Real Images: Soviet Cinema and the Thaw (review)

Book Reviews | Regular Feature Robert R. Archibald. A Place to Remember, Using History to Build Community. AltaMira, 1999. 224 pages; $23.00. You Should Go Home Again Many of us have reached the age when we begin to reminisce about our past. A sight, an odor, or a song lyric brings us to a time when we were younger and perhaps unappreciative of the world in which we grew up. Such strolls down "a memory lane" may be attempts to logically explain how we got to where we are and what we are doing, when we started on such different paths. This is the case with Robert Archibald's highly readable, A Place to Remember, Using History to Build Community. In this book— both autobiographical and historical—Dr. Archibald presents himself as the every man of the post World War II era who was only too happy to leave the places of his childhood and strike out for a world that would be considerably betterjust by being a part of it. As I read A Place to Remember, I found myself joining Professor Archibald in his mea culpas because I, too, had abandoned my childhood hometown convinced that my intellect was destined for national or international stages. Ironically, like the author I am preserving and chronicling the very histories of the places I once derided as parochial and uninspiring. Unlike Europe and even nearby Quebec where families remain attached to the historically based communities of their youth and families for generations—if not centuries—the United States has always been a nation focused on its future, not its past. Therefore, all of us may be guilty of sacrificing the preservation of community history and contributing to the death of our nation's hometowns, both rural and urban. A Place to Remember presents a ten-step program to educate the general public that local preservation is as worthy as the national treatises written by the endowed academia chairs. In a touching scene, during a long delayed visit to Archibald's hometown in the Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the author returns to a childhood variety store and introduces a living artifact, the shop's owner, Theresa Andriacchi. Who is the better recorder, the professionally trained but absent historian—who abandoned his neighborhood—or the townswoman who stayed behind and lived the history scholars now find worthy to chronicle? Local experiences are multifaceted and cannot be restricted to one perspective and all sides must be considered ; otherwise integrity is compromised . Therefore, while I concur with the author that multiple sources for community history must be solicited and conserved, I felt Professor Archibald spent too much time, seven chapters, detailing his autobiography as justification for this preservation. The author makes a case for the future survival of many communities deserted by factories, railroads, and its youth by citing them as symbols of what they once were. Collectively, these abandoned small towns and decaying inner cities would make a unique road map ofmilestones in our development. But, they could also be interpreted as tombstones in a national graveyard . Are all these communities worthy of salvation? Are there risks in creating each place as a museum to the past if it really has no future? Are we preserving the past or just creating jobs for public historians? Rural life needs to be written and diverse interpretations recorded, but are limits needed? The author fails us on these points. A Place to Remember's remaining three chapters caused me to pause and worry that after constructing strong arguments for neighborhood preservation, why did the author proceed to put the reader off by detailing the difficulties of getting funds, staff, and community involvement for the very projects advocated ? These issues hung like albatrosses. I would have preferred that the concern over money, staffing, and the selection of what is recorded be offered as creative challenges to the talented pool of newly credentialed public historians. While each chapter has its own bibliography and there is a booklist at the end of carefully selected supplementary works advocating Archibald's worthy agenda, the reader would have benefited from listings of universities issuing degrees in public history, agencies awarding grants for preservation...