Letting Go? Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World (review)

This brainy fun house of a collection, which incorporates newly crafted articles inspired by Michael Frisch's early article on how public history is a process of sharing authority between the professional historian and the public that actually informs history, should inspire most anyone toiling in American museums and related cultural organizations. Essays, reviews, interviews, bibliographies, photographs, and the various arts enhance several debates simmering within this beautifully designed volume. Oral historian Michael Frisch provides one of the flash points by expanding on his 1990 classic text A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (SUNY Press).

Frisch explains, "We need to recognize the already shared authority in the documents we generate and in the processes of public history engagement—a dialogic dimension, however implicit, through which 'author-ship' is shared by definition, and hence interpretive 'author-ity' as well" (127-28). Frisch shows how new technology makes oral history interviews a "post-documentary" resource more open to public use than was common a decade ago, when historians regarded written transcripts as the primary source generated by interviews. He also questions the viability of the well-known StoryCorps project as a legitimate oral history endeavor since it overedits sound bites for weekly National Public Radio broadcasts while also neglecting to create a useable database available to the public and scholars. Frisch's combative essay brings up other current issues in the field as well, making this a key text on the state of the field.

Benjamin Filene offers a lengthy defense of StoryCorps. Observing the project's potential to popularize oral history, Filene cites none other than Studs Terkel, the late Chicago author, radio personality, and activist. At 91 years of age, he cut the ribbon for the first mobile recording booth at the Manhattan Grand Central Terminal and said, "Today we shall begin celebrating the lives of the uncelebrated!" One of the strongest contributions of StoryCorps, Filene believes, is that it "shows that emotion powerfully conveys meaning and is meaningful in itself. If museums tell stories—rich, complex ones that engage emotions—then visitors will engage, reflect, and likely, be moved to tell stories of their own" (189).

The editors divide some twenty texts into five sections: influence of the Web, community involvement, oral history interpretations, evaluation, and a long final section of five essays on fine artists working in museums. These latter essays were among the most fascinating, though Filene's earlier piece on the Minnesota Historical Society's Open House project may describe the most innovative project presented here. In addition to Frisch's (1990) monograph, artist Fred Wilson is credited in the introduction with shaking up the authority of museums and curators to explain history. Wilson explains in a wide-ranging interview the background of his famous 1992 exhibit "Mining the Museum" at the Maryland Historical Society:

I try to inform myself as much as I can. It's the story of my life. My family moved every five years within New York City, and, in order to exist in these different environments, I had to become a different person, realizing that people saw me in a particular way according to the environment. I had to fit in as a black child in an all-white school in suburban Westchester County. Then we moved into the black and Latino neighborhood in the Bronx. Looking like everybody else but not having the same experience was another negotiation that I had to do. So, I'm always negotiating environments, and context has always been important to me as a way to survive

(234).

Can creative artists in whatever genre help public institutions gain wider authority and encourage greater public involvement? A lengthy essay examines artist/playwright Ben Katchor's performance piece to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Rosenbach Foundation in...