Working-Class Public History in the Context of Deindustrialization: Dilemmas of Authority and the Possibilities of Dialogue (1). (Presentation/Presentation)‪.‬

SOME 25 YEARS AGO, a friend and I were motoring along the tourist trail in Nova Scotia when we saw a sign pointing to the town of Springhill and an underground mine/mine disaster history tour. I was familiar with the then-famous ballad by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl about the Springhill event, and so we took the turn and bought tickets for the tour. (2) Joining a group of some fifteen visitors, we were led to a changing room where we were given coats and headlamp hard hats, and pointed to an exhibition about both the world of mining in Springhill and the disaster that doomed it. There we were greeted by our guide--one of the retired miners from the now-closed mine who seemed to constitute the entire staff of the museum. From the first moment, he was relentlessly cheerful and accommodating -- chatting us up about who we were and where we had come from, making friendly little jokes about the distant towns and regions represented, asking our names and inquiring about our families. As we strolled to the mine, the teasing repartee continued -- he was doing everything possible to make us feel comfortable with him and each other, to define the fleeting community of our accidental group. But as the tour began, this quality did not alter--we were being told almost nothing about what we were seeing, and even less about the history it represented. Our guide's every effort was directed, rather, to maintaining a jollity that, after a while, began to feel almost eerie. The tour culminated with our being led to a coal face, where children in the group were given little hammers to chip out a piece of real coal for souvenirs, after which, we could see, we were to be led out and back to the changing room.