Going public

07 February 2017 – James F. Brooks

Editor’s note: We publish TPH editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the February 2017 issue of The Public Historian. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members.

I write surrounded by residues. One month ago, a national election laid waste my faith in the sense and sensibility of many of my fellow citizens. Two weeks on and ash still hangs in the air over the charred homes and shaken hopes of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Two days ago, the Ghost Ship warehouse caught fire in Oakland, ending scores of  young, creative, and impassioned lives. Today I revisit the contents in this issue of The Public Historian and find a lesson amid the rubble. Public history is about more than “making history accessible to the public,” it is about going public with the stories of lives buried, literally or figuratively, in state violence, in the shadows of violence, and in the all-too-human capacity to all-too-easily forget.

Rachel Hatcher’s exploration of the courage with which Guatemala’s street artists, spray paint and buckets of glue in hand, have forcefully kept alive the history of that nation’s thirty-six-year internal war leads the issue. State-sponsored militias, funded by the US “anticommunist” geopolitical agenda, waged war against the poorest of indigenous peoples, dispossessed of their traditional lands by corporate monopolization; and against activists, union members, students, academics, and members of the official opposition. Some two hundred thousand Guatemalans died, another forty-five thousand remain “disappeared.” Recast by Guatemala’s street artists in flashes of bright paint, the Diario Militar (Death Squad Dossier), the once-secret catalogue of torture and death, has now “gone public.”  So too has indictment of the elite economic sector’s alliance with multinational capital in the scourge of the poor. Hatcher shows in rich visual detail how provocative public visual history demands this past remain in the forefront of public memory, and that “history” takes many forms. Street art provides lessons “that even those Guatemalans often excluded from conversations about the past can access, and each lesson is an invitation to open a dialogue about the past.”

Gregory Rosenthal’s “Make Roanoke Queer Again” is likewise an exercise in “going public.”  A product of the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, a community-based history initiative that Rosenthal cofounded in September 2015, the essay explores aspects of community history theory and practice through the contributions of more than “fifty people from the local community—including students and workers, cisgender and transgender individuals, gay, straight, bisexual, queer, and questioning folks” and shows how “queer flourishing” proved a critical element of the rebirth of Roanoke after post–WWII deindustrialization and white flight to the suburbs. It is also a timely example of street-level courage, in that the project “went public” in the April 29, 2016, with the #MakeRoanokeQueerAgain bar crawl, in the face of a fierce regional backlash against municipal ordinances that allow use of public restrooms to match the user’s gender identities.

Rosenthal employs the history of the movement to expand the public historiography of the queer South as well. He argues that the Roanoke case, with its urban setting, provides a new field for place-based, popularly driven oral history. In distinction from a tendency to see the queer South as predominantly situated in small towns or rural spaces, where privacy was essential to safety, he suggests that gentrifying cities such as Roanoke created a vast complex of social and cultural venues in which queerness could be more publicly expressed. Thus, southern queer history is also southern urban history, and perhaps among the most important underexplored elements of urban rebirth in the last three decades.

Like street history and queer history, Rachel Donaldson’s “Placing and Preserving Labor History” works in the face of erasures—the toil of and toll on working-class Americans of many nationalities and races seems rapidly fading in public memory and discourse. Although the passage of the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966 included the first cases of public commemoration of working-class sites—the Mountain Iron Mine, the Soudan Iron Mine, and the Washburn Flour Mill in Minnesota—the trend over the subsequent decades of national deindustrialization has been toward forgetting, rather than remembering. Even those sites on the National Register are often interpreted within narratives that “focus on their ties to important industrial leaders, their being places of technological achievement, or the roles they played in regional and national economic advancement, rather than acknowledging workers and their communities.” Counterexamples such as the Tsongas Industrial History Center of the Lowell National Historical Park and the Tenement Museum are powerfully rendered cases that forefront working-class life and struggle.

Donaldson challenges us to revise “the official statement of historic significance [in industrial and manufacturing sites] to include an emphasis on workers’ perspectives and experiences, [so that] preservationists can present a more nuanced understanding of the multiple meanings attributed to sites like this, which can, in turn, potentially broaden any future public interpretations.” She insightfully compares the interpretive language around the Highland Park Ford plant site, in which Ford’s Five-Dollar-a-Day plan, antiunionist at its core, received no comment on the national historical landmark nomination form, whereas the more recent nomination of the Ford Piquette Avenue plant does address labor’s pushback. It fails, however, to engage the divisive racialized consequences. White workers departed the plant and abandoned any solidarity with black coworkers, offering a powerful example of the challenges we face. Likewise, her attention to laborers’ “third spaces” of ethnic halls and cultural societies leads us back to the importance of making the informal and quotidian in worker’s lives as much a part of our interpretive toolkit as shop floors and union halls.

So, we pull ourselves collectively together and “go public,” ever committed and constant to our core principles of helping to build a society that demonstrates the best in us, rather than our darkest corners. Each of us harbors each quality; it is in the process of working side-by-side, in our lives and in the profession, that we can best enliven the qualities of light, rather than smoke.

~ James F. Brooks is editor of The Public Historian and professor of history and anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.