David Thelan, Roy Rosenzweig, and the small army of graduate student researchers responsible for the myriad of phone interviews that form the raw data used in The Presence of the Past offer an interesting model for historical scholarship that combines quantitative and qualitative analyses. As they show in their introduction, the new academic possibilities available by the 1980s due to improvements in phone surveys and computer systems enabled a truly collaborative effort to test not what Americans know about their history but how interested they are in ‘the past’ (perhaps a bit too) broadly defined. Their study offers useful insight into ethno-cultural differences in collective memory with blacks, natives, and evangelicals more likely to connect their own family histories to broader national narratives than whites, while “Mexican Americans occupy a figurative— as well as geographical— borderland” [p. 13] based on their responses. However, their methodology (outlined in a separate appendix as if hidden despite their devoting much space in their introduction to discussing the evolution of the project itself) as well as the loose use of ‘the past’ to mean anything vaguely historical (from reading pirate themed romance novels to going antiquing on weekends) threatens to turn it into a floating signifier and undercuts the project. Published in 1995, the book also clearly reflects the cultural conflicts and ‘history wars’ of that period.
The three essays we read for this week, David Glassberg’s “Public History and the Study of Memory”, Ian Tyrrell’s “Public at the Creation: Place, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907-1950”, and Denise Meringolo’s “A New Kind of Technician—In Search of the Culture of Public History” can best be viewed in dialogue with one another. All three articles deal with the role that both memory studies and non-professional scholars have played throughout the history of American history, paying very careful attention to place, and often mentioning the same key figures in the evolution of public history, such as Verne Chatelain first chief historian of the national park service. Whereas Glassberg focuses primarily upon memory scholarship since the 1970s, when academic public history began in earnest as means of finding jobs for the surplus of doctoral candidates at the time, both Meringolo and Tyrrell go back to the early decades of the 20th century, with the former focusing on the challenges of training university historians to be popular tour guides in the 1930s while the latter looks at the origins of the Organization of American Historians which began in 1907 as just a regional history association that focused on the area between the Appalachians and the Rockies, local history, memory, Mexico, and Canada in its early decades before WWII permanently shifted the focus of its increasingly professional membership to mainly national historical issues, a story itself that is all too often forgotten.
Carolyn Kitch (who teaches a fascinating media and memory studies class in the communication school) visited hundreds of local historic sites, took dozens of factory tours, and delved into everything from the Amish and steel to railroads and highways to coal and agriculture in crafting her exploration of the place of Pennsylvania in Public Memory. Kitch constructs public memory (her preferred term for the shared experience of the past that is sometimes called popular, communal, or collective) through a myriad of time periods and through a number of key themes that represent the nation as a whole (the declaration in Philadelphia, early farmlands in Lancaster County, trains well maintained by interested individuals, coal mined in Scranton used to heat blast furnaces making steel in Pittsburg, and roadside tourism along routes 30 or 40 (which both begin in Atlantic City). Throughout her study Kitch looks at heritage tourism replacing some of the revenues lost by deindustrialization as just one way people use memory for profit.
Jersey Shore Public History 