Beyond Preservation: Using Public History to Revitalize Inner Cities

2. Taking It to the Streets: Public History in the City

2  Taking It to the Streets Public History in the City T he philosophy and practice of public historical commemoration has changed dramatically in the last forty years. The rise of social history as a field of study in the 1970s, along with theoretical advances in the disciplines of cultural geography and urban sociology, gave scholars powerful conceptual tools for making the past meaningful to diverse populations and empowering previously marginalized groups. Academically trained public historians and archaeologists have taken the lead in sharing these insights with popular audiences and developing collaborative projects. Some of the most exciting ventures have boasted a strong preservation component and have relied on the built environment as the primary vehicle for communicating the past to present-day audiences. To grasp the potential of public history as a tool for preservation-based revitalization, it is useful to review the developments that have simultaneously democratized and professionalized the public interpretation of urban landscapes. Historians in Public Until very recently, public historians ignored much of the diverse mosaic of American life. Broadly defined, public history encompasses all history delivered to nonacademic audiences. Documentaries appearing on television, museum exhibits, books written for mass markets, and historical markers fastened to building facades all fall under the public-history classification. Public archaeology is a related enterprise that seeks broad public engagement TAKING IT TO THE STREETS 33 in the excavation and interpretation of material artifacts. Before the rise of the modern university in the late nineteenth century, all history was public history. The men and women who chronicled the past received no special training in historical research; the people for whom they wrote shared a similar social profile as well-educated members of the elite. As late as 1911, amateurs constituted 70 percent of the American Historical Association’s membership. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, historical research and writing became increasingly professionalized. University-trained scholars, working in academic settings, disseminated their findings to colleagues and students. Popular history was relegated to journalists, filmmakers , museum employees, and the members of local historical societies. Despite this bifurcation among history practitioners, the themes used to interpret the past remained remarkably consistent. Through the 1950s, both academic and public history recounted a tale of progress. Academic history gave more emphasis to the rise of democratic political institutions and the crystallization of a distinctive American character while the history delivered to public audiences focused more on the heroic acts of individuals, but in both cases the dominant storyline glorified the European march across the American continent, the solidification of national identity after the Civil War, the growth of the industrial economy, and the rise of the United States to worldpower status. The history encountered by men, women, and children out in the streets and public places of the city reinforced the dominant narratives. That is, most of the history produced for public display in town squares, along roadsides, and on building facades tended to celebrate the achievements of elite white men.1 The flip side of this bias was a blatant disregard for the contributions and sacrifices made by other social groups. Conducting a cross-country survey of monuments, markers, and preserved historic sites during the late 1990s, author James Loewen discovered to his dismay that women and African Americans were severely underrepresented. In the State of Illinois, for example, mention of women was almost completely absent from historical markers despite the fact that both the League of Women Voters and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs were founded in Chicago and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union was headquartered in Evanston.2 While Loewen was surprised to find ample reference to Indian wars, Native Americans typically were depicted in unflattering terms. Statues featuring Native Americans , for instance, almost always showed them in a subservient relationship to white Europeans.3 Even more offensive to Loewen was the public veneration of historical figures who worked actively to suppress the rights of racial minorities. Astoundingly, Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux 34 CHAPTER 2 Klan, appeared on more historical markers in Tennessee than any individual in any other state. At the foot of Canal Street near the Mississippi River, New Orleans maintained an obelisk to commemorate the violent overthrow of the biracial Reconstruction government at the hands of the aptly named White League in 1874. The so-called Liberty Monument, built...