National Council on Public History

Katherine Garland

NCPH Working Group – Religion, Historic Sites, and Museums

Case Statement

April 3, 2015

During my summer 2013 Buchanan/Burnham internship at the Newport Historical Society in Newport, Rhode Island, I worked on the Spectacle of Toleration project.[1] This 2013 initiative celebrated the 350th anniversary of Rhode Island’s 1663 colonial charter. The charter included the, now famous, “livelie experiment” line, which promoted toleration of a variety of religious opinions in the colony. The Spectacle project was more than a mere celebration; it asked probing questions about what toleration meant in the seventeenth century, what its legacy was, and what lessons contemporary Americans can draw from the lively experiment. The Historical Society and its partners planned a number of events throughout the year, including public lectures, concerts, and a conference, but wanted to spread the message and information beyond those who could travel to Newport and Rhode Island. Thus, the staff asked me to brainstorm ways of getting the message out, and of making the complicated historical scholarship regarding religious toleration understandable and interesting for the public.

I decided to create a blog, hoping that the medium would reach people across the country interested in the topic. Thus, I began with two introductory posts. The first, “The ‘Livelie Experiment:’ An Introduction to Religion and Politics in History,” articulated my methodology, explaining how I think about religion and politics historically.[2] It was important for my readers to understand my perspective, and my goals for the blog series. My second essay, “‘An Unnatural Act:’ Thinking Like An Historian,” further explained my point of view, exploring what historical thinking is, and how it differs from other ways of analyzing the world.[3] Using Sam Wineburg’s Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts and Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke’s “5Cs of Historical Thinking,” I discussed how historians think about primary sources.[4] I encouraged readers to think about a brief entry about Mary Dyer’s death from an archival document held by NHS in terms of change over time, context, causality, contingency, and complexity, and gave examples of appropriate historical questions about each “c.” My goal here was to further elaborate on my big idea that historians think about the past in a fundamentally different way from others.

As I was constructing my essays, I needed to consider audience, and how to make my essays participatory, or as participatory as any internet and social media experience could be. I could write to my heart’s content, but if nobody actually read my essays, then they were pointless. While my public could theoretically include everyone from professional peers to students to Newport community members to tourists, this was an impossibly broad public to try to reach. To narrow this down, I decided to write for an educated, but uninitiated audience. I assumed that my readers would have a basic understanding of American history (perhaps at a high school level), but that they did not know specifics about how historians do research, Newport’s history, or religious toleration in history. In the beginning, this audience was nameless and faceless, but as time went on, I began to interact with my readers, especially beginning with this particular essay about how to think historically. With each comment, my public gradually transformed from an imagined community into a more tangible audience. Subsequent posts received comments from a wide variety of people. All of these conversations were incredibly gratifying; seeing others grapple with the information that I had presented made me feel like I had done my job as a public historian well. Even if the public could not talk to me face to face, this conversation with people of varying backgrounds across the United States confirmed the participatory nature of the internet for me.[5] As the internet becomes more and more commonplace in today’s society, public historians are learning how to dialog with the public through the internet, and I appreciated the experience of watching this happen in real time with my scholarship.[6]

The remainder of my essays built upon this historical thinking foundation, exploring specific topics in more depth. The next three essays reported on the research of John Barry, John Fea, and Michael Feldberg, scholars who all spoke at the June 21, 2013 event sponsored by NHS entitled “How Christian an Understanding?: A Public Conversation about our Founders and their Intent.” If my original goal was to translate scholarship into an understandable format for the public, these three essays most literally fulfilled that objective as they explored Barry’s 2012 Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, Fea’s 2011 Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?, and Feldberg’s experiences with the George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom and American Jewish Historical Society. In each post, I worked to synthesize each man’s research, along with what he specifically discussed at the June 21 panel discussion.

The final seven essays delved more deeply into the history of Newport and Rhode Island, exploring topics that might be of interest to people hoping to understand how religious tolerance played out on a local level in the past. I explored the Rhode Island Charter in more depth, religious toleration in the physical landscape (from which I drew my working group map analysis), and the experiences of various groups on the outskirts of traditional orthodoxy (Quakers, Jews, Africans, and Native Americans). These essays demonstrated the successes as well as failures of colonial Rhode Island’s commitment to religious toleration. Whenever possible, I connected these to the material culture of Newport, explaining how architecture and archaeology can reveal information about people from the past in hopes of teaching the public a little bit about how to read objects as historical sources. My essays finished with a summary of the various posts, and an invitation to the October 2013 conference, in hopes that some of my readers would be interested and attend.

The Spectacle Project also included an exhibit at the Rhode Island state house, which compiled the various religious history artifacts from across the state into one exhibit. Visitors could see the original 1663 charter next to a painting of Mary Dyer across from an African slave minkisi. This juxtaposition was moving, and is not something that any one institution could have accomplished single-handedly. And, the public seemed to agree. I attended the exhibit’s opening ceremony when people were lined up through the halls of the Rhode Island State House waiting for a turn to see the objects.

Unfortunately, my Spectacle experience ended with the exhibit and the blog series. I had a prior commitment and was no able to attend the capstone conference. Anecdotally, I heard that the conference went well and brought together a number of scholars from across the country (and world!) to consider the meaning of religious toleration in the past and present.

As our working group thinks about how to best broach ideas about religious history in museums and at historic sites, I would like to offer the Spectacle of Toleration project as an example of a successful program. It brought the Newport Historical Society (a local level organization) together with the Rhode Island Historical Society (the state level history organization) and a number of colleges and universities from across the state like Salve Regina University and Brown University. Thus, the organizers had some of the best public history minds and most up to date religious history scholars available for the project. The Spectacle initiative also nicely wove together material culture and the landscape with the topic at hand. In other words, the theme could not have been explored anywhere else; it was deeply connected to the history of Newport and Rhode Island. The objects in the collections of the various partner institutions and the landscape of Rhode Island told the story of religious toleration in a way that words alone could not have accomplished. My only critique is that the Spectacle of Toleration project could have been more participatory. I appreciated talking with people who left comments on my blog, and the public had the opportunity to comment and ask questions at all of the lectures and other events throughout the year. However, the public did not assist with much of the planning. Talking with contemporary religious leaders about issues surrounding toleration, for instance, could have resulted in additional events that tackled issues facing contemporary people of faith. Thus, as we begin to put together ideas for a new project exploring the history of religion, I hope that we can find a topic and location that allow us to get a number of public history institutions and academic institutions in collaboration, provide us the opportunity to make use of a rich material culture and/or landscape record, and finally, have opportunities to bring academic historians and public historians together with interested members of the public (from a variety of religious backgrounds). This final piece is key to making religious history scholarship available for contemporary religious groups, and vice versa, making religious history scholarship created by religious insiders available for wider discussion. I realize that this is a tall task, but I believe that it is one which would allow for fruitful and deep conversations about the role of religion in the past and present.

[1] This project was co-sponsored by the Newport Historical Society, George Washington Institute for Religious Freedom, The John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy at Salve Regina University, and the Rhode Island Historical Society. “Partners,” Spectacle of Toleration.

[2] Katherine Garland, “The ‘Livelie Experiment:’ An Introduction to Religion and Politics in History,” Spectacle of Toleration (blog), July 9, 2013.

[3] Katherine Garland, “‘An Unnatural Act:’ Thinking Like a Historian,” Spectacle of Toleration (blog), July 16, 2013.

[4] Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past, (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2001); Thomas Andrews and Flannery Burke, “What Does It Mean to Think Historically?” AHA Perspectives 45:1 (January 2007)

[5] For a discussion of how to get the public to participate in museum settings, see Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museums 2.0, 2010).

[6] For a discussion of how to use the internet to create meaningful dialogue with the public, see Matthew Fisher and Bill Adair, “Online Dialogue and Cultural Practice: A Conversation,” in Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, ed. Bill Adair, Benjamin Filene, and Laura Koloski (Philadelphia: The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, 2011), 44-55.

Discussion