Unexpected thinking ftw!
I haven't been this reflective about my life and what I'm trying to do with it since, uh, grad school, I swear. Or maybe when dealing with that flood a couple years ago, which was practically still grad school anyway.
The intersection of my academic interest in history and my personal connection with the past--and I use those two terms specifically, a la Roy Rosenzweig et al in The Presence of the Past--is never stronger than when I am in this city. And living in this city, instead of just visiting it, is sort of doing my head in.
My aunt invited me to join one of those family website things, linked to one of those genealogy websites, and I finally joined up. And I found she and another Howey--I swear, Howey is almost as bad as Wilson for being the most common last name evah--had uploaded a bunch of old family photos, some dating back to the late nineteenth century. But the ones that got me were of my grandfather. I'd only ever seen one photo of him before, as a little boy; but one of these was of him as a fairly young adult, in the 1920s, with his (future) wife (who I've also seen few photos of), standing in front of her parents' boarding-house. And he wore a suit, and she a dress, and they were smiling, even laughing, and casual--and there were the photos of my uncles, when they were all young, decades before I met any of them--
I asked my other aunt, the one who still lives in town, about the boarding-house, as I'd never heard about it before. And she said the house was torn down to make way for the interstate, which means it must have happened back in the '60s, I think. But it still hurt to think that that house, some piece of my family history, had been torn down. Me, I've always been practical about preserving historic buildings; it *can't* be done, not all the time, you have to let some things go, but this still hurt, all because I had a specific emotional connection to it.
There are still lots of other markers lying around, indications of where my family has existed. I have more connection to this state than to the one in which I grew up for the first 18 years of my life. It's instinct, or hormones, or social engineering, this feeling of connection to a place just because my family--some portion of it--has lived here for about 150 years. But for all that, for all that it is not logical or rational, it still feels like a home, and I know I would have hated thinking that when I was ten, fifteen years younger.
And this is how it comes back to the academic--history museums and their exhibits try to tap into this connection. The connection between image or object and emotional resonance and immediacy is obvious, when you stop to think about it; everyone has visceral reactions to something they can see and touch. But how can you tap into that? You can never know what will make a person feel the connection, feel history "come alive." I have associations with objects that nobody else has; so do you. What leaves me in a mixture of laughter and tears leaves the person next to me stone cold. But the ability to catch that piece, capture that ephemeral quality--it really is what history museums, and even archives, strive for in creating exhibits and attempting to educate about history. It's an intersection of memorial, relic, and personal association. How can you educate, how you can grab somebody's attention, if they are not in some tiny way invested in what you want to show them?
I'm...sort of surprised to see that I've typed that. That's not academic history--Ranke is probably spinning in his grave constantly these days--but it is the way that people best connect to the past. The sole interest I have in WWII is that my uncle was on Iwo Jima after the major battle. My understanding of the 1950s is colored by my mother's stories of growing up. The unaccountable fondness I have for this city and state is wrapped up completely in the fact that my family have lived in this space for decades. That's why objects hold such power, that's why people prefer getting their history from museums over the classroom--it's something tangible, concrete, a way to begin creating a personal connection if one doesn't already exist. Objects don't lie (or so we like to think). It's why people always ask if the furnishings are original in house museums; it's why docents always have to tell people, "Don't touch." We want to connect. It's a sense of belonging.
Which...is really sort of old hat, museum theory-wise. But hey, it's still got to sink in for *me* before I get *my* personal epiphany. And I still don't know how we can make it work.
Mmmm, professional wankery, it's been a while.
The intersection of my academic interest in history and my personal connection with the past--and I use those two terms specifically, a la Roy Rosenzweig et al in The Presence of the Past--is never stronger than when I am in this city. And living in this city, instead of just visiting it, is sort of doing my head in.
My aunt invited me to join one of those family website things, linked to one of those genealogy websites, and I finally joined up. And I found she and another Howey--I swear, Howey is almost as bad as Wilson for being the most common last name evah--had uploaded a bunch of old family photos, some dating back to the late nineteenth century. But the ones that got me were of my grandfather. I'd only ever seen one photo of him before, as a little boy; but one of these was of him as a fairly young adult, in the 1920s, with his (future) wife (who I've also seen few photos of), standing in front of her parents' boarding-house. And he wore a suit, and she a dress, and they were smiling, even laughing, and casual--and there were the photos of my uncles, when they were all young, decades before I met any of them--
I asked my other aunt, the one who still lives in town, about the boarding-house, as I'd never heard about it before. And she said the house was torn down to make way for the interstate, which means it must have happened back in the '60s, I think. But it still hurt to think that that house, some piece of my family history, had been torn down. Me, I've always been practical about preserving historic buildings; it *can't* be done, not all the time, you have to let some things go, but this still hurt, all because I had a specific emotional connection to it.
There are still lots of other markers lying around, indications of where my family has existed. I have more connection to this state than to the one in which I grew up for the first 18 years of my life. It's instinct, or hormones, or social engineering, this feeling of connection to a place just because my family--some portion of it--has lived here for about 150 years. But for all that, for all that it is not logical or rational, it still feels like a home, and I know I would have hated thinking that when I was ten, fifteen years younger.
And this is how it comes back to the academic--history museums and their exhibits try to tap into this connection. The connection between image or object and emotional resonance and immediacy is obvious, when you stop to think about it; everyone has visceral reactions to something they can see and touch. But how can you tap into that? You can never know what will make a person feel the connection, feel history "come alive." I have associations with objects that nobody else has; so do you. What leaves me in a mixture of laughter and tears leaves the person next to me stone cold. But the ability to catch that piece, capture that ephemeral quality--it really is what history museums, and even archives, strive for in creating exhibits and attempting to educate about history. It's an intersection of memorial, relic, and personal association. How can you educate, how you can grab somebody's attention, if they are not in some tiny way invested in what you want to show them?
I'm...sort of surprised to see that I've typed that. That's not academic history--Ranke is probably spinning in his grave constantly these days--but it is the way that people best connect to the past. The sole interest I have in WWII is that my uncle was on Iwo Jima after the major battle. My understanding of the 1950s is colored by my mother's stories of growing up. The unaccountable fondness I have for this city and state is wrapped up completely in the fact that my family have lived in this space for decades. That's why objects hold such power, that's why people prefer getting their history from museums over the classroom--it's something tangible, concrete, a way to begin creating a personal connection if one doesn't already exist. Objects don't lie (or so we like to think). It's why people always ask if the furnishings are original in house museums; it's why docents always have to tell people, "Don't touch." We want to connect. It's a sense of belonging.
Which...is really sort of old hat, museum theory-wise. But hey, it's still got to sink in for *me* before I get *my* personal epiphany. And I still don't know how we can make it work.
Mmmm, professional wankery, it's been a while.