The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History's Front Lines

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Anyone who has encountered costumed workers at a living history museum may well have wondered what their jobs are like, churning butter or firing muskets while dressed in period clothing. In The Wages of History, Amy M.Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesota’s Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they understand their roles and experience their daily work. Although many who are drawn to such work initially see it as a privilege, the realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, in order to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to avoid confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace. This case study also offers insights into the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out among the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public history’s front lines both resist and embrace the site’s more difficult and painful histories relating to slavery and American Indian genocide. “A sophisticated analysis that brings together the politics of gender with the aesthetics of historical performance and the materialist sensibilities of political economy—truly a multifaceted approach that adds something quite new to the critical literature on public history.” —Cathy Stanton, author of The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City AMY M.TYSON is assistant professor of history at DePaul University. A volume in the series Public History in Historical Perspective UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress Cover photo: Fort Snelling Sutler Store, 1982, by Stan Waldhauser. Courtesy Minnesota Historical Society. ...