The Chrysler Village History Project emerged as a perfect storm of passionate public historians and enthusiastic residents from the working-class neighborhood of Chrysler Village in the southwest corner of Chicago. The group donated their time and resources to leverage the newly-revealed history of the area for the benefit of the contemporary community. In August 2016, the three-year project culminated with the launching of a robust online oral history archive and a community festival featuring the unveiling of commemorative signage and a mural designed and painted by local elementary students. The project was a public historian’s dream, with an important exception: we could not sustain our professional involvement with the community long-term without compensation. What would a Chrysler Village History Project look like that not only delivers tangible benefits to the community but also paid for public historian’s labor? Where should the money come from to fund public historians? What is the responsibility of the public historian to their funders? Their community? Should the two be one the same?
To envision a model of public history that is economically sustainable for practitioners and also applies shared authority in an economic sense, I offer a brief survey of career options for public historians and associated funding sources. After making broad structural observations, I re-imagine the Chrysler Village History Project as a public history cooperative. But first, it is important to note that passionate public historians accomplish magnificent work in all settings discussed here; my critiques are not meant to indict individual institutions but the realities of capitalism. Thinking structurally about how public history is and should be funded in turn provides opportunities to interrogate public historians’ ethical and practical obligations. This conversation also serves as a first step in further brainstorming alternative economic models for
public history.
Setting aside academia—with its precious few tenure track jobs that prioritize scholarship
and teaching over community engagement—non-profit, consultant, and government work
emerge as common career paths for public historians. Employees in museums and other nonprofit
organizations can often find their hands tied by the grant cycle and restrictions of major
donors. Consultants are ultimately beholden to the profit margin. In both settings, public
historians are accountable to funding sources beyond their immediate publics, which in turn
restricts their ability to truly center community authority and need in their work. Local, state, and
federal governments also fund public historians, including employees of state historical societies
and the National Park Service. In theory, the public financially supports these positions through
taxes. Particularly in the cases of town or county historians, perhaps this provides a promising
model of direct service and compensation. At the metropolitan, state, and national level,
however, bureaucracy introduces damaging distance between historians and their public.
Insulation risks hindering a historian’s connection with the experiences—and needs—of their
local constituencies.
Public historians may find themselves directly financially supported by local
communities when working in preservation, tourism, or historical societies. Here, the realities of
capitalism manifest on a local scale by privileging the desires of the middle and elite classes who
have the resources and motivation to use history to their economic advantage. For public
historians trained and committed to centering and serving marginalized communities, privileging
the authority of wealthy, hegemonic stakeholders produces a substantial ethical roadblock.
Whether working in local, nonprofit, or government positions, public historians are ultimately operating in a capitalist system—itself dependent on white supremacy and patriarchy—that prioritizes the interests of stakeholders in power. Can we envision an economic model for public history that resists capitalism? What might a public history cooperative look like where community members, regardless of wealth, can contribute labor or capital and have a clear stake in determining the direction of the organization? Reimagining the Chrysler Village History Project as the Chrysler Village Cultural Cooperative offers a way to begin seeking answers to these questions.
In order to center the authority and needs of the public, the Chrysler Village Cultural Cooperative adopts a consumer cooperative model in which members contribute money or labor in exchange for a defined role in determining what services are provided. For example, residents could dedicate their time to a planning committee or a business might donate a certain value worth of resources. To resist replicating problems identified in historical societies or museums, the cooperative’s membership structure would need to be feasible and valuable to a cross-section of the community. Even then, the cooperative must make an intentional effort to collaborate with local institutions and networks connected to stakeholders with limited-to-no extra time or money.
All members participate in the determination of services provided by the cooperative, whether an oral history project, community festival, or an after-school program for youth to paint historical murals. The Chrysler Village Cultural Cooperative might, pending membership priorities, pursue cultural tourism as a way to deliver tangible financial benefits to a working-class community. With residents as members, the cooperative offers a strategy to engage with the risky economics of cultural tourism while resisting gentrification.
The resources pooled by the cooperative cover not only services, but the public historian’s income. As a result, a key component of the work of the public historian is to powerfully demonstrate the tangible value of her work and service to the community. By continually fostering buy-in, the cooperative fundamentally roots the attention of the public historian to contemporary, local issues. The public historian can still push the public to deal with contentious local issues of wealth disparity, racism, and sexism, but constantly frames the work in response to the primary needs of the cooperative’s membership.
Certainly, the Chrysler Village Cultural Cooperative does not deliver a fully satisfying escape from the realities of capitalism. Questions remain about who funds the cooperative during the grueling early years of cultivating grassroots support before the organization is financially sustainable. Yet the concept of a public history cooperative provocatively applies shared authority on an economic level to redirect organizational focus away from donors and bureaucracy and toward the tangible realities of local stakeholders.
Rachel Boyle, Newberry Library