National Council on Public History

Intro

My name is Owen Lourie, and I am a historian on the staff of the Research Department at the Maryland State Archives, where I have worked since I started as an intern in 2003. The Archives is the official repository of the state government’s records, and holds a large collection of personal papers, religious records, and newspapers. In addition, we serve as the state’s historical agency, working to tell the stories of Maryland’s people. We maintain information and biographies of office holders and historic Marylanders. We also organize public outreach, exhibits, and the like. My department also handles research inquires from other government agencies and the press.

In thinking about our three questions, my mind immediately went to two project that I’ve worked on. One was a project I led to document life in Brookeville, Maryland, the town where James Madison fled after the burning of Washington during the War of 1812. That was a relatively conventional type of public history project, although one that I think speaks to our discussion questions quite well. The other is a more archivally-oriented project, indexing certificates of freedom issued to free African Americans.

Brookeville

The Town of Brookeville still advertises itself as the “U.S. Capital for A Day,” on basis of James Madison’s stay there in August 1814. To commemorate the bicentennial in 2014, the town reached out to the Archives to help them document what happened. They were able to secure enough funding for various sources to get me three interns over two years. Our final product was a website that includes biographies of people connected to the town and a number of articles about various aspects of life in Brookeville (it was a sizable industrial town, now only about two dozen houses in the DC suburbs).

We purposefully did not emphasize the president’s visit, instead focusing on “the people and community that welcomed” him. The story of Madison’s stay is pretty well known, and was also commemorated elsewhere, most prominently in a two-day town-wide reenactment. More than that, however, we felt so much attention to what happened when the president came would provide too limited a view of what Brookeville was, and make our project too much about something that a (sort of) famous person did during a war. To me, the hardest part of interpreting history at all, and particularly this era, is avoiding things that seem like a cliched history class of famous names and dates.

Indeed, the town encompassed a number of major historical themes. It was founded by Quakers, and by 1814, most of them had freed their slaves, who formed the large free African American community nearby. Likewise, the town was briefly an industrial center, and is a good venue to talk about industrialization in the early nineteenth century. By presenting a broad view of the whole town, we could show everyone, even those parts of the community often left out of history.

In addition, we worked to include a mapping component, connecting the people with their places in town. There were a couple of reasons for this, which I think are both important for a conversation about public history. One is that audiences really like to hear about the history that happened where they live, both local history (a local guy did something here once!) and national history (something happened here that was part of something famous!). An interactive map also helps solve the problem of how to interpret a historic site without a physical presence. There is no town museum, just a historic marker. The house the president stayed in has been restored by its owners, but is a private residence. But by doing something online, it is possible to offer historic interpretation.

Certificates of Freedom

I’ll touch on the other project more briefly. The Archives has long had a strong focus on African American history, both traditional history and genealogy. Most recently we have placed images of manumission records and certificates of freedom online, along with a database of the individuals named. Since these records often contain detailed information about ages, parentage, and the like, this will be a very valuable resource for people tracing their own ancestory, along with historians examining the data more broadly.

It’s a project that provides access to information that is otherwise out of reach to most users, either because they couldn’t come to Maryland to use it, or because these are records that are difficult for most ordinary users to understand. Since the lives of African Americans, free or enslaved, in early America have little documentation, these records are crucial sources to telling our story broadly and accurately. It’s a project that stretches the idea of public history a bit, but in a helpful way, I think.

Conclusion

None of these examples are revolutionary, and I certainly don’t hold them up as being particularly exemplary. I’m pleased with how the Brookeville website turned out, but while it’s pretty and full of good information, it has always had a low rate of visitorship (some of that is a result of the particular circumstances of the project and our relationship with our partners). I do think that both of these projects are examples of ways public historians can expand the scope of their interpretation–the topics, the places, and the people we (historians, as well as the public) talk about–in addition to the ways online content is used.

I look forward to hearing about other approaches and tactics from everyone else!

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Discussion