Selling the past/co-opting history: Colonial Williamsburg as republican Disneyland

According to the Wall Street Journal, Colonial Williamsburg has recently initiated a $3 million advertising campaign to boost its “declining attendance” in the face of “stepped up competition from razzle-dazzle theme parks.” One of the new advertisements depicts a large tricorner hat flanked by the headline, “would you visit if we put big round ears on it?” Building on the theme, Williamsburg has also adopted a number of “Disney-style innovations,” such as theatrical closing ceremonies, “Revolutionary Fun” packages, and piped in sound, in an effort “to persuade families to swallow a dose of American history.” Attendance at Colonial Williamsburg has declined almost 25 percent in the last decade, while the number one tourist attraction in Virginia is Potomac Mills shopping mall, and reported attendance at Disney World has reached record highs. In response, the foundation is attempting to “bridge the gap between contemporary and colonial culture” by positioning Williamsburg as a historical and educational theme park. ¹

In a world of mass leisure and mass multimedia, government cutbacks, decreased funding, history standards, and culture wars, in a society where Disney World looms large, promising a sanitized America filled with adventure, entertainment, and escape from the mundane and unpleasant realities of modern life, history museums—all museums for that matter— have been forced to move beyond the highbrow ideals of culture and education and embrace the middle and lowbrow desire for entertainment and spectacle. Yet simultaneously, history museums have attempted to speak to a broader, more diverse audience by embracing the new social history and moving beyond the glorification of political leaders and victorious warriors to present the experience of everyday life, the underside of history, and the economic and social relations of power that have kept silent historical actors voiceless and invisible. Walking a tightrope between the desires of popular culture and the demands of the academy, history museums have struggled to redefine their mission and their place in the public sphere.

In The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, anthropologists Richard Handler and Eric Gable offer an intriguing and disturbing assessment of this struggle as it has been played out at Colonial Williamsburg. ² Building on recent scholarly interest in museums as sites of social, cultural, and political production concerning issues of representation, collection, commemoration, and the politics of identity, Handler and Gable examine the cultural construction of history making at Colonial Williamsburg. ³ However, this is not your standard critique and analysis of public history and museum exhibition. Rather, Handler and Gable have produced a “thick description” of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as a distinct corporate culture devoted to living history as a form of public education. Approaching Williamsburg as a combination Balinese cockfight and society of the spectacle, they examine “the production and consumption of museum messages in relation to the institutional context in which those processes occurred”(10). ⁴

Between 1990 and 1991, Handler, Gable, and their graduate student assistant Anna Lawson became participant observers at Colonial Williamsburg, conducting extensive interviews with visitors and museum staff ranging from frontline interpreters and support personnel to department managers and foundation vice presidents. They toured the buildings and grounds, attended special events, and participated in various personnel workshops. In addition, they conducted extensive research in company archives. The result is a provocative—if sometimes disconcerting from a historian’s perspective—exposé of the corporate culture of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and the historical products it generates.

In the late 1970s, Colonial Williamsburg, in response to theoretical and methodological developments in the field of history, decreased attendance, and the pressures and realities of mass tourism, experienced a paradigm shift in its conceptualization of history. In 1977, a new cadre of social historians hired during the late 1960s and early 1970s codified these changes in a report from the Curriculum Committee, which eventually was incorporated into the 1985...