Heritage, Refracted
21 February 2019 – James F. Brooks
TPH 41.1, African American history, The Public Historian, walking tours, slavery, Native American, campus history, photography, heritage, Editor's Corner
Editor’s note: We publish The Public Historian (TPH) editor James F. Brooks’s introduction to the February 2019 issue of TPH here. The entire issue is available online to National Council on Public History members and to others with subscription access.
On a cold afternoon this past November, I shadowed history professor Hilary Green’s “Hallowed Grounds” walking tour of the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. Green’s critical engagement with “heritage” anticipated, for me, the insights and tensions we see in this special issue of The Public Historian, guest-edited by anthropologist Jon Daehnke and historian Amy Lonetree of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Green crafted her project on “Race, Memory, and the University of Alabama” to offer students, especially African Americans, an alternative narrative to “the myths the campus tells itself about its slave past.” In two hours, Green cast light on some of the darkest corners of the university’s past. We began at the Gorgas House, the first building on campus, with the story of Ben, an enslaved man purchased by the trustees in 1829 to work on its construction and to landscape the gardens. Two years later, when the university opened, the trustees sold Ben. We walked past Morgan Hall, named in honor of John Tyler Morgan (1824-1907), grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan and long-term US Senator, a Democrat and imperialist who advocated the resettlement of freedmen and women in Hawaii, the Philippines, and Cuba. The tour’s midway point is the iconic President’s Mansion, a four-story marble-columned Greek Revival building bracketed by low-slung slave quarters that university guides call “garden sheds.” One now serves as break room for physical plant employees. Near the end of the walk, we stopped at the slave cemetery, recently identified and interpreted with a plaque that acknowledges the nearby interment of Jack Rudolph and William “Boysey” Brown, enslaved men who were owned by the university and a professor, respectively. Rudolph and Brown were unusual, however, in that 98 percent of the enslaved people who labored at the university were rented, rather than owned outright. Green and her colleagues employ the sharp edges of these storied locations to chisel at numerous architectural and narrative monuments to the Lost Cause, a “heritage” so deeply embedded that it remains unquestioned by many alumni.
If heritage might be defined as “aspects of the past that we wish to keep . . . not what happened in the past but what has survived from the past,” then Green’s bottom-up “Hallowed Ground” is an acute alternative to the university’s top-down Lost Cause heritage project.[i]Presenting the histories of enslaved people in signage, digital publications, and public tours reminds trustees, administrators, faculty, students and alumni that the university’s rise to prominence required the exploitation of many who could never dream of pursuing higher education, people whose heritage deserves public commemoration.
This collection of essays takes up this angle as its own. As Daehnke and Lonetree remark, “the study of heritage is no longer about simply preserving the past, but rather the social, political, and economic dynamics of utilizing the past in the present and in efforts to shape the future.”[ii]While cognizant of the hegemonic aspects of “heritage,” this collection emphasizes themes of resistance, repair, recovery, decolonization, and resilience. Six of the essays engage with Indigenous peoples, from Australia to North America, and explore themes ranging from reclamation, affirmation of intangible cultural property rights, and “heritage in-between” that bridges trauma in the past and resoluteness in the present. Process figures centrally as well—it is one thing to seek to recover and preserve heritage, often in the form of repatriated items of cultural patrimony, but such recovery must also allow the processing of memory and emotions attendant to the initial rupture. The issue closes with two distinctly different cases—one that addresses the “failure” of a heritage project in Doha, Qatar, in that the public toward which it aimed held little interest in the effort—and a painfully current treatment of heritage as mobilized around the outrageous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
We at TPH have long attended to heritage, history, and memory studies, such as with the two-year conversation that began with David Glassberg’s 1996 “Public History & the Study of Memory” essay and the roundtable that followed in 1997. There, David Lowenthal forecast some of what this journal issue fulfills: “Heritage activists use the past to find roots, to affirm identities, to claim legacies, to celebrate collective bonds, and traduce rivals. Clashing indigenous, chauvinist, and archaeological perspectives envenom prehistory with acrimony. Disputes over historic site relics embroil ever more litigants.”[iii]The following essays show public historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists bringing their own training, field experience, and critical eye to the work of heritage in the world.[iv]
Finally, we at TPH remain deeply grateful for the opportunity we shared in the presence of the late Wesley Johnson at our editorial board meeting last year in Las Vegas. His depth of insight, wisdom, and wry humor enlivened and enlightened our hour together. Rebecca Conard’s obituary in his honor reminds us all just what special role he played in the history of public history.
[i] Susan Marsden, “Is Heritage History? History and the Built Environment,” Community History (June 1992): 6-9; see Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches(New York: Routledge, 2013), 8-9.
[ii] Jon Daehnke and Amy Lonetree, “Introduction: Conversations in Critical Cultural Heritage,” The Public Historian 41, no. 1 (February 2019); Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, “Heritage and Identity,” Studies in Late Antiquity 1, no. 4 (December 2017): 333-34.
[iii] David Lowenthal, “History and Memory,” The Public Historian 19, no. 2 (Spring 1997) 31-39, quote 32.
[iv] Daehnke and Lonetree, “Introduction.”