Case Statement for Making Radical Repairs Working Group
Kate Silbert
Two competing thoughts came to mind as I read the initial proposal for this working group back in the fall. One arose from my research expertise on nineteenth-century historical practices, the other from memories of the tasks I had been charged to complete as a student worker at two small-scale archives when I was still a budding historian. Together they get at the crux of the matter Carrie has laid out, and for me raised this question: how do public historians balance the practical realities of stewarding “an (over)abundance of objects” with the potential for innovative research approaches to illuminate fuller stories from them?
First, a memory: years ago, my very first task in an archival setting was to count and inventory spoons. I ended up counting spoons for weeks. Besides illustrating in vivid terms the literal “silver spoon” atmosphere of the independent girl’s school I was attending at the time, the only lasting imprint of the experience – besides, oddly, the mark of the Gorham Manufacturing Company and where it appeared on the stem of many of the pieces – was the way my enthusiasm waned as the task wore on. I have visited enough collection storage spaces in the intervening time to understand an “(over)abundance” of spoons – or shovels, glassware, or linens, and often of the silver and not everyday variety – as a not unfamiliar challenge to many museum and archive professionals.
Having research shifting forms of engaging with the past, on the other hand, makes me mindful of the power at play in professionals making judgments about what objects are worthy of study, resources, or preservation, by whom, and in what spaces. My current work traces how the object-based, everyday commemorative practices of white New Englanders – and particularly women – across the long nineteenth century came to be dismissed as amateur, decorative, and sentimental by emerging history professionals at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The changing shape of the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts stands out for me as a provocative example of how this process unfolded and the way that historians today, whether aware of it or not, pursue their work amid its consequences. AAS is one of the most prominent research libraries for scholars of the early United States and is an institution, I expect, with which at least some of you are personally familiar. What is likely less familiar is how AAS operated in the first several decades of its existence.
From its founding in 1812 up into the late 1880s, AAS was an institution whose collections ranged widely from natural history specimens, household objects, and artifacts of the ancient world to colonial-era manuscripts and contemporary printed works. Though barred from official membership, women appeared regularly in the society’s records as donors, visitors, and correspondents throughout this era, and one of them, Hannah Mather Crocker, contributed to the society’s collections on a scale that rivaled that of Isaiah Thomas, the man remembered as the institution’s visionary founder. Until 1821, the collection was kept in Thomas’s residence, with female family members and household laborers contributing to its upkeep and the hosting of social events related to the society’s business. And it is a young woman’s diary entry from 1818 that stands as the earliest record of a visitor’s impressions of the society’s holdings.
The physical makeup of the collections began to change dramatically in the 1880s, as the society’s leaders decided to transfer many of AAS’s material artifacts to institutions deemed more appropriate for their safekeeping and study: geological and botanical specimens, as well as Native American artifacts (separated out from those objects signifying (white) American progress in the racialized logic of the time), went to natural history collections in Boston and Washington, DC; the more elaborate art objects moved to Worcester’s art museum; and the colonial-era clothing, household objects, and everyday implements – a disproportionate number of which had been donated by women earlier in the century – were dispatched to the newly- founded local historical society. (A few objects did stay – and those exceptions are fascinating to explore). Remaining intact, and in new pride of place, stood the manuscript and printed documents in AAS’s collections as well as the scholars who used them. The objects that left and documents that remained represented in material terms the changing expectations about how AAS would be used, by whom, and for what purposes. An institution which functioned in its early years within Isaiah Thomas’s household, preserved and exhibited a wide array of objects, and involved women in nearly every aspect of its operations except governance suddenly looked – and could be remembered as – decidedly more masculine, scholarly, and archival.
As we reimagine collections today, indelibly marked and molded as they are by the past, what expectations have we inherited about how historical objects and documents should be used, studied, or preserved? I recognize that the impetus for telling more diverse, inclusive stories with historical objects and through historical spaces arises from a very different politics than the exclusionary discourses of scientific racism, American exceptionalism, and professionalization carried by those leading institutional change in the early twentieth century. At the same time, I wonder to what degree our vision as academic and public historians remains beholden to ideas formulated then about expertise, knowledge production, and what an object or collection can and cannot serve to do, tell, and be. How might our practices of reshaping collections and their interpretation, in contrast to the historical case I have laid out above, avoid the power dynamics of sidelining those without institutional standing, of inadvertently setting at a remove materials that are meaningful to everyday users, or of limiting how scholars, museum professionals, donors, and visitors together engage with the past?
I am heartened by examples of institutions – many of them relatively small – already experimenting in this vein. I don’t have the space to go into detail here, but I will bookmark just one (that I happen to know well) as a starting place for further conversation as a working group. The ongoing reinterpretation of Cliveden, an eighteenth-century Georgian mansion and now National Trust site in greater Philadelphia, has included building a consistent community conversation series, a willingness to host dramatic productions and meditations on the site’s history of enslavement within the house itself, and ongoing research into under-interpreted service spaces. The fine furniture and portraits in the house haven’t changed, but the overall orientation of the site and how visitors encounter those objects has. Ultimately, this is to sort of transformation I would like to encourage across the varied collections of historical objects in the United States and elsewhere: not just a broadening of those collections beyond the “silver spoon” artifacts they long have highlighted, but a recasting of relationships among objects and among those who interpret, preserve, view, and encounter them.