Website Review

 

Presbyterians and the Civil War: Witness to a Great Moral Earthquake (produced by The Presbyterian Historical Society: The National Archives of the PC (USA)) http://www.history.pcusa.org/resources/exhibits/civil_war/, Created and Maintained by the Presbyterian Historical society, Reviewed March 27 to March 29, 2013

 

               During the last few decades, outreach has become one of the archivist’s most vital functions. As Laura A. Millar explains, archival outreach, including digitization, not only entails making archival holdings available, but also explaining the institution’s ‘…value and purpose.’[1] The Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) has cemented their online presence by making selected materials from the Presbyterian Church’s national archives available through virtual exhibits such as Presbyterians and the Civil War: Witness to a Great Moral Earthquake. Although PHS explores the conflicts Presbyterians experienced during the Civil War through primary sources, they have focused on availability at the expense of educating the public on the value and purpose of their holdings.

               PHS uses several thematic concepts to convey their message: the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America; the Presbyterian Church’s efforts to care for soldiers and freedman; the theological debates between Presbyterians over slavery and secession; and the individual stories of famous Presbyterians. Despite PHS’s efforts, the digital exhibit only superficially examines these themes. For example, PHS’s exhibit on Abraham Lincoln notes that, while Lincoln did not belong to a specific religious denomination, he spent the majority of his life attending Presbyterian services. While this may be an intriguing factoid, it does nothing to illuminate Lincoln’s place in history, or the Church’s effect on the Civil War. Did the Presbyterian Church’s doctrine somehow affect Lincoln’s policies during his presidency or his overall philosophy? This deficiency partially stems from PHS neglecting to define its audience. Is the exhibit supposed to be for school children and non-Presbyterians who know little about the church, or Presbyterians?

               Further problems arise due to PHS’s ineffective use of digital technology. Throughout the exhibit, PHS provides visitors with digitized images of documents pertaining to the Civil War. Unfortunately, visitors are not able to access more than one page of a digitized letter or sermon, nor does it not allow patrons to use magnification features to study the documents, or access transcriptions of the documents themselves. This severely limits the usefulness of the digitized items, relegating them to glorified set pieces for the text. This also prevents PHS from creating lesson plans for K-12 students; teachers will be able to do little with an 870 by 1086 image.  

               Although PHS has created a user-friendly website, it will need several revisions before it will become a quality exhibit. PHS will need to research what their materials say about American society during the Civil War; it will serve no one to state simply that Abraham Lincoln was a Presbyterian. The creators of Presbyterians and the Civil War will also need to define their core audience. Once they have answered these questions, they will need to reformat their digitized collections, allowing visitors to magnify documents and view more than one page of a document. Although implanting these changes will be a challenge, the society’s donation program could provide a possible solution, allowing PHS could maximize its resources and improve Presbyterians and the Civil War, thereby generating more visitors and future donors.         

 

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[1] Ibid, 193-195, 199.

Week Eleven...I think

               Throughout my long and illustrious career in the food and retail industry, I have always adhered to one basic axiom: the customer is always right. As most of you know, in reality, the customer is full shit ninety nine percent of the time, but that does not matter; what matters is that customers leave the store happy. While this philosophy has saved me from the wrath of obese soccer moms and senile old men, it does work well for museums. Unfortunately, the almighty dollar triumphs over everything else in most aspects of our daily lives, even in those areas we consider sacred, such as museums. While Colonial Williamsburg attempts to overcome these limitations by embracing the new social history, they continue to be limited by their allegiance to the cult of the customer. Of course, I am not saying that Williamsburg should not be concerned about making history accessible to the public; Dr. Criblez would have to bitch slap me if I believed that. However, Williamsburg’s concern over imparting “good vibes” severely hampers their mission, transforming frontline interpreters into glorified Wal-Mart door greeters. With this obsession over good vibes, history devolves into a simple narrative of progress (Things just keep getting better and better!) that Williamsburg’s social historians originally intended to avoid. While there will always be limitations to what public historians can do at museums and other historical sites, they should never become so timid that they lose sight of their original mission.  

“Well, boy, I guess you are up shit creek without a paddle”—Robert Clarence Luecke

*This week’s blog will most likely not be as insightful as I had originally hoped. I am currently trapped in St. Charles and forgot to bring this week’s readings with me.  Although I read the text last Monday, I usually need the readings on hand in order to write meaningful blogs. In the meantime, I plan to eviscerate the lying, treacherous groundhog who predicted that we would have an early spring.  

               For some reason, my grandparents always wanted to take me to Texas on vacations as a child. My mother has always referred to the Lone Star state as “nut country”, so it came as no surprise that my grandparents would want to spend their vacations in the state that produced such illustrious figures as Lee Harvey Oswald and George W. Bush. During one of our frequent travels to the asshole of the United States, we visited the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum. As we toured the museum, I made the mistake of touching one of the open displays out of curiosity. The museum’s alarm system immediately activated, startling everyone in the vicinity. My grandpa Luecke quickly rushed over and began interrogating me; his instincts told me I was the cause of the trouble. “Did you touch that goddamn display,” he asked. I responded by protesting my innocence, knowing my grandpa would give me a severe tongue lashing, not to mention the subsequent nagging from my grandma Luecke.  My grandpa stared at me for what seemed to be the longest two minutes of my life before deciding (thankfully) that, although I was guilty, it would be best to forget the incident. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said. We found my grandmother—we did not dare tell her what had transpired—and rushed through the rest of the tour as the museum.

               Although the museum profession has made progress in recent decades avoiding the debacles I experienced as a child, this week’s readings prove that more work still needs to be done. For example, Handler mentions the controversy surrounding the interpretation of African American life at Colonial Williamsburg. Relying primarily on oral histories, Colonial Williamsburg’s African American tour guides note the possibility that several of Williamsburg’s gentry probably engaged in mutual (or more likely coerced) sexual affairs with their slaves. These sexual liaisons often produced illegitimate offspring that slave owners never officially claimed as their own for fear of becoming a social pariah in the community. The majority of white tour guides counter that no documentation exists definitively proving any sexual affair between slaves and their owners. This frequently devolves into a recurring debate between both camps concerning the “facts” surrounding these alleged affairs. Unfortunately, in their quest for definitive facts to validate their arguments, both sides ignore the interpretive nature of history that scholars employ to explore and make sense of the past. Handler notes that these discussions usually devolve into debates over “facts” because museum staff fails to convey the full complexity of history to tour guides. The staff at Colonial Williamsburg would improve the overall quality of the site by refining their educational seminars for tour guides. Although conflict will always arise of historical interpretation, it will hopefully be more productive than what Handler witnessed during his study.      

“Gettysburg—there were some mistakes made there, it’s a sad thing and I’m not going to go into that.”

A couple of weeks ago a heated debate arose in class over the appropriateness of Disney’s proposed plans in the mid-1990s to construct a Civil War park adjacent to the Gettysburg battlefield. My overactive imagination immediately conjured up images of Disney characters reenacting the Battle of Gettysburg, with a Confederate Mickey Mouse at the center of the carnage eviscerating Donald Duck with a bayonet. As a result, I opposed the idea, arguing that the battlefield was “sacred” ground and should not be inadvertently altered by Disney’s crass commercialized endeavors. However, I realized that I missed the entire point of that week’s readings by using the term “sacred.” Whenever historians or the general public describe a public history site as “sacred,” they imply that the site is more of a religious shrine than a secular monument open to reinterpretation and revision. When perceived outsiders, such as American Indians, attempt to revise these cherished narratives, the defenders of the traditional narrative accuse them of heresy and treason (Savage, 4, 10, 14) (Linenthal, 144-148, 154-155, 160-161).

               This opposition to revisionism, of course, is the antithesis of historical thinking. Defenders of “sacred” ground view revisionism as a naive attempt by liberals to “right social wrongs” (Linenthal, 154). What these individuals fail to understand is that historical thinking is a fluid process, requiring historians to ask new questions perennially and revise their previous interpretations of the past. This process is crucial to the survival of the nation if we hope to become a more inclusive society and heal the wounds inflicted by past generations (Savage, 10). If we fail to do this, we risk becoming like “hardcore” Civil-War re-enactors. The Civil War will never end for these individuals as they continue to piss on their clothing and recite meaningless Civil War trivia in a futile to attempt to recreate what they view as a “simpler time.” While some individuals might find it appealing to dress in piss soaked clothing, historic sites must never devolve into the blatant hero worship evidenced from these readings (Horwitz, 9-17, 36-37). As I always like to remind my cousin, we are living in 2013, not 1853. We should treat our historic sites in the same way as the public continues to redefine what it means to be an American (Yes, I realize the previous sentence sucked. As you can tell, I am not the most articulate lad).  

Week 9

               Recreating the past on celluloid is probably one of the most challenging aspects of filmmaking. Like academics, filmmakers must consult the fragmented documentary record in order to make history come alive. However, the cinema’s broad public appeal increases the potential for a director to ignite a firestorm of controversy surrounding their chosen topic. With the majority of these films, public outrage usually centers on the director’s choice to infuse the material with blood, sex and violence at the expense of historical accuracy. One only has to examine Oliver Stone’s filmography to understand why filmmakers continually rely on this formula, and why the large segments of the public usually leave these movies pissed off. For instance, my father once became disgusted after watching JFK, noting that the only thing Oliver Stone got right was that Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy in the head.

               Yet even the most historically conscious directors, such as Bruce Beresford, incur the public’s wrath. Beresford’s Black Robe, the story of a 17^th century Jesuit Priest in colonial Quebec, engendered the same controversy as any of Stone’s films. Ward Churchill—yes, the same Ward Churchill who made the disgusting comments about the victims of 9/11—claims Black Robe sanitizes the past by portraying colonists as noble, spiritual men with good intentions, rather than the brutal conquers portrayed in recent films. To make matters worse, Churchill believes Beresford consciously portrays the Indians in the film as brutal savages who prefer farting and fornicating “doggie style” to the spiritual pursuits advocated by father Laforge, the title character; it is up to the colonists to Christianize the “savages” and introduce them to the proper European sexual positions.

               Unfortunately, it appears Mr. Churchill’s emotions overtook him while he wrote his critique of the film. In fact, Black Robe makes no attempt to sanitize the past. According to Kristof Haavik, Beresford uses the film to examine what happens when a man’s arrogance distorts his noblest intentions. Throughout the film, Father Laforge fails to find any value in the native’s culture, which ultimately helps bring the destruction of Indian civilization as the imposition of the Christian religion destroys the Huron’s society. As for the sex scenes Mr. Churchill complained so much about, I subjected my virgin eyes to re-watching these scenes several times in order analyze Mr. Churchill’s critique. After several hours, I was able to determine that none of these scenes portrayed the characters as hedonistic savages. Instead, the characters exchange in sexual activity to express their love to a committed partner much like Europeans.

               Film is an inherently subjective medium; film goers see what they want to see. Mr. Churchill got out of Black Robe what he wanted: a film that reinforces his worst fears about an Eurocentric nation that glorifies the near extinction of native peoples. Perhaps filmmakers in the future would be better served by articulating their intentions to the public. Beresford and the film crew appeared to focus more on promoting the film’s aesthetics than publicizing its message. While this may not prevent individuals like Mr. Churchill from seeing what they want to see, a proper defense could possibly prevent misunderstanding among the broader public.