the main house at Turkey Island in a style that gave it the nickname “The Bird Cage.”  He reveled in his library and, perhaps tellingly, his own mixed-race descent from Pocahontas.  And he adopted as his motto, Fari Quae Sentiet  — “To Say What One Feels” (from Horace).  And he did, indeed, do just that in his will in 1785, when he not only gave Aggy and her children their freedom, but also left her all of his “household furniture of every kind including gold and silver” and arranged for their transport to England, along with a trust fund of £3000 (the modern equivalent of almost $500,000), to be administered for them by close friends in London (one of them a senior member of the British Treasury).

His brother, Richard, however, strongly opposed the will.  He encouraged its executors to refuse to serve and he challenged it in court.  Richard claimed that the generosity to Aggy showed that Ryland was not of sound mind and, something closer to the Henrico County Court justices’ hearts and minds, Ryland owed money to Richard that must be accounted for before any bequests were allowed.  Of course, Richard had no proof of those debts, but the justices would certainly take his word for it, as a matter among gentlemen, wouldn’t they?  Of course, they did, declaring the will void and granting administration of Ryland’s estate to Richard.

That’s where things stood when I got to Colonial Williamsburg and told the story to my partner in program development, Bill Weldon, one night at our favorite watering hole (I should have had my mail delivered to Second Street).  I was hired by then-Vice President Jim Horn to ensure sound scholarship as the foundation of public programming, and it was his charge to Bill, as creative director, and me to develop new programming, and refine existing programs, that would push our guests’ boundaries and challenge conventional notions of the Revolutionary generation that made America.  So one of my first thoughts was of Ryland and Aggy, and its interpretative potential gripped Bill’s imagination as much as it did mine.  But how could we effectively tell that story?

As with the very best in public history programming, success begins and ends with human capital.  At the time, Bill and I were reconfiguring the entire “Revolutionary Community” to more accurately reflect, in the people whom our interpreters portrayed, those who were actually there during the years of the Revolution, and more authentic social and racial demographics.  Out went figures such as Robert Carter Nicholas, who left Williamsburg in 1776, and composite personas, and in came James Madison, Martha Jefferson, Martin Hemings, and Barber Caesar.  And in a remarkably gifted young interpreter — Mary Hardy Carter — we had someone with the capacity and interest to properly build Ryland’s Aggy.  It did not matter to us that not much was known about many of these individuals (NOT characters.  We refused to use that term to describe people who once lived.  Cinderella is a character.  Aggy was a person).  What did matter was that we knew their relevance, and the power of the stories they could tell, which would generate new scholarship from the research and creative work needed to authentically explore and represent their lives, as a product of that relationship among public history educator, practitioner, and audiences.  Through that process, we could recover the historical Aggy on her own terms, and learn more about her world.

We were also fortunate to have at that time embarked on a new partnership with Karin Wulf at the College of William & Mary (when CW was still an Omohundro Institute partner), in a project that she and I developed to examine gender in Early America through an explicit connection between American Studies students and CW Actor-Interpreters.  Students were charged with working with our interpreters to develop the history and historiography around the historical figures we wanted to portray.  So we had teams of graduate and undergraduate students “adopt” an interpreter and her portrayal as their major class project.  And one of those groups had Mary and Aggy.

It was a tremendously exciting moment for us all, as public and academic historians, to watch those students help Aggy emerge from the historical ether.  That was largely due to the indefatigable research of Alex Finley, a talented — and inspired — William & Mary graduate student, who discovered documents long hidden in Virginia court records.  The work of her and her team, combined with my own continued research (and that of my splendid intern, Jenna Simpson), painted a new picture — or, rather, restored a lost portrait — of Aggy that not only led to an effective individual portrayal, but a powerful program, “His Natural Wife,” to tell the story of a remarkable woman.

Through that work, we developed new scholarship on both Aggy and on the nature of interracial relationships in early America.  At the beginning of the process, the story ended as one expected it might, with the Virginia gentry preserving their ancient hegemony over those who would rebel against it.  At the end, and ongoing, we see a much different Virginia, one in which a woman could fight for her rights — and win.  That’s a Virginia much more complicated, much more contingent, and much more interesting and diverse than you’ll get out of most books and historical sites.

Aggy did not let Richard’s challenge against Ryland’s will stand.  She fought back, partnering with a neighbor, lawyer (and prominent Quaker) Robert Pleasants, to claim her rights under Ryland’s will and demand that Richard produce evidence of Ryland’s supposed debts to him.  Richard countered, offering to grant her and her children freedom in his own will if they did not make any claims under Ryland’s, but Aggy refused.  She petitioned the various Virginia courts, suing Richard and his successors for unlawful imprisonment by Richard and his family, as she was oppressed by them “in more than a common degree” as she possessed an “absolute right to freedom.”  It took 16 years after the death of Ryland, but Richard never provided the evidence of debts and Aggy’s tenacity won out: On 18 August 1801, Aggy, “who obtained her freedom by suit,” appeared before the clerk of the Henrico County Court and obtained her legal liberty.

That, however, is where the story ends — for now.  What happened to her and her children is, as yet, unknown.  There is evidence that Ryland succeeded in establishing the trust for them in London, but not what became of it.  Nevertheless, through the synergy created by the relationships at the heart of public history, we know more about the period and its people.  And we have new questions.  For example, chief on my mind, did Aggy’s difficulties with Richard influence Jefferson’s choices about what how to legally treat Sally Hemings and their children? Jefferson was well aware of the fight over Ryland’s will, which might have impacted his own plans for the Hemings. [UPDATE: I’ve since discovered what happened to Aggy, the two children, and the trust Ryland established for them.]

This is one of the stories in my file.  It’s also a reminder of the power of public history as a partnership of the sort that History Space is trying to teach, grow, and show.  I’m also looking forward to building the process into my forthcoming Public History: A Field Guide (Rowman & Littlefield for the AASLH) and my public history courses at Johns Hopkins.  But, on some days, like today’s rainy one in Providence, some stories just need to be told.  And Aggy’s would wait no more.

Many well-meaning journalists covering Colonial Williamsburg’s latest troubles have bought into CEO Mitchell Reiss’s narrative that “history is dead,” therefore — so his reasoning goes — CW’s problems are part of a general trend among museums (from art to living history) that he must heroically combat, rather than ones of its, or his and his board’s, own making.  In the absence of other readily available data, the journalists have tended to rely on 2014 articles and 2012 reports as proof of a field in trouble (see NPR’s Sarah McCammon’s otherwise fine piece as an example). Of those commentators without a financial stake in the current establishment, only Peter Galuzska in the Washington Post has gotten it completely wrong (I’m not sure how cutting African American programs but adding a shooting range, a skating rink, an inflatable octopus, and craft beer tastings are opening CW “up to a more diverse America”– the Wall Street Journal nailed this one). But we in the field know that things have changed in the last three years, given the efforts of many practitioners to better understand the business of public history, religiously reading “Know Your Own Bone” (check out Colleen’s terrific new resource website) and following along with Ruth Taylor (Newport Historical Society), Frank Vagnone (Old Salem), Richard Pickering (Plimoth Plantation), Gary Sandling (Monticello), and Kat Imhoff (Montpelier) as they move their institutions, and the field, forward.  And, more to the point, the data actually is there, if you know where to look.

So it’s more instructive and useful to examine the matter in terms of metrics, rather than empty — and largely unprovable — assertions about motivations behind visitation numbers and donation levels. Let’s look at how CW compares with similarly situated institutions based solely on the data, and what it really means. To me, as I prepare students to work in public history and advise major donors (and solicit them), a most useful figure is fundraising efficiency. It’s a nicely simple indicator, and terrific as a diagnostic measure: How much money does it cost an institution to convince a donor to give them $1? The implications are clear, and accurate. Institutions that donors do not know or, worse, in which they do not have much trust, take more convincing, which costs money. Or, when donors have given up on your institution, you have to find new donors, which also costs money.  Institutions that have a clear mission and an institutional culture that projects it, build donor confidence, along with a solid brand, thereby making the donation pitch much less expensive, all things considered. Based on its most recent IRS I-990, how does CW stack up against its peers and the field as a whole?

The average for museums across the country is 14 cents to raise every $1. It costs Mount Vernon 17 cents, Monticello 9 cents, Montpelier 9 cents, Strawberry Banke 8 cents, Plimoth Plantation 7 cents, and the American Civil War Center at Tredegar just 2 cents.

It costs CW 24 cents to raise every $1. Among American museums, only Mystic Seaport‘s 25 cents is higher. That also means that a quarter of every dollar donated to CW goes to raise the next dollar, not to programming or anything else.

It’s directly a measure of what we call donor confidence, a precious commodity. Once gained, it’s something to defend at almost any cost. Once lost, it’s almost impossible to get back, and, sorry Reiss, doing things like siphoning tens of millions of dollars from the non-profit endowment to mask for-profit losses isn’t going to help much with that.  Keep in mind, the massive financial losses in the hotels, golf courses, and other for-profit properties have little to nothing to do with the work on the Foundation side, even if the Foundation is bearing the brunt of covering those losses (they even fired the director of conservation and effectively shuttered the research library — pretty tough to run a history site without those folks, although a current staffer tweeted that those cuts were merely “unfortunate.” One suspects he enjoys continuing to collect a paycheck.).  For example, the Foundation had to rent the Kimball Theater, essentially from itself, for all programs (and without a discount from the normal rate).  That’s one way to use non-profit money to underwrite a for-profit venture.  Again, look at the data — the Foundation, strictly speaking, has always been able to cover its own costs.  The eye-popping deficits have been caused by the for-profit ventures.  But mix them together and, suddenly, it’s an issue for the entire museum field?  Um, no.  The problem is less that CW’s historical audience stopped going, it’s that the ones who were going stopped sleeping in its expensive hotels.

That leads us to look at CW’s “Working Capital” number. That’s how long, based on existing assets and current trends, a museum can last. CW’s number is now 6.6 years (less than the eight that’s been reported).  Several years ago it was twice that.

How does CW stack up against the sector in other categories? Take a look for yourself by digging through Charity Navigator.

The problem is not general. It is not the public history or museum field. It is just CW — and its leaders.

The threat facing the Queen Mary is a serious issue with which, ultimately, every museum or other site with major physical resources has to grapple. Maritime museums of all sorts — from the Queen Mary to Fall River’s Battleship Cove or Mystic Seaport — are like zoos in that way: the first responsibility is to the care and preservation of the reason(s) they exist at all (check out the AASLH’s guide to Interpreting Naval History at Museums and Historic Sites). That alone is a tremendously expensive effort, and while certain things can be deferred, they cannot be avoided and will only become more expensive to fix. As someone who once ran a site with a few dozen historic buildings, some dating to the 1600s, maintaining them (to the point of spending winter mornings shoveling snow off 18th-century roofs), let alone interpreting them, was a daunting task. How can you completely fulfill every site’s implicit core mission — not just to protect, but to project — when you can’t let anyone experience the space because it’s dangerous to the structure and to the guests, and you simply don’t have the money?

As funding sources decline, and schemes to find more become more wild and ineffectual in their desperation, when does the answer become “let it go”? More and more sites will face the question that the Queen Mary — a unique, immersive site that has a special place in my heart and where my Disney connection began — now must answer. Communities have done, and are doing to do, what they can, but the need is quickly outstripping their capacity. The differences among Long Beach to Fall River to smaller towns are in degree, not in kind. In the end, while we talk a great deal about succession plans in museum and public history leadership, and sustainability of programming and human capital, must we now include a new discussion about decommissioning with dignity, responsibly and thoughtfully turning experience into memory and history?

And, keep in mind, this has already begun. Does anyone remember Johnsonville, an Old Sturbridge-type (meaning totally fictional but with period buildings shipped in from other areas) Victorian “living history” village in Connecticut that closed more than 15 years ago? They have already been decommissioned, the site is abandoned, and its caretakers are selling historic resources to anyone with cash. Other sites are taking different tacks, but are no less transformational. Old Sturbridge itself, for a site that is losing $1 million a year per its last 990, is shifting its scarce resources to creating a charter school. Colonial Williamsburg, now hemorrhaging guests, has dropped all pretensions to the history education vision that created the place, and inspired Walt Disney himself, to embrace “theme-based interpretation” that promotes, as the Wall Street Journal just promoted, hotels, golf, fine dining, and craft beer (the new motto, according to the WSJ, should be “Give me luxury or give me death!”): Its idea of a Women’s History Month program is a group of patriot men, talking about women, which basically happens every day ending in a “y”. As for many of the rest, the unique stories they can tell are being buried underneath an increasingly anodyne and banal series of cookie-cutter programming. Bold, original programming, except at places like Plimoth Plantation, appears to have largely evaporated. Perhaps, as has been suggested elsewhere, it is simply that an era in the history of heritage tourism — that of the large-scale living history museum — is over, a relic of post-World War II prosperity, highways, and a love-affair with car trips. At least some places, such as Historic Deerfield, seem to be resolutely holding on to their integrity, keeping within their financial compass to focus intently on mission-related efforts, to their credit. But for many others, is there a pandemic of the same sort of “mission rot” that the Queen Mary more seriously and directly faces in its hull deterioration, but leads, nevertheless, to the same metaphorical end: a sinking ship that can never sail again?

In any case, it’s a situation that’s certainly calls for a new chapter for my upcoming book, and might require a serious re-read of The Anarchists’ Guide.

Several weeks ago, a group of admittedly self-proclaimed radical public historians, led by NHS Executive Director Ruth Taylor,  descended upon the Colony House in Newport to dispel a rumor that is growing like a pernicious weed through certain quarters of the field: History is dead and the heritage sites that depend on it are dying.  It’s a rationale being deployed by some of the largest and oldest living history sites in America to justify dramatic changes in their programming to chase revenue from other, hopefully younger, sources, such as the coveted, yet elusive, Millennials whom, the thinking goes, are searching high and low for the next unique background for a strikingly similar, and similarly anodyne, series of ghost tours, craft beer tastings, modern art installations, and weddings (lots and lots of weddings).  Millennials want leisure experiences, they say, like spa treatments and wine pairings, not challenging engagement with the people, events, and ideas that continue to shape our collective lives.  They want resolution, not conflict.  History is dead, these wishful trailblazers declare, and the only way to save heritage spaces is to kill them and their archaic missions.

It’s a topic that our panel of radicals — Old Salem’s Frank Vagnone (co-author of The Anarchists’ Guide to Historic House Museums), the American Association of State and Local History’s Bob Beatty, the Rhode Island Historical Society’s Morgan Grefe, History Communicator extraordinaire Kevin Levin, and myself, with a special appearance by Plimoth Plantation’s Tom Begley — were eager to tackle, perhaps because, for all of our claims to radicalism, and record of causing trouble in the museum world in several time zones, we were uniform, even resolute, in response: to channel Faulkner’s fictional attorney Gavin Stevens in Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”  In other words, history — especially a public history that actively seeks to connect the past to the present in ways that shape the future, and a preservation ethos that rehabilitates stories as much as buildings — is alive and well, even amongst Millennials.  As one of the panelists pointed out, just follow the money.  Lin-Manuel Miranda and his Hamilton: The Musical wouldn’t have reached their current astronomical heights of popularity if history is dead.  “Hidden Figures” and “Hacksaw Ridge” wouldn’t have been nominated for Best Picture Academy Awards, and grossed a combined $219 million at the box office, if history is dead.

More to the point is the evidence provided by the institutions that appear to be at greatest risk if history was headed to the morgue.  Closer to home, the mansions managed by the Preservation Society of Newport County reported welcoming an astonishing one million guests last year.  Plimoth Plantation — a prime candidate for extreme unction if there was one, with its dozens of costumed interpreters, a complex narrative that blends religion, Native Americans, and a core of Protestant extremists, and a 90-minute drive from the nearest metro area — is not only holding onto its historical audiences, it’s growing new ones, while maintaining a respectable balance sheet for donors and trustees.

So what’s the deal? Why are some sites losing guests and dollars, jettisoning boatloads of human capital in the process, while seemingly similarly situated ones are looking forward to a sustainable future?  In the end, we concluded that the issue isn’t about history being dead, it’s about history being deadly boring.  From Hamilton to Plimoth, success clearly appears to lie in a consistently strong yet diverse helping of mission-driven historical programming designed to educate and entertain, connecting audiences — even Millennials — in ways that are natural, that taste and feel real because they are.  But that requires a level of deep immersion in a historical past that draws heavily on academic resources of all kinds in order to get the details right, even the ones guests don’t see.  The important thing is the scope and nature of a 360-degree guest experience, one that’s not bland or artificial, and than can carry the serious ideas and conflicts that are going on in the heads of Americans and other visitors, regardless of marketing demographic, if for no other reason than because that is the only way through them. Immersive public history doesn’t work unless the past we present gets at the big stuff.  As my experience from Disney to Colonial Williamsburg consistently reminds me, engagement doesn’t work unless it gets at the core of a human condition that wrestles with the challenges we continue to face, whether over race, religion, gender identity, or other distinctions that artificially divide history into one that’s yours and one that’s mine.

But it can’t be fantasy.  That line can’t be crossed, even if, in the end, all we are really trying to do is tell a story and draw others into its pages.  Do that and, as we radicals discussed during and beyond the panel, your site will not just lose money, it will lose much more — it will lose credibility, which, for a heritage site, is the ball game.  Entertaining, provocative programming will convince your guests to come back to your site, but your reputation is what will get them there in the first place.

So Faulkner’s over-quoted phrase can continue to have real meaning for us as public historians, who see the past as vibrant and alive, with an important role to play in our daily lives, as it swirls all around us.  Because, in the final analysis of the Newport radicals, people don’t hate history, they just hate history done badly by people who don’t seem to care much about it.

Dr. Taylor Stoermer, Visiting Curator of Public History at the Newport Historical Society, Faculty Fellow and Adjunct Professor at Roger Williams University, and author of the forthcoming Public History: A Field Guide (Rowman and Littlefield).

This is a guest post by journalist Brian Hubert (follow him on Twitter @briguyhubert), an avocational specialist in transportation history, who just visited southern New England to look into the different ways in which public history is practiced here.  This is his impression of a visit to several sites in Fall River, Massachusetts, offering military, technological, social, and dark history, in places that use the power of space in strikingly different, but similarly influential ways, when it comes to understanding the elements of a successful guest experience.

A recent trip to Fall River, Massachusetts shows the power of space in historic sites.

A career in public history can lead one down some unexpected paths.  Unlike a traditional academic career, focused so intently on classrooms and publications, public history is, indeed, everywhere, and can assume almost any creative or intellectual form. It has taken me from Colonial Williamsburg to C-SPAN to the Hudson Valley and on to Harvard, the Kennedy Institute, and Newport.  It has also put me on a plane to Orlando, on my way to, of all places, Walt Disney World, and all it has to offer for the practicing public historian, which, as it turns out, is quite a bit.

This particular adventure started when the editor of my forthcoming textbook on the practice of public history — Public History: A Field Guide (Rowman & Littlefield for the AASLH) — strongly suggested, in a way that only editors seem to be able to carry off, that I include more in my book about the history of public history. I was pointedly planning to avoid the topic, except for some broad historical commentary on public historians of the 18th and 19th centuries, and escape any emphasis on theory — given the little interest and less patience I have with that particular topic. But a textbook worth the time and money of any student or practitioner, I was reminded, however focused on the practical dimensions of the field,  should tell the whole story of that field, which includes such essential backstories.  So added to my research and writing schedule were two new chapters, starting with the history of public history.  And who would I run into as I began it but the man behind the mouse: Walt Disney.

It’s not that he, or his specter, at least, wasn’t inevitably lurking in the background of that history.  “Disneyfication” has long been a pejorative in the field, meaning essentially the commodification, simplification, and even misdirection of cultural heritage for profit.  It had a particularly negative resonance among veteran staff at Colonial Williamsburg, who sneered at what appeared to be the Walt Disney Company’s overt rejection of any responsibility for authenticity and accuracy in pursuit of whatever sentimental or narrative entertainment value that might earn a buck for the multimedia behemoth.  The recent past has given us attempts by the Disney Company, under Michael Eisner’s guidance, to establish a Civil War theme park in Northern Virginia and a cringeworthy twist on the tale of Pocahontas in the eponymous animated feature.  Throw in movies and television adaptions such as the stories of Esther Forbes’ fictional, but beloved, Johnny Tremain and an all-too unhistorical take on the very real Davy Crockett (a broadcast that nevertheless generated a massive nationwide phenomenon that makes the current “Hamilton” fad look like the merest blip on America’s cultural radar screen), and Disney’s reputation for being the enemy of public history, of doing more harm than good, appears to be well-deserved. So what, you may well ask, am I doing on this plane? 

In short, I blame Neal Gabler, a terrific biographer now penning a life of Edward M. Kennedy, about which we have been exchanging thoughts and ideas.  Our discussions led me to his splendid book on Walt Disney and more than a few things I didn’t know about that complicated American visionary.  One was his deep appreciation of America’s past and its importance to our national identity — an issue that has been contested, and condemned, in more than one academic conference session.  More interestingly, however, was his connection to the thrust of my book: the seminal, and reciprocal, role he played in the the modern practice of public history.  When he first considered the potential of  imbedded, immersive experiences, and the business that made it possible, as well as the point of it all, Disney turned first to those sites that were then on the cutting edge, most notably Colonial Williamsburg.  Disney and his wife registered their first visit there in 1944.  As his activity and interest increased, especially when Disneyland was coming to the fore of his efforts in the 1950s, he returned to CW and added Old Sturbridge Village and other sites to his research itinerary, shaping and reshaping his view of the importance of people and place as key elements in telling a story that could transport anyone to another context, whether fictional or historical, leaving their modern views behind to embrace the possibilities inherent in fully engaged interactions with live interpretation and, of course, the built environment.  He refined that with more visits in the 1960s as he moved to expanding that view while he and his “Imagineers” developed Disney World. In 2017, it is likely that more people this year will gain their core understanding of American history and identity from a visit to a Disney theme park, a movie, or another media source than will ever read all of Bernard Bailyn’s books combined.

The favor, if you will, was returned as cultural heritage sites like CW adopted and profited from the practices that Disney developed, for better and worse. So the relationship has definitely become one in dire need of therapy, which is why I’m here — to learn, with the help of the Walt Disney Company, to renew the dialogue, if not stage an intervention.  As a group of my Harvard graduate students taught me with a clever project last year, Walt Disney World is a great public history site, whether we like or not, so here I am (Using Frozen‘s hereditary monarchy model for an extra credit question recently had nothing to do with it. Really.).  It’s sure to be a wild ride, so I hope you come along for it. 

Second historian to the right, and straight on ’til morning.