Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History

Notes

171 Notes Prologue 1. Charles B. Hosmer Jr.,“Pioneers of Public History: Verne E. Chatelain and the Development of the Branch of History of the National Park Service,” Public Historian 16, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 25–38, 32–33. 2. Harlan Unrau and G. Frank Williss, “The National Park Service, 1933–1939,” in Expansion of the National Park Service in the 1930s: Administrative History, National Park Service, last modified March 14, 2000, www.nps.gov/history/history /online_books/unrau-williss/adhi6a.htm. 3. There is a vast literature on these subjects. See, e.g., Rebecca Conard, Benjamin Shambaugh and the Intellectual Foundations of Public History (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002); Julie Des Jardins, Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race and the Politics of Memory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Michael Holleran, Boston’s Changeful Times: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Barbara J. Howe, “Women in Historic Preservation: The Legacy of Ann Pamela Cunningham,” Public Historian 12, no. 1 (Winter 1990): 31–61; Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1993); James M. Lindgren, Preserving the Old Dominion: Historic Preservation and Virginia Traditionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); Charlene Mires, Independence Hall in American Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); and Patricia West, Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999). 4. In addition to several of the studies cited in note 3, other works frequently assigned in introductory public history courses recount the history of the field in this manner. See, e.g., David Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Barbara J. Howe and Emory L. Kemp, Public History: An Introduction (Malabar, Fla.: R. E. Krieger, 1986); Phyllis K. Leffler and Joseph Brent, Public History Readings (Malabar, Fla.: R. E. Krieger, 1992). 172 notes to pages xv–xx 5. Kristin Ahlberg and others, “Report of the Working Group on Evaluating Public History Scholarship” (unpublished draft, November 2008), 2. 6. Pete Daniels, a curator in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, Division of Work and Industry, served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 2008 to 2009. 7. Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 105. 8. Recent works have been well received, including the winner of the 2007 NCPH Book Award,Cathy Stanton,The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,2006).See also Amy M.Tyson,“Crafting Emotional Comfort: Interpreting the Painful Past at Living History Museums in the New Economy,” Museum and Society 6, no. 3 (November 2008): 246–62. In contrast, research conducted by Richard Handler and Eric Gable created an ongoing and rather public debate between the authors and Cary Carson, then vice president for research at Colonial Williamsburg. To trace their debate, see Gable and Handler, “On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, Conjecture, and Black and White Histories at Colonial Williamsburg,” American Ethnologist 19, no. 4 (November 1992): 791–805; Gable and Handler, “The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (June 1994): 119–36; Cary Carson, “Lost in the Fun House: A Commentary on Anthropologists’ First Contact with History Museums,” Journal of American History 81, no. 1 (June, 1994): 137–50; and Handler and Gable, The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997). 9. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 574. 10. G. Wesley Johnson, “The Origins of The Public Historian and the National Council on Public History,” Public Historian 21, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 167–79. 11. Robert Kelley, “Public History: Its Origins, Nature and Prospects,” Public Historian 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 16; Johnson, “Origins,” 168; Kelley, “Public History,” 18. 12. Johnson, “Origins,” 168–69. 13. Ibid., 169. 14. Jack M. Holl,“Cultures in Conflict: An Argument against ‘Common Ground’ between Practicing Professional Historians and Academics,” Public Historian 30, no. 2 (Spring 2008): 29–50, quote on 32. 15. Jack M. Holl, “Getting on Track: Coupling the Society for History in the Federal Government to the Public History Train,” Public Historian 21, no...