Sarah Dylla, MA Candidate, Brown University Public Humanities

Proposal Type: Roundtable

Seeking: Additional Presenters, Specific Expertise, General Feedback and Interest

Abstract: In the spring of 2015, graduate students in the Brown University course, “Whose Heritage?: National Landmarks for Diverse Publics,” researched and nominated The Steward’s House of the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, CT to the National Historic Landmarks program under the Asian and Pacific Islander Heritage Initiative. Exploring questions of how cultural heritage is made and whose history is remembered, the course syllabus included related reading, discussion, and case study analysis, in conjunction with compiling a nomination to the National Park Service. The nomination process and class discussion pointed to the benefits of expanding the national historical narrative to include those voices not commonly heard or widely known, but these tasks also highlighted numerous challenges to such endeavors. In the spirit of this course, its implications, and its larger questions, we would like to propose a roundtable session to discuss issues surrounding the use of federal programs and systems to expand and diversify a collective national history and how these programs may be used in the classroom setting.

Seeking: For this proposed roundtable, we would like to focus the conversation around three points of access into the topic of how academic projects can contribute to diversifying national narratives. First, we would like to reflect on the completion of our and other classroom-based National Historic Landmark nominations as case studies, paying particular attention to how the project functioned as a teaching tool. In our experience, the course emphasized collaboration and in-depth research, but students faced challenges when adapting the breadth of materials collected to the federal application framework. Given this outcome, we are interested in evaluating this experience in comparison with other public history classroom projects. Secondly, the discussion will broach the disconnection between the built environments traditionally preserved by federal initiatives and the sites that are most representative of diverse heritage. When compiling the nomination for the Steward’s House, stud ents struggled to prove the alignment with the subjective determinant of “integrity,” maintain a connection to the building throughout the interpretation, and still depict as full and complex a history of the Foreign Mission School as possible. We hope that participants will discuss ideas for expanding traditional definitions of architectural integrity, providing insights from other sites where the layers of history within the landscape have been obscured by the built environment. Finally, we intend to conclude our remarks and questions with a close study of what it means to diversify national narratives given physical and archival limitations. In our case, contemporary accounts of the Foreign Mission School’s devolving reputation in its later years occluded those of its earlier period and international presence, with much of the remaining material already passed through several layers of interpretation. Such layered storytelling is of course an important aspect of place -making public history, yet we intend for this roundtable discussion to engage critically with what it means to rely on structured federal programs to uncover new place-based interpretations and to examine what challenges must be overcome for a national history narrative to have been diversified successfully.

To support this conversation, we would like to invite participation and suggestions from both academic and professional public historians, including students or faculty who have participated in similar project-based courses, NPS employees or professionals in related federal, state, and local programs, as well as other interested historians and archivists. Thank you in advance for your feedback, and we look forward to the opportunity to contribute a productive roundtable discussion to the schedule of presentations, workshops and sessions relating to the theme of “Challenging the Exclusive Past.”

If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to share contact information for other people the proposer should reach out to, please get in contact directly: Sarah Dylla,sarah_dylla[at]brown.edu

If you have general ideas or feedback to share please feel free to use the comments feature below.

All feedback, and offers of assistance, should be submitted by July 3, 2015.

Related Topics:  Place, Preservation

 

 

Discussion

2 comments
  1. Laurie Arnold says:

    Hi Sarah, I have served as a reviewer of grant applications submitted to federally funded programs. One of the review criteria is that federal funds cannot support “advocacy.” For those of us who orient knowledge from non-Western/non-dominant culture perspectives, overcoming the label of our work as “advocacy” can be a challenge. This is something you might consider, or ask the audience to consider, as you prepare your proposal content.

  2. Jill Ogline Titus says:

    This topic is extremely well-suited to the 2016 conference theme. You might consider reaching out to some of the historians and NPS officials involved in the new LGBTQ theme study to weigh in on how even the most high-profile attempts to diversity publicly-recognized landmarks struggle with similar tensions and challenges as those brought to the surface in your class project.

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