My time is limited this week, so my post will be short. For our reading, we were assigned what amounts to the first half of The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, by Richard Handler and Eric Gable. Of course, as a historian of American slavery, Colonial Williamsburg is very interesting to me, given the journey they have been on over the last couple decades, trying to reflect changes brought by the emergence of social history. As I was reading the first chapter of this book, a new question hit me: why social history? I mean, my interest in Williamsburg has always been more along the lines of how they implement social history, but this time, I started to wonder why social history is so important anyway.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a social historian to the core. I wasn't actually wondering if social history was important, more like how. Not that I didn't know, but sometimes we tend to overlook things we think are too basic or obvious, thereby missing some of the important details.
Early on, Colonial Williamsburg was a fairly sterile, clean environment, praising the lives and work of Williamsburg's elite. By the 1970s, Americans had grown bored with the sanitized version of history which overlooked the bad, praising too highly the good- or at least, what leaders and historians at the time wanted Americans to think of as good. Beginning in the 60s, people wanted to learn about the history of the working class, ordinary people. They wanted to see history's whole picture- not just the "important" parts.
In the case of Williamsburg, just over half of the population were African American slaves, giving its elite an unusually high standard of living. Showing the social history of Colonial Williamsburg would mean showing some pretty unsavory elements of American history. It would mean presenting the great leaders of that town, and the American Revolution, as being flawed. Showing "the other half" would mean bursting the bubble for many Americans. But then again, I come to the same question: why? Why show slaves in Williamsburg? Why have live animals and horses leaving their droppings, or "road apples" for everyone to see and smell? Why not just focus on the good? Why do things have to be real?
As I thought about it, I came up with an answer that at least makes sense to me. If we don't show the past as it really was, if we sanitize it, if we take out the bad, then the good of the present doesn't mean as much. Additionally, it marginalizes the struggles others have gone through, the things people have had to overcome to get to where they are. It also takes away a lot of our ability to accurately understand the present- both the good and the bad of the present. Social history- both at Colonial Williamsburg and elsewhere- allows us to study, analyze, and understand history as a whole. Without social history, we're only looking at part of the picture- a part that lacks a lot of the struggle and stark reality- good and bad- of the past and the present.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a social historian to the core. I wasn't actually wondering if social history was important, more like how. Not that I didn't know, but sometimes we tend to overlook things we think are too basic or obvious, thereby missing some of the important details.
Early on, Colonial Williamsburg was a fairly sterile, clean environment, praising the lives and work of Williamsburg's elite. By the 1970s, Americans had grown bored with the sanitized version of history which overlooked the bad, praising too highly the good- or at least, what leaders and historians at the time wanted Americans to think of as good. Beginning in the 60s, people wanted to learn about the history of the working class, ordinary people. They wanted to see history's whole picture- not just the "important" parts.
In the case of Williamsburg, just over half of the population were African American slaves, giving its elite an unusually high standard of living. Showing the social history of Colonial Williamsburg would mean showing some pretty unsavory elements of American history. It would mean presenting the great leaders of that town, and the American Revolution, as being flawed. Showing "the other half" would mean bursting the bubble for many Americans. But then again, I come to the same question: why? Why show slaves in Williamsburg? Why have live animals and horses leaving their droppings, or "road apples" for everyone to see and smell? Why not just focus on the good? Why do things have to be real?
As I thought about it, I came up with an answer that at least makes sense to me. If we don't show the past as it really was, if we sanitize it, if we take out the bad, then the good of the present doesn't mean as much. Additionally, it marginalizes the struggles others have gone through, the things people have had to overcome to get to where they are. It also takes away a lot of our ability to accurately understand the present- both the good and the bad of the present. Social history- both at Colonial Williamsburg and elsewhere- allows us to study, analyze, and understand history as a whole. Without social history, we're only looking at part of the picture- a part that lacks a lot of the struggle and stark reality- good and bad- of the past and the present.
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