Presently Historical

I know, I know. You all want to know where I’ve been the past few months. I can honestly say I’ve been busier than I knew I could be. I took fewer classes this past semester (only two, Visual and Material Culture and Colloquium in US 1) but I was also working three days a week at Arlington House. For the most part, it was actually a pretty good semester.

 

Luckily, I have something to show for myself besides an exhibit review and presentation, a few papers, five book reviews, a conference experience, a stack of books as tall as me, and whatever else I did over the past semester. If you all wouldn’t mind, I’d love for you to take a look at Capitol Art: Teaching the Art of the Rotunda for 5^th Graders, a site I made with a classmate as part of a project in my Visual and Material Culture class.

 

Early in the semester, we read a book called Art and Empire: Race and Ethnicity in the United States Capitol by Vivien Green Fryd. If you haven’t read it yet, please do so. Not only is it fantastic, you will never look at the art in the Capitol, or even the art of the Early Republic, the same way again. For those of you who don’t want to read it, and really, it’s a school book so I can’t blame you, you can find the main argument here at the website. Essentially, it is this:

 

“In Art and Empire, Vivien Green Fryd argues that the art in and surrounding the United States Capitol represents a specific idea and belief within American culture. The art is not merely decorative; the pieces represent white hegemonic power, dominance over the Native American population and in the final chapter, the deliberate absence of African Americans. This absence is indicative of the political and social tensions of the time.”

 

It touches on ideas near and dear to the traditionalist, westward expansion and Manifest Destiny… and everything that comes along with them, such as white superiority and subjugation of the American continent. What the above paragraph (taken from our website) doesn’t explicitly say is that Congress had an agenda to create a national myth and a shared heritage, at least for white people, and did so through the art of the Capitol.

 

The book shocked me.  I had never thought about the art in the Rotunda in such a way before, and the very idea that in the center of democracy and equality (at least supposedly) we proudly display these ideas blew my mind. Over and over throughout the semester our class discussions returned to Fryd’s work, especially in terms of a government agenda. My mind, however, returned again and again to the idea that such works of art are still venerated in our Capitol with no explanations for visitors as to what exactly those works of art mean.

 

There are two ways for visitors to see the Capitol. One is a tour from the Capitol Visitors Center, the other is a tour from the office of a Congressman. CVC guides are trained in their tours. Congress tours are generally by interns and junior staffers who don’t really care about what they’re showing the family from their boss’ district visiting the nation’s capital and don’t get much training. I’ve seen both up close and personal. (I will admit that though I’ve never taken an office tour, I’ve seen them and I know a lot of former Hill interns. In my experience, they generally dislike the tours and take pride in making up information.) From personal experience, CVC guides tell you who made the art and when, but don’t go into the complicated early 19^th century social and political situations surrounding the pieces. Add in the sparse labels, and you’ve got is a lot of missing information, a public missing the point, and the nation calling (subtly?) for white superiority.

 

The website takes all of this into account. To be perfectly clear, our goal was not to create a lesson plan for students. Instead, we created a resource for teachers. We give them enough information to get started, in terms of the hows and whys of using visual culture and the historical material, namely Fryd and the art, and let them do what they want with it. The website also contains four in-class activities for teachers to use.  We provide them with our bibliography on visual culture, education, digital media in the classroom, and 19^th century history if they want to learn more. We left the comment functions enabled so educators can communicate with one another about the material and their own ideas for how to use it.

 

Personally, I was more concerned with making sure teachers knew the problems and dangers of teaching these subjects rather than giving them something to print out and use. The challenges to the traditional American myth Congress created with it have always created controversy (see the Enola Gay and West as America exhibits, and the National History Standards debates). Art and Empire was published around the same time these other controversies were making national headlines, but I can’t find much to say how much it brought to the table.

 

So please, take a look at Capitol Art. Pass it along to your friends in education if you think it’s any good. If you have an opinion, please let me know. I figure the site can pretty much look after itself, but I will be keeping an eye on it and am willing to put some extra effort into it if I think it will really help make a difference.

For some masochistic reason, I’m taking another fascinating class this summer: Readings in Early America. It’s a three-week crash course on recent historiography. I’m taking it for two reasons: first and most importantly, comp exams in January. Reason two? It’s early America, I am an early Americanist, and I haven’t taken an early America course in over a year. Plus, it’s with Lewis, and he’s completely ridiculous. I appear to be sidetracking, but I do have a point!

Anyway, this class is massive amounts of reading all at once, and one of tonight’s articles is truly something I’ve never encountered before. Claudio Saunt of the University of Georgia wrote a piece in the William and Mary Quarterly, the premier early America journal, called “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography”* in which he literally mapping the “mental geography of the field” (746) from 1944, when the journal expanded from just Virginia history, through 2006. Not only did he categorize almost every single article by the author’s university and the subject matter, but he then divided them into pre-determined regions. He then created cartograms, “which display the geographic distribution of a given variable (people, automobiles, oak trees) by resizing defined units (countries, states, counties) in proportion to that variable” (750). In this case, regions with many articles written about or from them will appear larger on the map than regions with fewer articles. For example, the journal has published manymanymany more articles about the Northeast than California. Therefore, though California is geographically bigger than the Northeast, the Northeast appears larger on the map than California. It’s subjective rather than objective.

I won’t restate all his conclusions here, Saunt does that quite well himself and the article includes the cartograms he created. Actually seeing the way the field has changed over time and the patterns that emerge is really quite fascinating, though, and got me thinking. Could a project like this go digital though? In a way, Saunt’s project reminds me of projects like we looked at last week, Australia’s Mapping our Anzacs for example, where people can plot on a map where veterans of World War I came from. Instead of clusters of little markers, though, he literally changed the face of the continent using cartograms instead of the more traditional equal-area map.

I think, in the end, it’s word “traditional” that gets me. Almost everything we do with history in conjunction with the Internet and Web 2.0 is untraditional. I’d like to see a map that doesn’t use little flags, but rather one that might change size depending on what information people feed into it. In a way, as Saunt points out, it can more accurately reflect mental attitudes, a la “Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker  cover depicting a Manhattenite’s foreshortened view
of the continent” (750) because the reader can see, in this case for example, a person’s world view or how important different variables are in relation to others.

It seems to me that getting opinions and understanding where the public is coming from is part of the job of a public historian and/or museum professional, and today, much of that is done via the web. Using this kind of insight gathering can let museums know, for example, which exhibits or parts of the museum visitors like most in a simple, visual way. It would, of course, have be supplemented with a comment sheet or in-person interview, but the results might help the staff decide where to start if more than one area is up for reconsideration.

In terms of digital collections after a tragedy, I’m thinking CHNM’s 9-11 project and Hurricane Katrina websites, these kinds of maps would show where items came from or what part of the country they refer to, giving an idea of where people’s attention is focused. Since submission date is stored as well, one could look over time and find out what part of the country submitted the most at any given time, or if there were any patterns.

Admittedly, these might not be completely original data, and I’m sure something similar has been done. I’ve not seen many cartograms though (I didn’t even realize they had a name), and looking at distorted maps is far more interesting than looking at normal maps, at least in my opinion. If nothing else, it might be a fun option to explore, if only for break in monotony and the opportunity to show people how maps aren’t static truth, but merely subjective representations of the world around us.

*The original article can be accessed through the History Coopertive, which requires a subscription. If your institution has one, log into the library, then go here and access the WMQ, October 2008. AU students, that link should ask you to log into the system and will then take you to the main page. HC is particularly awesome, as it has the latest issues of journals, not just the ones from at least two years ago.