In today’s increasingly electronic age, digital mapping has become an important tool of historical scholarship, allowing historians to not only share information but to present it in different ways that facilitate new interpretations and conclusions. Conveying historical information through interactive, electronic maps adds a spatial component to the information, allowing readers to locate it within geographically defined context and thus examine how geography influences trends in this data. Mapping the information creates an explicit link between the geographical and historical context of the data, and encourages a holistic approach in which the historian can compare the data to other data based on the relevance of its proximity. Continue reading
Creating History: The Reverence for Family and the Power of the Personal
As I walked into the “To Be Sold” exhibit at the Library of Virginia, a section of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s now classic work “The Presence of the Past” describing public opinion on museum and family history moved to the forefront of my thoughts, and I spent much of the tour contemplating how the exhibit and this text related to each other. Interested in the popular uses of history in American life, Rosenzweig and Thelen asked 1,500 Americans to rank the perceived trustworthiness of various sources. The average response put “Personal accounts from grandparents or other relatives” second-highest on the list, just behind “Museums” and well ahead of “College history professors.” Considering the significance that many Americans attach to personal accounts and family histories, I often found myself weighing the exhibit’s significance to family history: How and in what ways does “To Be Sold” incorporate a sense of familial or personal history into the display? Continue reading
A Community’s Marred Memory
In the nineteenth century, more than 300,000 men, women, and children were auctioned off as slaves in the Shockoe Bottom district of Richmond, Virginia. Second only to New Orleans, Richmond served as the largest market for the U.S. slave trade in the early nineteenth century. In the past five years, there has been a grassroots movement to build a memorial park in the Shockoe Bottom area to remember the historical significance of this area. Controversially, the city also has a growing interest in building a new stadium for the Flying Squirrels baseball team in the same district. The city is looking to stimulate the city’s economy through the construction of a new stadium, whereas others argue that a memorial park would bring in little revenue to the city. The council has proposed including a memorial heritage site within the baseball stadium complex. These two ideas have developed into a battle of what is most important for the needs of the city: a need for the community’s memory to be protected or the need to bring in significant profits for the city through a structure intended for public gatherings. Is the city better off with the construction of a baseball stadium or a memorial park in remembrance of Richmond’s slave trade? Continue reading
Abbitt Papers: Archivists in the real world
In the “Historian’s Workshop” seminar at the University of Richmond, our class has been working this semester to process boxes from the papers of Watkins Moorman Abbitt. Abbitt was a 1931 graduate of the University of Richmond law school who served in the U.S. Congress from 1948 to 1973. The collection consists of nearly 130 boxes and remains unprocessed, meaning no other archivists have gone through and organized or preserved the contents of each box. My fellow classmates and I, most of who are history majors, put our historian’s hats down and simultaneously picked up our archivist ones. In this experience, we learned about the importance of archivists, the challenges they face, the work of maintaining objectivity, and ultimately the importance of choosing and displaying the most important documents to the public. Continue reading
Community-controlled attractions: Locals wield more power than you think
From the 1830s to the Civil War, Richmond was the second largest slave-trading hub in the nation next to New Orleans. Shockoe Bottom, an area located along the James River, is one of Richmond’s oldest neighborhoods and was central in the slave trade. In a battle to preserve this Historic Slave Trade site, Ana Edwards, head of a coalition of scholars, artists, community activists, has argued recently that putting a minor league ballpark in Shockoe Bottom detracts from Richmond’s ability to come to terms with its slave past. Reasoning that if we do not deal with the slave trade history in Shockoe Bottom, Edwards continued, Richmond “will always struggle through this identity crisis that it has.” A museum in Shockoe Bottom would enable both local and national communities to interpret and examine Richmond’s role in the slave trade, shedding light on stories that deserve telling. In this, a slave trade museum or memorial site is important because it preserves the past and legitimatizes it by keeping the local communities incorporated in the past experiences. Continue reading
The Story of Virginia 2.0
In his article, “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?,” Cary Carson, former Vice President of the Research Division for the Colonial Willamsburg Foundation, calls into question the challenge faced by many institutions today: Can museums keep up, or are they trapped in the cycle of decline that so many before have fallen prey to? With the internet providing faster and easy access to historical content, it is not enough to simply show the facts, museums must go above and beyond. Continue reading
Native Americans and Museums: The Effects of NAGPRA on Methods of Presentation and Preservation in Museums
Of all the influences on the evolution of museums in recent history, one of the most significant, yet underappreciated, is that of Native American peoples. In 1990, this activism helped drive passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). Over the last two decades, NAGPRA has had notable effects on the way museums present and preserve their artifacts. In her essay “What is the Object of This Exercise? A Meandering Exploration of the Many Meanings of Objects in Museums,” historian Elaine Heumman Gurian argues that this activism has changed our understanding of what counts as a museum “artifact,” something that had previously been taken for granted as unproblematic. I was struck by the effort that indigenous communities have put forward in the last four decades to reclaim their own history and the manner in which they are represented in museums. What effects have Native American groups had on the development of museums, specifically in areas such as presentation and preservation in museums? Continue reading
A New Decade for the Virginia Historical Society
To tell the story of Virginia, one must know the history of Virginia. To know the history and its legacy, you must understand what happened and what influence it has had on the current endeavors. It may be something simple as a confirmation of what took place on a date in the Virginia State capital or even deeper when trying to see how politicians voted during a particular session. Through the usage of artifacts, archived papers, and paintings, the story is told. Continue reading
Data mining without a pick-axe
Computers have become the historical researchers’ powerful ally when it comes to discerning patterns amid data in text. Technology has allowed researchers the ability to complete projects that would have been impossible without these computational methods. The typewriter allowed the researcher the ability to create a manuscript that was legible and edits were cleaner, unlike handwritten documents that needed a cypher. Word processors, the internet and digital databases that allowed researchers the ability to not only type up and revise documents, but to complete research from the comfort of their office without having to drive to a library or archive to review written sources. While some of these tools were advancements allowing finished research to become published article or monograph faster, research has advanced to combine critical thinking with computational data mining that creates new assessments of old research. Continue reading
Using photography to shape historical interpretation
I recently undertook a class trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to examine how the museum tells the story of the Holocaust. What struck me most was the way the museum used photographs to convey the horrors of the Holocaust to visitors. Walking through the exhibition, I was confronted continuously with close-up, small portrait photographs of the faces of holocaust victims, generally placed at eye-level so as to force a realization of the human face of the Holocaust. This pictorial narration of the human face of the holocaust is punctured throughout by large, striking photographs which illustrate the ‘other side’ of the Holocaust : the Nazi state machinery, soldiers, rallies and propaganda. These large photographs dominate their allocated exhibition space, and their very size represents a psychical metaphor for the sheer dominance and power of the Nazi regime. Continue reading