by Leah Arroyo

This article was published in Museum News March/April 2006

Do history museums teach history? If so, how good are they at it? Eric Foner has some thoughts on the topic. As Columbia University’s DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, a prize-winning author, and one of the nation’s leading historians, he has devoted much of his career to improving how history is taught outside the ivory tower: in museums, in middle and high schools, in newspapers, on T.V. and radio—even at Disney World. He acquired his insightful viewpoints not only from theory but from the practice of creating museum exhibitions that maintain a sophisticated and intelligent content delivered in popular forums. Among these are the award-winning “A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln” at the Chicago Historical Society and “America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War.”

The author of numerous books, including Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (winner of the Bancroft Prize, Parkman Prize, and Los Angeles Times Book Award) and Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World, met in New York with Museum News editor Leah Arroyo to talk about how museums teach history, the dangers of blockbuster exhibitions, how museums should—and shouldn’t—work with communities, and the role of the scholar in the museum.

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You’ve curated museum shows on history; you’ve been a consultant to museums. Do history museums teach history, or do they do something else?

History museums do teach history, they just teach it in a different way than we do in a classroom or in a scholarly book. If what you mean by teaching is presenting people with new ideas and encouraging them to think about the past, then yes, history museums are and should be teaching history. The key is to make sure that the history they’re teaching is good, up-to-date, modern history.

What do you think museums get right in exhibiting history, and what do they get wrong? What are their principal challenges?

Museums utilize different methods in teaching history than other forms like books and public lectures. That is, they present things with visual impact. When they do it right, museums utilize their mode of presentation and education to its fullest. Exhibits allow visitors to encounter artifacts and documents of the past directly, to see for themselves and get a visceral sense of what life was like.

That doesn’t mean they can’t present complicated ideas also, and they should, and sometimes they do. I think the biggest problem I have seen—and I have worked very happily with institutions like the Chicago Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Smithsonian, and others—is that museums sometimes fear complexity because they’re afraid it will alienate an audience.

They know that their audience is not an academic one; it’s not the same as a scholarly convention or scholarly classroom. But I think they often don’t give enough credit to the audience for being able to tackle complicated ideas, so there is frequently a tendency toward oversimplification.

There are more history museums in the U.S. today than ever. They are, generally speaking, larger, better attended, and better funded. Do you see an effect on our appreciation of history as a result of this growth?

There are more and more people going, but I haven’t seen up-to-date analysis of who is going to museums and what they are expecting and what they are getting out of them. One might perhaps be more skeptical of those figures if one began to wonder about how people are being attracted to history museums. What are they actually seeing?

There is a tendency nowadays to emphasize attendance numbers, and that leads inexorably toward thinking about doing things to draw in the largest number of people—which may not be the best kind of history or the most unusual or perhaps disturbing kind of history.

The most popular show  that the National Museum of American History did a while ago was “First Ladies’ Gowns.” I saw that. It was interesting. But is that really what we ought to be doing, or is it a success merely because a lot of people went to see it?

Obviously people liked seeing first ladies’ gowns, but the large visitorship doesn’t necessarily mean that the museum is teaching history well. I think there is a tendency nowadays in some museums to go for the lowest common denominator in order to boost attendance figures, and that may cut against their ability to present history that is complicated, unusual, and perhaps in some ways disturbing to visitors, in that it may challenge preconceived ideas.

Defenders of blockbusters might say, “If you bring them in, there may be a sort of collateral benefit.”

Yes, maybe some visitors will wander off from the first ladies’ gowns to take a look the exhibit on Japanese internment [“A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the United States Constitution”], which was wonderful. But I don’t know how many people wandered off that way.

I’m not trying to be a prude, saying “Oh, no, no, you can’t enjoy yourself in a museum. Our job is to make people be so serious that they’re bored.” No, not at all. Nevertheless, the subject matter in museum exhibitions makes you wonder sometimes.

How would you evaluate the role that historians play in museums, and in public history generally?

The role of the historian in the museum is complicated, but I think essential, and many museums over the past 10 to 20 years have come to recognize this. It’s about 20 years ago that I was asked to work with the Chicago Historical Society on “A House Divided,” a very successful exhibit on the Civil War era, broadly defined. The show was up for 15 years or so; it was recently taken down to make room for a new American history gallery, but some portions will be incorporated into the new gallery.

The Chicago Historical Society was the first museum to do this on a regular basis, bringing an outside historian in to really be the chief intellectual organizer of the show. Not just to give advice—to bring him in for a day and say, “Well, what do you think we should do?”—but to be the curator.

This was difficult for me because I didn’t have museum experience, but it was a wonderful opportunity. I learned a tremendous amount about how museums can function and do function, and I think it is very valuable for academic historians to work in this realm, to present history in a completely different way.

I teach a lecture course here on the first half of the 19th century, and I spend roughly four weeks of lecturing on the institution of slavery. In the show, I could write a label of 150 words describing slavery and then surround that with images and artifacts. That’s a different mode of communication, obviously, and it forces you to be succinct and clear about what you think is most important. I think that we owe it to visitors to give them the most up-to-date, complex history that we can, and that’s where museums have sometimes fallen down in the past. The history presented has been oversimplified and too bland.

There’s nothing wrong with presenting visitors with the notion that there are differences among historians, that we’re not just giving you the truth with a capital T, that there are many ways of viewing complex historical subjects, and more than one of them can be legitimate. That’s one of the most difficult things for people outside the academic world to understand: that there is more than one legitimate way to view any important issue in history.

When historians are doing a good job working with museums, they are teaching not only about a specific subject but about the study of history itself—what it is to study history, what it is to think about history.

History is not just a collection of facts, obviously. It’s not just a single truth, but an ongoing dialogue about the past, which involves many different people and many different points of view. That’s valuable, if a museum can get that across.

You’ve written about resistance to public discussions of history, such as when African-American workers at the Library of Congress objected to a small exhibition on slavery.

Yes. It was called “Back of the Big House,” an exhibit of photographs of slave living quarters from the pre-Civil War period. Some black employees of the Library of Congress objected to this exhibit, as I understand it, because they felt it presented African Americans in a degrading manner. Presenting African Americans only as slaves, the argument went, reinforced stereotypes of them being slavish.

The Library of Congress did take the show down. I was able to see the exhibition because it was later mounted in the public library in Washington, D.C., where it attracted a very large crowd, mostly of African Americans. They didn’t seem particularly shocked or outraged. They were interested to learn. They looked around. They said, my goodness, this is how slaves lived.

Nobody owns history. Nobody has a monopoly on how history should be presented, and I think we shouldn’t shy away from controversial or even disturbing aspects of our history.

You know, one of the most popular shows the New-York Historical Society put on a few years ago was “Without Sanctuary,” a show of lynching photographs. Those are shocking images to see. But the show attracted a very large crowd of people. Some of them were very upset. Some were horrified. Some were amazed this actually happened in America—not only that the lynchings happened, but they were widely publicized and people would take souvenirs and they would send postcards around with pictures of lynchings. Some aspects of our culture and its history aren’t flattering, but people can take disturbing things if they’re put in a historical context. I don’t see any reason why museums should run away from them.

I’m sure context plays a big role.

Putting something in a museum does mark it as an icon of some kind and elevates its significance. We faced this with our show in Chicago. There was a section about slavery and a section about racist iconography of the era, as examples of some of the things the abolitionists were fighting against. We wanted to give a sense of what a powerful force racism was in American life at that time, and not only in the South, of course.

Some of the images were very offensive racist caricatures. Do you put those in the show or not? We decided to put them in the show in a context. Those aren’t the only images of black people we showed. We also showed black abolitionists. We showed black soldiers. You know, if [a caricature] was the only image of a black person in the show, I would say that’s very bad history. But these were real historical artifacts representing a genuine piece of the culture of that time, an important piece of the visual representation of racism.

Some visitors objected to it; some visitors didn’t. Some visitors said, thank God you’re finally showing the truth. Museums can’t expect to please every person.

Do graduate students and young scholars see public history as part of their work?

Unfortunately there is still a divide between public history and academic history, although it’s less pronounced than it was. Many well-known scholars have taken part in public history, not only myself but James Horton, David Blight, Ira Berlin, Gary Nash. I could name many others who have worked on museum exhibits, and this has not only helped the exhibits, but it helped elevate the status of public history within the university.

I consider curating an exhibit to be scholarship; I put it on my vitae. I don’t see why it’s any different from writing a book and presenting history another way. But, yes, there still is a divide, especially in the elite graduate programs like Columbia.

Most of the graduate students here intend to get jobs teaching. They don’t come to graduate school with the ambition of getting a job in public history. Some of them end up doing that, and I’m always telling them that’s fine. You shouldn’t feel like it’s a second-class thing.

Some universities do have a track within the history department for people who want to go into public history. We don’t have that at Columbia; maybe we should.

Many museums strive to be more active partners in their communities, but this may carry its own set of problems. How do museums determine whose story to tell?  How do they seek objectivity and handle community pressure?

Those are great questions. I faced them in another museum I’ve been involved with, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn., a very fine regional museum. It’s located in a city that’s gone through wrenching social changes due to deindustrialization in the last generation or two. Waterbury used to be a major center of brass manufacturing. That’s all gone. The population has changed enormously from the old Italian and other immigrants to the new immigrants, people from the Caribbean or Africa or Eastern Europe.

The Mattatuck Museum had an excellent exhibit on the history of Waterbury, from the early rural days through industrialization. But then they realized: the brass industry is history now, too. But that’s not the end of Waterbury. They said, now we’re a different city than we were. How are we going to bring it up to date? They’ve met with scholars to ask, how do we show Waterbury now, as a very different city than it was 50 years ago? And whose story do we tell, and do we tell a story of decline or of change? Is it the collapse of the city, or is the story about how people create different ways of living—one group moves out of a neighborhood and another group moves in? Who do we listen to, exactly? Do you try to relate to these new communities, such as Hispanic people who didn’t live in Waterbury in large numbers until fairly recently?

I commend the museum for trying to confront those complicated questions. There are no easy answers. I’ve seen National Park Service sites also struggling with these issues. Asking for the participation of communities is a desirable thing, but it carries risks. Communities may have a distorted view of their own history, and the job of the museum is to present as good and accurate a history as it can, a scholarly history presented in a popular way, and to show the good and the bad, so to speak. Sometimes local communities don’t want all that, or they rely on oral history reminiscences that may or may not be accurate.

You have to allow people their say without turning over the content of the museum to people who are not scholars or historians. You can do that in many ways: through forums, oral history, public discussions; by presenting different views of the same thing. But you cannot cede control of the museum to people who are not museum professionals or scholars.

As regards communities and museums, what are the lessons of the controversy over building a Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site?

Let me start by telling one of my favorite, though probably apocryphal, stories about history. When Chou En-lai, the Chinese premier [1949-1974], was asked what was the impact of the French Revolution on history, he said, “It’s too soon to tell.”

It’s too soon to do anything at the World Trade Center site. I think that’s the lesson. So many political and personal wounds are still open. There are so many groups demanding a say. There are so many refusals to admit the possibility of difference of opinion that it just became impossible to do anything, and there is a total abdication of political leadership about this. The governor has succumbed to those demanding that the only presentation at the 9/11 site must be something that merely glorifies America. I have no objection to glorifying America, but we ought to tell the truth about America too, and it’s not entirely a glorious story.  In the end, it was ordered that nothing in the Freedom Center could criticize America. 

How can you have a Freedom Center without freedom? I mean, that’s a bizarre thing, a Freedom Center with no freedom of expression. It died because nobody could figure out how to create a presentation that satisfied the super-patriotic demands of some people and the demands for historical clarity of others, so probably it just wasn’t the right place for something at this time. We have a Holocaust museum in Washington, D.C., that offers a very successful and complicated presentation. It doesn’t justify the Holocaust, obviously, but it doesn’t just say, look, we’re good and they’re evil, and that’s the end of the story.

I would have liked to see at this Freedom Museum a presentation about freedom in the world, both good and bad—I mean, where freedom is enjoyed and where freedom isn’t enjoyed, and the complications of freedom and the fact that even in our own country freedom is not secured in some ways or enjoyed equally by everybody.

You can’t present a historical exhibit when political parameters are being set from outside. It became impossible to have any intellectually serious result with the Freedom Center.

What museum experiences stick out most in your mind, for better or worse?

I have learned a tremendous amount from working in museums. What sticks out in my mind is the process of collaboration itself.

When I’m writing a book, I can say anything I please. People may not want to read it, but it’s my book. A museum exhibit is by definition a collaborative venture. I’m not talking about censorship or anything like that. I’m saying there are designers. There are curators. There are collection people. There are development people. There are staff who need to get people in the door, attract an audience. You are always collaborating. Ideas are always coming back and forth. Sometimes that leads to tension, debate, argument, and sometimes it leads to tremendously creative interchanges.

And of course, you have to realize that you’re not going to get everything you want. There are other people with strong opinions, and it’s always going to be a give and take. You have to say, “I know what I think is important, and as the historian I’m going to insist on that,” but I’m not going to insist on every single thing that I think ought to be done, and I have to take seriously the views of other people. Not necessarily about the history, but about how to exhibit objects and how to draw an audience in and how to decide what’s important and many, many other things of importance to the exhibit.

Have you gotten much feedback directly from museum audience members?

Almost every exhibit I’m involved in has some mechanism for feedback, whether it’s a visitors’ book at the end for people’s responses—and I always try to look at those—or nowadays at the New-York Historical Society, at the “Slavery in New York” exhibit, they’re actually videotaping visitors and putting their reactions right into the exhibit.

I get e-mails out of the blue from people who have been to exhibits of mine, not from people I know. Sometimes their messages are positive; sometimes, less frequently, they’re negative, but the most common reaction I get, and the one that I enjoy the most, is simply, “I never knew that. I never knew that, Professor.” That’s what we call education.

I particularly recall the responses I received to the traveling exhibit I did on Reconstruction, which opened at the Virginia Historical Society in 1996 and then traveled to a number of venues. As you well know, the Reconstruction era is still rather controversial, often very misunderstood—there are widespread mythologies about corrupt carpetbaggers and ignorant former slaves and things like that. We presented a very different view of Reconstruction, and a few people said, “Oh, God, this isn’t what my schoolteachers taught me 50 years ago.” Many of the responses were along these lines: “I never knew all that happened in Reconstruction. I never knew there was all this progress as well as problems. I never knew there were all these black people in public office, and many of them doing perfectly good jobs. I never knew about all these struggles over land.” That’s the kind of reaction you want to get—not “I agree with everything you said,” but “It made me think about history in a different way.”

What kind of future do you see for museums in the U.S., and for history museums specifically?

How does a museum appeal to young people or others who have grown up in an age of video games, of computer-generated King Kongs? How do you compete with fantasy all over the place, with Narnia, Lord of the Rings, War of the Worlds? We can’t create things in a museum that are going to be as fantastic as that.

On the other hand, some museums are Internet-savvy. Two of the exhibits I did are now online: “America’s Reconstruction” and “A House Divided” were digitized thanks to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. They no longer exist in the real world, but they could exist forever digitally so anyone can see them.

How do museums compete? There is a cult in museums now around visitor interactive things, computer screens and activities. Interactives can be interesting, but they take you away from the actual artifacts. Maybe the artifacts are boring to people now when they’re used to constant sensory stimulation, so museums face a challenge in that way.

They also face a challenge of making themselves up to date. The study of American history has undergone enormous changes over the last generation or two. Some museums have kept up with this, and some haven’t. One wants to see all museums presenting history that is current and up to date and reflects the best historical thinking of today rather than of some previous generation.