During our roundtable at last year’s NCPH conference, I talked about the importance of places for public historians and museums that focus on the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Early National Eras and I continue to use historic sites when I teach. Houses, public buildings, battlefields, and businesses provide the settings in which stories about people and historic events can be told. These places include original and reconstructed sites that people can visit in person and sites that individuals explore digitally. I believe that physical spaces can help to connect twenty-first century men, women, and children to the past because eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people also had lives that were shaped by the built environment. Information about a wide range of buildings can also help visitors to historic sites to quickly see that there are clear differences between the past and present-day.
Buildings and places alone, however, are not enough. Public historians need a wide range of primary documents to help tell the stories of the people who used these spaces and sites in the past. Extant written records are essential to learn about past events as men, women, and children experienced them. Material objects—clothing, eating utensils, books, toys, prints, ceramics, and more—enable museum and historic site visitors to add this visual information to stories they hear or reading during visits. Digital tools make it possible for public historians to read documents and see images in collections hundreds of miles away from their desks. This access to primary sources can help public historians to add complexity as they refine exhibits and revise interpretations. Discussion about the ways in which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century people used buildings can help highlight historic aspects of racism and gender roles. Imported goods can highlight the fact that the global economy was part of the past, not a product of Amazon and other online merchants.
There is another important piece to the challenge of making the past appeal to today’s publics—we need to remember that the people of the past were real people who lived in real places and lived real events. In Hamilton An American Musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda depicts the Founding Fathers as men who had flaws and who were not the confident men who gaze at us from portraits. Instead, we see individuals who made mistakes and worried about the way in which history would remember them. In other words, Hamilton fans see our country’s Founding Fathers as real people who lived and experienced important events that we see as history and, at times, inevitable. The Founding Fathers did not know that the Americans would win the Revolution and have a chance to create a new country. There is an air of excitement and uncertainty to their actions. This sense of liveliness and uncertainty is important to keep in mind for people from the past that are not as well known as Hamilton, Burr, Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Historic sites and museums often depict men, women, and children as people who did not experience life, inhabit homes, and use material objects.
I think public historians have the tools to appeal to visitors to today’s museums and historic sites. These tools are the places where events, both noteworthy and mundane, took place and details about the people who experienced these events. Instead of seeing obstacles to overcome, I see that we have the opportunity to build off of the excitement and appeal of Hamilton by becoming better storytellers. If public historians can depict people of the past as dynamic individuals who experienced events, not historic facts, in their lives, we will appeal to today’s publics and interest them in learning about the complexities of the past.
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