When I walked into the Library of Virginia a few weeks ago, the first thing I noticed was not the books, or exhibition signs but rather, the people themselves. They were both people who had come in from the street to use the atrium as a place to sit and talk and get out of the cold and people there to check out books and review records. When I have always thought of a library I have always thought about scholars finding their materials to write about or the young kid checking out his first library book. What I saw before me that day though was not just that, it was actually so much more. But what was this something more? Why did it strike me as it did? Continue reading
Tag Archives: Library of Virginia
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
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