The New History in an Old Museum
Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of “historical truth” as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with pedagogical principle in Colonial Williamsburg to blur the lines between education and entertainment, patriotism and revisionism.
During much of its existence, the “living museum” at Williamsburg has been considered a patriotic shrine, celebrating the upscale lifestyles of Virginia’s colonial-era elite. But in recent decades a new generation of social historians has injected a more populist and critical slant to the site’s narrative of nationhood. For example, in interactions with museum visitors, employees now relate stories about the experiences of African Americans and women, stories that several years ago did not enter into descriptions of life in Colonial Williamsburg. Handler and Gable focus on the way this public history is managed, as historians and administrators define historiographical policy and middle-level managers train and direct front-line staff to deliver this “product” to the public. They explore how visitors consume or modify what they hear and see, and reveal how interpreters and craftspeople resist or acquiesce in being managed. By deploying the voices of these various actors in a richly textured narrative, The New History in an Old Museum highlights the elements of cultural consensus that emerge from this cacophony of conflict and negotiation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the late 1960s, social historians emerged with a fervent desire to write history that included populations other than elite, white males. The collision of this objective with the "entrenched" hegemonic values and the equally difficult clash between commercialism and education at Colonial Williamsburg, is the focus of this accessible and, frequently, engaging book. According to Handler, professor of anthropology at the University of Virginia, and Gable, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at Mary Washington College, the broad ambition to merge critical inquiry with corporate values such as visitor comfort and market share was bound to fail: in contextualizing, interpreting, updating or making palatable the known facts of history, how much of it is left behind? What makes this book more than an able, academic study is the authors' ear for the irreverent phrase (they include the term "Republican Disneyland," which insiders applied to the site, more than once) and also their use of employee voices to give behind-the-scenes accounts. Especially welcome is an account by a master cooper, who represents a blue-collar segment which, like the slaves, historians too often have overlooked. When Handler and Gable were conducting on-site fieldwork in the early 1990s, one corporate executive predicted that any study they might write would be "fiction." This well-written book is not fiction, as the extensive footnotes attest. Rather, it provides valuable insights into how history is presented and why the best intentions go awry. Illustrations not seen by PW.
