Interpreting Our Heritage

I have to admit to being thoroughly disenchanted last week by Cathy Stanton's The Lowell Experiment. That feeling wasn't aided this week by either the West or the Handler and Gable readings. The idea of politicizing public history is completely off-putting to me. I am certainly self-aware enough to know that public history in general and preservation more specifically is a left-leaning activity. I am also self-aware enough to know that my political tendencies are also quite liberal and I am driven by a genuine desire to help others and do good in the world. However, I didn't choose public history as a career out of any sort of political motivation. I left Washington, D.C., because I found out I did not want to fight political battles on a daily basis. This is my goal for a career in public history: I would love to have a job that would allow me to be surrounded by history, present the subject matter well and in a thought-provoking manner. If people make connections from past events to the present day, nothing would please me more. I firmly believe that we cannot move forward without working knowledge of where we've been. I do not think that the majority of public historians run or work a museum or historical site with the intention of shortchanging one group of people over another or with any other sort of malicious wilfullness. I think more often the case is that someone gets left out because someone is unsure of an alternative way to handle the situation. Most people are good people with good intentions; museums and others sites, along with those who run them must do their best to work with the resources they have in the environments in which they find themselves. Often, the resources and the average person's energy just don't stretch to fighting the battle of correcting every wrong in the surrounding community. Certainly burying one's head in the sand is not the way to go, but picking one's battles is essential to survival. Though, I could be wrong. I'm still unsure that I'm properly enunciating my feelings on this.

Onto Freeman Tilden and Interpreting Our Heritage. What a little gem of a book, though I did surprise myself with a couple of strong reactions to it. At first, all of his talk about "love" and other mushiness was getting to me. I'm all for having passion for one's work and probably would have felt better about it had that been the word used. I also thought that his writing style took a little getting used to. However, this could just have been a symptom of how disheartened I'd been feeling. Once I got into the book, I loved it. Tilden's 6 principles of interpretation are invaluable, though I'm unsure I have the storytelling prowess he feels is vital to a good interpreter. I thought that, "When in doubt, say 'no'" was wonderful advice both for interpretive work as well as life in general. I was also intruigued by Tilden's assertion that a good interpreter thinks carefully about words used in reference to, in, and around historic sites, but shouldn't overthink what he's going to say. Tilden's work is full of priceless insights such as these. I can see why many interpreters refer back to Interpreting Our Heritage so often.