History at Work, History as Work: Public History’s New Frontier

Guarded View, a sculpture by the artist Fred Wilson, shows four mannequins wearing guard’s uniforms from major New York museums. Positioned on a raised platform, the mannequins are headless, though their hands and necks show that they are African American. Wilson, who had been a museum guard, created the piece as a way to reflect on his feeling of invisibility as an African American man in the space of the museum. Museum administrators intended the guards—often the only people of color in the galleries—to disappear into the background, literally hiding their labor. But he and other guards were invisible not only to visitors but also to the professional museum staff, who were predominantly white. Guarded View reverses the process. Instead of retreating behind the art, the guards become hypervisible through being reinscribed as art, confronting the viewer with the racist and classist structures in museums.

Museums are not simply repositories for beautiful objects. As Tony Bennett, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Marita Sturken, Ivan Karp, Steven Lavine, and Alicia Caspar de Alba, among many others, have shown, museums and historic sites are creators of knowledge bound to a history of imperialism and colonialism.¹ The cultural authority of these institutions, expressed through collecting practices and exhibitions, define who is part of the nation and who is not.² In making these claims, these scholars read museums as spaces (comparable to other exhibitionary spaces like department stores) that produce classed and raced subjects with exhibits that make visible ideologies of race and national identity. Ethnographers and anthropologists have built on this cultural studies approach by asking how visitors negotiate the messages being delivered by museums through their own complex life histories.³ Guarded View reminds us that these organizations are also complex sites of labor. An exciting group of new books takes up this challenge. Using a political economic analysis of public history sites, they are focused less on their products than on their institutional workings: how they change over time, how power works within them, and how relations between workers and management (among other institutional actors) shape them. Collectively, these authors—Andrea Burns, Amy Lonetree, Denise Meringolo, Amy Tyson, and Kirsten Weld—map exciting new directions in public history scholarship, moving us from seeing public history as “a dream, or better, as a utopia” to seeing it as “a practice or as rules for some real institutions.”⁴

While the topics of each book are quite distinct, three themes weave throughout them. First, each author sees the institutions she examines as living ecosystems. Management decisions, workers’ roles, and the exigencies of funding are not relegated to the footnotes as in much scholarship; instead, they form links in an analytic chain about how institutions evolve in response to outside and inside stimuli. In each case, this means becoming more professionalized, which comes at a cost, especially to the communities that created them. Second, each author implicitly responds to Wilson’s critique by making labor visible. Workers have some agency to determine the course of these institutions, though all work within the confines of structures that affect them physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Finally, each author asks how public history institutions write the master narrative of the nation. Is it possible to counter or...