Editor’s Corner: Time, Space and Place

02 August 2024 – Sarah H. Case

Editors’ Note: We publish the editor’s introduction to the August 2024 issue of The Public Historian here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access.

The three articles in this issue all grapple with interpreting a particular place over multiple time periods, often in conversation with each other, and the insights that doing so can provide historians and the public. Each centers Black history and Black lives in very different geographic and spatial settings and together speak to themes of community, memory, and resilience. 

On the cover: Lawrence Tolliver working in his barbershop in Los Angeles in 2019. Tolliver’s Barbershop, an independently owned business, also serves as a community gathering space. Notice the images related to Black history throughout the shop. For an analysis of the importance of collecting oral history of Black entrepreneurs as a means of documenting African American community and social history, see Yolanda Hester and Teresa Barnett, “Community and Commerce: Oral Histories of Black Business in Los Angeles,” in this issue. (Photo by Yolanda Hester)

Our first article, “Community and Commerce: Oral Histories of Black Business in Los Angeles” is a Report from the Field by UCLA oral historians Yolanda Hester and Teresa Barnett. The report analyzes the work they did for “‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ Histories of Long-term Black Business Ownership, Community, and Family in Los Angeles County,” an oral history project drawn from interviews with nineteen African American business owners in Los Angeles and the online exhibition based on the interviews, Community and Commerce: Oral Histories of African American Business in Los Angeles. Hester and Barnett emphasize that despite the centrality of small business owners to Black communities in Los Angeles and elsewhere, they have been largely overlooked by oral historians (and historians in general) who seek to recover nonelite voices. Questioning the assumption that business history is antithetical to the social justice roots of much oral history practice, Hester and Barnett argue that Black businesses have proven essential not only to economic stability but also to providing community and fostering social movements and political activism in Black neighborhoods. The report details the process of building relationships with the business owners and emphasizes the goals of the entrepreneurs in participating. Together the interviews demonstrate how these businesses have shaped and anchor Los Angeles neighborhoods over time, and that their current relevance is closely tied to how they span across generations. 

Arijit Sen’s thoughtful “Landscapes of Hope: Anachronic Histories of a Single Urban Block in Milwaukee, Wisconsin” explicitly engages an anachronic approach to a neighborhood in Milwaukee called Center Peace by residents. The area, now facing disinvestment, economic decline, and violence, was, within living memory of residents, a close-knit, “vibrant” community. Sen argues that the memory of this recent past allows residents to imagine a better future. Through a deep analysis of a geographically small space, Sen shows that the three “readings” of how the space has changed over time interact, allowing “residents of Center Peace [to] remember their past in complex ways to rewrite the history of their neighborhood.” In doing so, these readings of the past pave the way to reclaim the space and create “sites of hope and community building in the face of catastrophe.”

In “Tubman’s Blackwater: Wading Through Public History at a Wildlife Refuge” Perri Meldon focuses not on an urban center but on the rural landscape of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Harriet Tubman’s birthplace. Here, too, historians and the public witness evidence of interaction of past and present. Hoping to draw tourists, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge (managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service) and the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park (managed by the National Park Service) each emphasize the connections between the present and nineteenth-century landscapes. But in doing so, they minimize the very real differences in the land rendered by two centuries of use and development and by climate change. As Meldon argues, “rather than a landscape of authenticity, the lower Eastern Shore is what I term a ‘landscape of evocation,’ one that evokes the historical, cultural, and ecological components not only of Tubman’s time, but those who have lived among and navigated these wetlands in the two hundred years since her birth.” However, despite stark environmental changes, Meldon discovers tangible evidence of the “evocative past,” especially with the continuing significance of a local animal: the muskrat. In recognition of this, a statue of Tubman at the National Historical Park’s visitor’s center represents her in the process of trapping one of the creatures, a practice that continues today. 

In addition to these place-based articles, this issue features four reviews of Salt Lake City sites and tours, highlighting innovative public history work in the host city of the NCPH 2024 annual meeting. 

~Sarah H. Case, the editor of The Public Historian, earned her MA and Ph.D. in history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she is a continuing lecturer in history, teaching courses in public history, women’s history, and history of the South. She is the author of Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South (Illinois, 2017) and articles on women and education, reform, and commemoration.