In 2014, I gave an invited lecture at Hagley Museum and Library, the nation’s leading center for the history of business and technology. The topic was based on my 2002 book, Black Powder, White Lace: the du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in 19th Century America. A videorecording can be found here: https://www.hagley.org/librarynews/video-black-powder-white-lace-du-pont-irish-and-cultural-identity-nineteenth-century
Category Archives: Public History
What’s in a Name? The JMU Quad as a Lesson Plan
I’m republishing this August 2019 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because petitions linking to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
If you understand that a college campus is a commemorative landscape, that its named buildings, statuary, roadways, plazas, and so forth all comprise a text that can be read for insights into the institution’s cultural values, then you’ll appreciate it when I say that JMU’s Quad is a kind of lesson plan. Conceived by Dr. John Wayland, first professor of history at the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg and head of the department of Social Studies until 1931, the plan relies on the associative properties of monuments, which call forth the great deeds and virtues of the person or Continue reading
Searching for Mr. Walker Lee
His name leaps out at me. “In Science Hall there was Walker Lee, the janitor. Short, rotund, and coal black, Walker’s smile, cheerful disposition and willingness to be of help made him a favorite with the girls. He could out spell many of them and was said to write a finer hand than President Burruss himself.” These sentences appear in Chapter 5 of Raymond C. Dingledine, Jr.’s Madison College (1958), a celebratory review of this institution’s first fifty years. Although the name is right there in black and white, the customary honorific “Mr.” is missing. Following the customs of the day, Dingledine, the Continue reading
Confronting Blackface
I’m republishing this Feb. 2019 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because links to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
Blackface minstrelsy has a long history on this campus, so in light of recent revelations about state officials’ participation in related activities I thought I’d pull together some information for students wondering what the heck is going on. First, as Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes noted in her recent WaPo essay, “The Troubling History Behind Ralph Northam’s Blackface Klan Photo,” minstrelsy was absolutely “central to civic and campus life in 20th century America.” White men, young and old, poor and elite, uneducated and erudite, not only used “the profits of amateur blackface to build white-only institutions” but, more importantly, to affirm their political, economic, and cultural Continue reading
Alumni Scrapbooks and Collective Memory
Page from Carrie Bishop’s scrapbook with mementos from a “masque party” she attended in 1916.
Collegiate scrapbooks are no longer a thing. Sure, modern students still take photographs to document their college years—arguably, they take even more than my generation, thanks to digital cameras–but instead of pasting images into memory books, they post them to Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook. It’s interesting to compare the ephemerality of today’s memory-keeping activities to the materiality of yesterday’s.
Physical scrapbooks fascinate me. I’m a scrapbooker, myself, have been since middle Continue reading
Digital Commonplace Books
image from pervasivejoy.com
In my Intro to Public History class, I usually require some sort of digital assignment as one of three short projects. The first project uses historic Sanborn fire insurance maps and requires each student to walk a different city block and submit an essay analyzing changes in the cultural landscape from past to present. The second project has been the creation of a personal website, inspired by a Domain of One’s Own, where the students can create a portfolio of their work in various classes, including mine. The third project always relates to James Madison’s historic home, Montpelier, which I use as a case study to explore multiple branches of public history at one historic property. This semester, I changed the second project to Adobe Spark glideshows documenting a local Confederate monument and the third shifted to a digital commonplace book focused thematically on Montpelier.
The idea came from a tweet by historian Joe Adelman, who has had students create Continue reading
Confederate Heritage at JMU
This building commemorates noted 19th century scientist and oceanographer Matthew Fontaine Maury, who resigned his commission in the US Navy in 1861 to serve as a commodore in the Confederate navy. After the Civil War, he briefly lived in Mexico, where he tried to create a slaveholding colony for exiled Confederates. He eventually returned to his home state, Virginia, and accepted a position as professor of meteorology at Virginia Military Institute. A strong advocate for public higher education, he helped create the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Virginia Tech). Photo by author.
I’m republishing this May 2017 post today 6/20/20 with a disclaimer: it contains references to historic ideas, words, and images that today are considered racist. I temporarily removed it because links to it were circulating on mass media and social media, and portions of it were taken out of context.
Talk of Confederate heritage seems to be everywhere these days. As a public historian who studies, teaches, and writes about this subject, I find the sudden resurgence fascinating and repellent at the same time. Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, put it well when he said, Confederate statues “are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.” I make a similar point in my forthcoming book, Race, Place, and Memory: Deep Currents in WiImington, NC, which includes an analysis of monuments and memorials in that city. But my interest is more than academic. Every day, I go to work in a building that long served as a Confederate monument. To be clear, my views on renaming/removing/contextualizing such Continue reading
It’s a Real Thing: Open Pedagogy
About three years ago, I recreated my own domain. I had had a fairly extensive website back in the late 1990s, when Web 1.0 ruled the universe, but when I came to JMU in 2005, I found that faculty overwhelmingly used Blackboard and hid their syllabi and assorted pedagogical aids away from public sight. It has been interesting to watch the shift toward open ed occurring here in the last decade. As more and more faculty, generally the younger ones, experimented more and more with WordPress and Omeka and similar tools, I did, too. And as I added blogging assignments, digital exhibits, and Continue reading
You CAN go home again . . .
On March 27, 2014, I gave an author talk, “Black Powder, White Lace – The du Pont Irish and Cultural Identity in Nineteenth Century America”
When my old friend Roger Horowitz first invited me to give an author talk at Hagley Museum and Library, I immediately said yes, but I’ll admit that I didn’t really know what to expect. Imagine turning your scholarly book into an hour-long lecture for the general public! It turned out to be one of the best presentations I’ve ever done, not just because some family and friends were there, but because so many strangers came up afterwards to share with me their stories, their genealogies, their thanks. One man, a Hagley guide, brought the copy he purchased back in 2002 for me to sign. It was all dog-eared and full of underlinings and marginalia. And that’s really what I always wanted—a book that regular people would read and enjoy. About twice a year, someone reads Black Powder, White Lace and tracks me down via Google to say hello or ask if I have more information about an ancestor or whatever. I’m always grateful and humbled when they do that. But it was so much nicer to meet my readers (past and future) in person.
Hagley has just posted the video of my talk. You watch the whole thing here:
Public History & Me
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I’ve been working in and around public history for nearly 30 years. As an undergraduate, I worked at the Center for Historic Architecture and Engineering at the University of Delaware. My job at that time was to measure and draw historic buildings for collections associated with the Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record Divison of the National Park Service. After graduation from UD, I was hired on to a HABS/HAER summer team that surveyed industrial sites in Continue reading