“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.