allison horrocks, national park service

Proposal Type

Working Group

Seeking
  • Seeking Additional Presenters
  • Seeking General Feedback and Interest
Related Topics
  • Labor and Economy
  • Public Engagement
  • Reflections on the Field
  • Teaching and Training
  • Theory
Abstract

For more than sixty years, Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage has been widely relied upon by many historical interpreters as a classic, benchmark text on how to work with the public. Despite major changes in disciplines such as history and anthropology–and interdisciplinary areas such as museum studies–Tilden’s text is still quite often assigned, shared, and used by public historians. Yet how much of Tilden’s work is still being applied in practice? Which aspects of this work are still usable or useful in the 21st century? In gathering a group of public historians to answer these questions, we are looking to consider which ideas from Tilden’s foundational study are worth reconsidering, and which now might warrant abandoning.

Description

We are considering using this session to draft a new set of interpretive principles specific to contemporary public historians. We would like to discuss this idea further to refine the submission.

We also need people! Currently we have a few people who are interested but of course would like many more for a lively working group.


If you have a direct offer of assistance, sensitive criticism, or wish to pass along someone’s contact information confidentially, please get in contact directly: Allison Horrocks, [email protected].

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 1, 2018.

Discussion

5 comments
  1. Suzanne Fischer says:

    This is a great idea! I am constantly hearing Tilden’s principles quoted and discussed and it would be smart and timely to reexamine them from a public history perspective.

    1. Allison Horrocks says:

      Suzanne and Peter: thank you for commenting. Please do feel free to email me ([email protected]) if you’d like to join the working group!

      Patricia and Seth: thank you for your comments — your suggestion to reframe this topic and to align it more closely with the theme is helpful. I think shifting in this direction will make the working group both more focused and I hope, more relevant in the overall context of the conference. You mention repairing/revising interpretive tools but there’s also the idea of interpretation as a form of social repair.

      I don’t imagine that many folks would turn out for a series of papers on Tilden’s work specifically (since nearly everyone seems overly familiar with it in the field). I appreciate this feedback on how to make this a more useful working group.

  2. Peter Bunten says:

    Hi — agree time to relook at Tilden. Overall I find his many recommendations often redundant. This topic could also be useful in the context of continuing financial and visitation pressures on our history sites.

  3. Patricia West says:

    It might be helpful to take a step back to broaden the topic a bit and align it with the conference theme of “Repair Work” in case there aren’t enough papers on Tilden specifically to form a session. For example, is this about repairing interpretive tools?

  4. Yes, I never tire of Tilden! Though his privileged white guyness can be a drag–my students especially have a hard time seeing through it. I agree with Pat re: reframing this in terms of repair work. Thinking about how to rework Tilden for a world in which difference is valued would be fun. I’m 99.9% sure Tilden’s paycheck came from Mission 66, and M66 set out to repair the NPS. How’d that work out, and how might a similar agency-wide repair project impact I&E today? Seems to me also that Tilden was concerned to repair a world torn by the Cold War, e.g. with love. Did it work? Could it still? What can interpretation repair? What’s at stake for all of us?

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