Museums and Public History in Action

In my last post, I talked about how museums have been changing over the past century. This time, I want to show you one of my all-time favorite museums.

While we are unable to actually visit it (since flying everyone who reads this blog to Washington, D.C. is, unfortunately, outside of my budget at this point in time), we can get a pretty good look at what they offer through their website.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you:

The International Spy Museum

The Spy Museum - one of the coolest museums of all time

Disclaimer: This is a class assignment - I was not asked to promote the Spy Museum in any way, shape, or form. I just genuinely like the museum.

I have been to the Spy Museum twice, and I can tell you from personal experience - the museum is as cool as the website makes it out to be.

Visitors enter the museum through a windowless elevator, and are then shown a brief informational video about the world of espionage. They are then asked to choose a cover identity and maintain it for the duration of the museum - there are special interactive checkpoints where this becomes important. 

Visitors then enter the main body of the museum - a veritable wonderland of gadgets, weaponry, and memorabilia from the height of spy culture - the twentieth century. Gadgets are explained and analyzed, and techniques are demonstrated. Visitors are also given the chance to demonstrate their own spy skills, from climbing through ventilation shafts in a stealthy manner to cracking codes. 

Only a small selection of the espionage memorabilia on display

Visitors flow from the gadgets and techniques of espionage to its history, learning about its earliest years. Displays cover everything from Elizabethan master spy John Dee to the American Civil War. Special displays are set aside for the Soviet Union's KGB, World War II, and the Cold War.

A simulated spy bunker in the Cold War exhibit

The Cold War exhibit is currently not on display. Instead, it has been replaced with a temporary exhibit called Exquisitely Evil: 50 Years of Bond Villains. The exhibit pays homage to the James Bond novels and film franchise, tracing the reality of the villains who haunt Bond's stories in the events happening in the world. While slightly more commercial than the other exhibits in the Spy Museum, it still does a great job of showing how espionage and the forces it fights are portrayed in the media.

The museum closes by ushering visitors into a small, final exhibit focusing on espionage in the twenty-first century. Here, the future of spycraft is discussed, emphasizing the possibilities of disturbances in electronic communication and how they could be used by modern spies.

As any good museum does, it then leads visitors into the gift shop (which, at the Spy Museum, is awesome - I have purchased several wonderful gifts for friends here, and personally own a t-shirt and moustache earrings). 

The museum also offers additional packages, if you are interested in continuing your visit beyond normal visiting hours. There are Interactive Spy Experiences, such as Operation Spy, that allow visitors to experience (in a less dangerous way) the life of a spy. 

If, like me, you cannot stay away, the Spy Museum has several social media accounts, which are updated on a daily basis. The Twitter and Facebook accounts both post "Today in Spy History," which is always a really interesting tidbit of history that I typically have never heard about before. 

The museum's website is key in finding all of this information before visitors arrive. One of the things that sells the Spy Museum before a visitor even arrives on the premises is the website's attention to detail - a small module on the sidebar asking for hand scan in order to access (when your mouse is held over it long enough, you can read the information beneath); a harsh black, white, and red color scheme changed only by the addition of photographs; or some quick, tiny bites of text that compel the reader to come to the museum and find out more. There is also access to the museum store, information about the extended packages, and connections to the museum's social media accounts. I greatly enjoy the site for its organization and its aesthetic - and that barely scratches the surface. 

Overall, I think this museum is one of the best that I have been to (and believe me, I have been to more museums than I can remember). I always feel welcome here, whether digitally or in person - and no matter how many times I walk in through the front doors, I am always invigorated and excited by the energy that it exudes.

And, every time I leave, I always feel compelled to remember their trademark phrase: 

DENY EVERYTHING.

The International Spy Museum is open seven days a week from 10 AM to 6 PM. It is located at 800 F Street, NW, Washington, DC, 20004.

You can follow them on Twitter at @IntlSpyMuseum, or on Facebook at International Spy Museum.

The Changing Face of the Museum

Museums are constantly changing and evolving.

Take Colonial Williamsburg, for example. The living history museum was built in the 1930s by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and represented a clean, orderly version of colonial life in Revolutionary America - a perfected portrait of Americana sans dirt, animals, and slavery. Today, it is much different. Certainly, there are no animals wandering the roads willy-nilly, but an effort has been made to incorporate the African-American story into the living history presented. It may still be slightly idealized, but it has a more balanced approach.

Colonial Williamsburg - not as idealized, but still picturesque for colonial America

Or, for a more traditional example, look no further than the Museum of the City of New York (MCNY). Founded in 1923 to counteract the "old man's club" of the New York Historical Society (Wallace 35), the museum initially focused on exactly the same topics, but with more interesting displays: Dining in Old New York and Heirlooms of New Yorkers Past feature among exhibit titles from the 1940s and 1950s (Wallace 37). However, by the 1930s, the realization of its location on the fringes of high society, Harlem, and the Hispanic community forced the museum to change its exhibit focus. The 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of a greater number of exhibits on the history of the ethnic groups surrounding the museum, but a slow draining of funds during the 1980s saw the progress gained slowly recede. As the museum dwindled, new curators arrived, with grand plans, and the museum continues to flourish, faring better in the long run than its original rival the New York Historical Society.

The Museum of the City of New York

But why have these museums (and many others across the nation - these are only two examples) changed their focus?

Because their original focus was too narrow and exclusionary.

In the case of Colonial Williamsburg, Rockefeller wished to portray the planter class of Virginia. The museum had, and still has, no visible issues: it is, as Mike Wallace points out in Mickey Mouse History, "a corporate world: Planned [sic], orderly, tidy, with no dirt, no smell, no visible signs of exploitation....The rest of the population - the 90 percent who create the wealth - are nowhere to be seen. The only whiff of conflict appears in recollections of the stirring anti-British speeches in which the founders enunciated the timeless principles since passed down..." (15). Williamsburg, in its original form, was too perfect, too idealized. It did not even attempt to touch on slavery until 1972, but remained uncomfortable discussing the relationships between blacks and whites. Because Williamsburg as a museum was built on the concept of idealizing the ideals of liberty which had motivated the founding fathers, "Admitting that the reality of exploitation contradicted the ideal of liberty was only a first step" (23).v

With the MCNY, the focus was also too narrowly classed. Many of the original donors were members of New York's elite society (the Carnegies, du Ponts, Guggenheims, and Vanderbilts were all on the original roster, to name but a few), and lent and re-borrowed their items from the museum as if it were a bank vault for temporary storage (Wallace 36-7). By the 1940s, the MCNY widened its focus to include the communities around it, beginning a lecture series that was given in Spanish (Wallace 38). It slowly incorporated the histories of the classes and people around it, and the museum became more than just a history of the glory days of Old New York. Despite the slight downturn in the 1980s due to lack of funding, the museum is coming back, returning to its focus on more than one socio-economic group.

These changes have, for the most part, been for the better. Both of these museums now include a wider perspective on the place (and, in the case of Colonial Williamsburg, the time period as well) that they cover, including the voices of men and women of different ethnic backgrounds.

However, they have also failed to change in some respects. Williamsburg still remains an idealized vision of colonial America - a clean-cut structure, where families can wander down Duke of Gloucester Street and stop in the little shops and houses along the way, eating gingerbread and drinking root beer that are made from recipes dating back to the time period. And the MCNY also struggles with retaining its image, most notably during the financial crisis of the 1980s, when it reverted to the Edith Wharton-esque portrayal of New York.

There are more museums in America (and in Mickey Mouse History, Mike Wallace's book of essays which was the basis for this post), than I can possibly blog about here. But, overall, I would like to think that the changing face of the American museum is a good thing, and, hopefully, it continues to improve, allowing for improved discussion and greater interest in historical topics. 

Why I Study History

When I came to interview at Spring Hill for scholarships, one of the questions that I was asked was, "Why do you want to be a history major?" And it stumped me - I think the answer I gave at the time was something akin to "I don't know, I just do."

But the thing is, as I've thought about it over the years, I've never once not been interested in studying the past.

As a little girl, I was always fascinated by, of all of the Disney princesses, Mulan, who was based on Chinese history and a legendary female warrior who saved China from the Huns. I watched it so many times that I broke the VHS tape and made my parents buy a new one. I read all of the Royal Diaries series, which told the stories of famous queens in history during their teenage years. These books led to my first forays into what I had previously considered the "grown-ups only" part of the library - at around ten or eleven, I started reading biographies of historical figures, such as David Starkey and Antonia Fraser's biographies of the wives of Henry VIII.

One of the many Royal Diaries books I read

In the classroom, I didn't become truly entranced by history until around fifth grade, when my teacher, Mr. Gensheimer (who just happened to also be my best friend's dad), began to make history come alive. We recreated the French and Indian War (many scalps were taken that day), and he dressed up as Alexander Hamilton in military dress and told us about the American Revolution. It was the first time that I realized that history could be more than names and dates and words on a page. He also gave me books to read outside of class, including His Excellency, George Washington (which, sadly, I never finished, due to a particularly graphic scalping sequence that was a little too much for a fifth-grade mind).

This classroom love for history continued to grow, and was aided by what happened outside as well. When I was younger, my dad traveled across the country for his job every summer, and so my mom, my brother, and I would join him, and we visited all sorts of historic sites. We visited Independence Hall and Benjamin Franklin's printing shop in Philadelphia; we toured the battlefields of Chickamauga and Chattanooga; we visited the home of the "unsinkable" Molly Brown in Denver, and learned about the mining boom; we wandered through the halls of 'Iolani Palace in Honolulu; we visited museums on the National Mall and every monument and historic home in that area that you could possibly think of. I owe a great debt to my parents for taking me to those places and encouraging me in my love of history.

Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, August 2013

What really pushed me to study history was, of all things, National Treasure. The movie's treatment for history (which, I now know, can be somewhat circumspect), seemed almost reverential to me as a twelve year old, and the idea of a woman who took care of documents, was extremely intelligent, and still received respect spoke to me. I'm pretty sure that Diane Kruger's character is partially who I wanted to be growing up.

From L to R: Diane Kruger, Nicolas Cage, and Justin Bartha, National Treasure

By the time I entered high school, I knew I wanted to study history, but I wanted to be a food historian (I'm not sure where this came from, but my guess is that, because I enjoyed cooking, I wanted to study what people ate). After taking AP European History in my sophomore year, I knew that there was no way that I was only going to study food - there was just too much going on in the world to focus on only that! As high school went on, and I talked to more and more of my peers about what we wanted to study, it became firm in my mind - I wanted to study history.

I'm not sure that I have articulated well why I study history; in fact, I'm not sure that I could without babbling on for several more paragraphs. But there is a quote that I have found that expresses everything that I feel about why I study history, and I want to share it with you. It comes from a tumblr user, serazienne (you can find my link to the post here), and it reads:

Why I Study History

(OR: Why I waste time in a meaningless field; why I want to spend my life looking at old dusty letters and books; why I care about people who are dead and gone; why this even matters.)

I study history because I love humanity.

I study history because it encompasses the entire realm of human thought and deed.

History is a coded map of the human heart; it is a record of hopes and dreams, of the great and the small. History is the ambitions of humans on their knees in the mosques, the cathedrals, the temples; on the plantations; in the trenches. History is the hopes of the humans looking ahead - at the horizon, up to the stars, towards the future.

History is the action of firing a gun or swinging a sword; the action of love (making it, keeping it, using it, stealing it, forgetting it, leaving it). 

History is a Mozart symphony, a Wagnerian opera, a Gamelan opera, and the rhythm of the military march. 

History is culture, literature, philosophy; history is the smallest bedtime prayer whispered by the smallest child. It is a quest - to slay the dragon, to reclaim the Holy Land, to surpass all boundaries.

History is neither good nor evil, but it is the sum of both good and evil things. It is the wheel of time, the moving hands of a clock, and the timeless hush of an old library. History is in the museums but also in destruction of museums.

And the work of a historian is not a dead job. It is not all dust and old books, faded parchment and endless, meaningless letters. It is not mummification - rather, it is the resurrection and immortalization of past lives, past hopes and fears and dreams. 

The historian does not worship the past, but instead brings it into the present - refreshes it, remembers it, and, most importantly, learns from it. The historian knows that history is a tool, and that knowledge of history is both an honor and a powerful weapon in the right (or wrong) hands.

Most of all, the historian knows that history is not only the past - it is the future.

A Brief Notation and Public Service Announcement...

Earlier this year, I posted a link to a blog called Culture&Stuff, and I raved about what a wonderful site it was. I went back to visit today, and the blog has apparently been inactive long enough for its URL address to be purchased by someone else.

It is no longer the blog. Instead, what popped up was a brightly colored page with loud music in a language that was not English. As far as I know, my computer does not have a virus, but it was rather terrifying (especially when I was expecting a page with articles on French Revolutionary history).

Please do not go visit the blog! I'm very sad that this has happened, and, if it changes in the future, I will be sure to let you know.

Thank you all.

Same Topic, Different Conclusion: Varying Viewpoints in Historical Study

Every historian will have his or her own view of the past, based on what he or she brings to the project. People from different backgrounds will bring different talents to their field of study. These varying viewpoints make history more interesting to study, because they allow historians to debate over meaning, significance, and interpretation of events.

Nowhere is this more evident than in American diplomatic history, which, as Walter LaFeber points out in his essay "Liberty and Power: U.S. Diplomatic History, 1750 - 1945," has gone through multiple interpretations, all of which can be viewed as correct. The main variations between the historians which LaFeber discusses are the time period in which they live and the school of thought to which they belong, which are often connected. The realists and the revisionists, for example, have different ways of interpreting history, but both views are correct. Realists prefer the "great men" view of history, looking at American politics and diplomatic achievements through the lens of those who, in their views, affected the policies the most. The revisionists, on the other hand, take a wider view, emphasizing instead the importance of economic stresses and foreign policy.

An excellent example of the differences between these two schools of thought is the "open door policy" put into place in China by the United States' Secretary of State, John Hay, at the end of the nineteenth century. George F. Kennan, a realist historian, argued in his book American Diplomacy 1900 - 1950 that the position was bad for the United States because they were manipulated into it by the British. This was due, according to Kennan, to Washington's inability to turn from "misplaced faith in legalisms and morality" or to prevent manipulation by other powerful nations (Foner 377). It was a better representation of British interests in China than American (377). However, according to William Appleman Williams, a revisionist historian, this theory is completely wrong. Williams wrote in his book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy that the open door policy was "engineered not by British officials but by U.S. leaders who fully understood, and were determined to expand, their nations' economic interests" (378).

Both of interpretations of the open door policy are completely valid. Both Kennan and Williams were able to look at the same events and come away with different conclusions because of what they chose to focus on. Because Kennan chose to focus on "great men" and the major political figures, he found one viewpoint; because Williams chose to focus on the economic factors, he found another. Neither one is more important or more correct than the other - they just look at the topic differently.

This is by no means the only example of changing viewpoints within LaFeber's essay. There are many topics for which this is true, and many other groups of historians who have different focuses than revisionists and realists. However, it provides a good example of how historians can interpret events differently, and yet still have a correct interpretation.

John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: Part 2

As promised, here is the review of John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Gaddis' work is on historiography, and so fair warning to those who are looking for a brief pleasure read on how historians do what they do: this is the nuts and bolts of historical work. It is not for the faint of heart.

That being said, Gaddis makes the book entertaining, lacing it with gentle humor and references to other subjects, including literature (the first chapter contains a running metaphor to Virginia Woolf's first novel Orlando, and a later chapter contains a quote from Tolstoy's seminal work War and Peace, not to mention the blink-and-you'll-miss-it Douglas Adams reference - all of which make the English major in me very happy) and paleontology. The writing style is fluid and casual, a professor chatting with a student about the hows and whys of the craft. Because it is a series of lectures that have been taken and turned into essays, Gaddis is able to preserve the conversational tone, and it works very well with the topics that he addresses, preventing them from becoming completely and utterly boring (which, in the hands of another author, could have been the case).

Gaddis does spend quite a bit of time (from about the fourth chapter onwards) mocking the social sciences in a not-so-gentle manner that does not quite fit with his tone in the rest of the essays. He also throws in a few quips against theories that he does not agree with which, if you are not familiar with them (and I'm not - but I'm sure I will become quite familiar with them in the future), you are likely to miss or simply pass over.

Overall, I enjoyed The Landscape of History, but I am glad that I was reading it for class, and not on my own, as pleasure reading. Having the class discussion and writing assignments to structure my reading definitely helped with understanding what to look for in Gaddis' text, which, while conversational, could be difficult to follow at times.

Now on to the next book on my reading list - ironically enough, Orlando.

John Lewis Gaddis' The Landscape of History: Part One

As you probably saw in a previous post, I have been reading John Lewis Gaddis' work on historiography, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. This particular post will deal with the first four chapters.

One of the topics that Gaddis brings up is time travel and whether it would make someone a better historian. He points out its use in literature, citing Michael Crichton's Timeline and Connie Willis' Doomsday Book as examples of graduate students jumping back in time for their thesis work.

Michael Crichton's time traveling novel Timeline

Gaddis' main point when it comes to time travel, however, is that, despite it being extremely exciting to see all of these wonderful places and people within their context, "the direct experience of events isn't necessarily the best path toward understanding them, because your field of vision extends no further than your own immediate senses" (4). In other words, going back in time to study the French Revolution, for example, is a bad idea because, since the time traveler will be too busy avoiding Madame la Guillotine, mobs of angry Parisians, and other horrible events on the ground to truly experience the wide affect of events.

I disagree with Gaddis, here, however. Gaddis' statement seems to cover every single type of historical study. But what if you are a historian interested in the social impact of an event? Time travel would be a perfect medium for someone to understand what it was like to live, breath, and survive in times as turbulent as the French Revolution, the War of the Roses, or the Hundred Years War. Imagine what it would be like, as a social historian, to discover what the people of England really thought about the Yorks and the Lancasters - or whether they even cared who was on the throne, so long as there was a king. 

Time travel gives more of a chance for a historian to learn about the things that don't find their ways into the textbooks. Stepping into a time machine, a historian can learn about the social structure at Versailles, not simply by reading about it, but by experiencing it for himself. And he can choose when he wants to go to - the beginning of Versailles' strict etiquette under Louis XIV, or its final lapse under Louis XVI. The possibilities for studying social strata are endless.

Because Gaddis' statement is an all-encompassing denial of the benefits of time travel, I cannot help but disagree with him. There are definitely benefits to traveling through time for a social historian, as it allows for the discovery of information that is left out of many documents, simply because it was irrelevant or so commonplace that it was uninteresting to the chroniclers of the era. By traveling through time, historians would discover new things about a time and its people, and maybe even completely change their perspectives and attitudes towards the cultures they study. 

History Podcast - Stuff You Missed in History Class

I was wandering around the Internet today when I discovered this podcast in the comments section of the NaNoWriMo Facebook page. The title intrigued me, and so I clicked on a podcast, curious to see what they would talk about.

This podcast is amazing.

Normally, I'm not a podcast person. But if you haven't listened to Stuff You Missed in History Class, then you're missing out. They have something to interest everyone - from African History to Pirates to World War II. I listened to two really great podcasts, one on Sophia Dorothea of Celle, the wife of George I of England, and another on Lucrezia Borgia, the daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Both of these women were fascinating to me, not only because they were technically royalty, but also because I had never really heard much about them before. I really want to know more about both of them - especially Sophia Dorothea and her family, because the early Hanovers seem really quite interesting.

Go check out this podcast! It's a great podcast, and one that will really surprise you with how much you learn.

Reading The Landscape of History: Or, Why I Really Like Prose that Flows Well

I'm reading The Landscape of History by John Lewis Gaddis for my history class (future blog posts on this to follow), and I can't help but notice how well Gaddis transitions between huge important historical topics and clever anecdotes and witticisms, which is a trait that I really appreciate in authors (a good example from Gaddis' book is when he opens Chapter Four by talking about how he kept associating the term "teasing out" with hairdressing - which is an amazing analogy, and absolutely hilarious in context).

Which set me to thinking - what is it that I really like about this book? What does it have in common with other non-fiction works that I have enjoyed in the past?

And the answer that I came up with, in my musings, was this: I like prose that flows well.

This may be a trait of being an English major as well, but I enjoy books where the author writes his/her prose as if it is a novel. Some of these works are more successful than others. All of them, however, allow the reader to get into the mind of the people of the time, whether it be through a third person omniscient narrator, or through a semi-narrative, semi-informative method of storytelling. This is a (very limited) list of the ones that I really liked:

Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates - David Cordingly
I'm pretty sure that this book reads so well because of the fantastic nature of piracy in general, and the fact that this book focuses mainly on the Golden Age of Piracy (think Blackbeard, Morgan, and Calico Jack) makes it even more fascinating.

Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer - James L. Swanson
This thing reads like a murder mystery and adventure novel. Swanson's narrative never really lags, and the tension constantly builds. I also learned so much about Lincoln, Booth, and the assassination that I didn't read anything that wasn't associated with the main figures for months.

The Billionaire's Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine - Benjamin Wallace
I am unashamedly fond of our third president, and this book deals with him, albeit in a round-about manner: it focuses on one of the greatest scandals in the wine world, that of the Jefferson Wine Bottles. Rumored to be the oldest bottles of wine in existence, their existence was questioned by everyone from the highest of wine critics to the staff of Monticello. But they also fooled the greatest of minds. It's a really entertaining read, going into the story of wine and white-collar crime - and, of course, Thomas Jefferson's sojourn in Paris.

Public Enemies: America's Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 - Bryan Burroughs
This book is amazing - fast-paced, well-researched, and insanely fascinating. It covers all of the major criminals of the day - Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson, and John Dillinger - in intricate detail, all while contrasting them with the FBI agents who chased them and, in many situations, gunned them down.

One Summer: America, 1927 - Bill Bryson
Honestly, just any of Bill Bryson's books. Because all of them are hilarious. And the ones that I've read - this one, At Home, Shakespeare, and Notes from a Small Island (not technically about history, but with lots of very interesting historical content thrown in at random intervals) are very witty looks at the world.

I'm looking forward to seeing where Gaddis goes with Landscape of History!