Before 1979

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-35
Author(s):  
Ywone Edwards-Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Black History ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Living History Museum

Before the living history museum of Colonial Williamsburg started its concerted interpretation of slavery in 1979, the African American coachmen were already representing the past and implicating black history and slavery in this restored eighteenth-century capital of Virginia. Various records of photographs, postcards, letters, newspaper clippings, oral history accounts, visitor observations, and corporate papers provide a window to understand the social climates of the museum’s period in the 1930s to the 1970s. This body of evidence supports the contention that the coachmen were visible and influenced public history within and outside the museum.

Teaching with the Past at Old Sturbridge Village: An Interview with Alberta Sebolt George

2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Becker ◽  
Alberta Sebolt George
Keyword(s):  
Experiential Learning ◽  
Learning Opportunities ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Past ◽  
Living History Museum ◽  
Old Sturbridge Village

Abstract In this interview, Alberta Sebolt George recounts her experiences as educator and administrator at Old Sturbridge Village (OSV), a living history museum, over a period of almost thirty years. George reflects on OSV's model for teacher/museum collaboration and the experiential learning opportunities offered in the living history context.

Resuscitating the Extinct: The Backbreeding of Historic Animals at U.S. Living History Museums

2003 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 98-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Magelssen
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Museums ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Mad Scientist ◽  
Living History Museums ◽  
Living History Museum

The shift to “living interpretation” in the second half of the 20th century redirected the trajectory of museum work. Living bodies were said to give a more real experience of the past than could historic objects. But what about those pigs, cows, chickens, and sheep found at every major living history museum? Nowadays museums seek rare breeds or they breed contemporary animals to bring them closer to descriptions found in historic documents. What are the ethical and political implications of “backbreeding”? Will museums determine that some backbreeding is legitimate, while others are the stuff of mad-scientist films?

The Convent of Santa Clara, the Elite and Social Change in Eighteenth Century Querétaro

2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN GUNNARSDÓTTIR
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Colonial Mexico ◽  
Social Strategies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social

This article focuses on the changes that occurred within Querétaro's elite from the late Habsburg to the high Bourbon period in colonial Mexico from the perspective of its relationship to the convent of Santa Clara. It explores how creole elite families of landed background with firm roots in the early seventeenth century, tied together through marriage, entrepreneurship and membership in Santa Clara were slowly pushed out of the city's economic and administrative circles by a new Bourbon elite which broke with the social strategies of the past by not sheltering its daughters in the city's most opulent convent.

The Walter Scott Experience

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Goode
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Living History ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Historical Reenactment ◽  
Colonial Williamsburg ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Living History Museum ◽  
Historical Fictions

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.

scholarly journals Thirteen ways of looking at institutional history: a model for digital exhibitions from science archives

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venkat Srinivasan ◽  
TB Dinesh ◽  
Bhanu Prakash ◽  
A Shalini
Keyword(s):  
Biological Sciences ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Public History ◽  
Wallace Stevens ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
The Past ◽  
National Centre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oral History Interviews ◽  
Official Records

Over the past decade, there have been many efforts to streamline the accessibility of archival material on the web. This includes easy display of oral history interviews and archival records, and making their content more amenable to searches. Science archives wrestle with new challenges, of not just putting out the data, but of building spaces where historians, journalists, the scientific community and the general public can see stories emerging from the linking of seemingly disparate records. We offer a design architecture for an online public history exhibit that takes material from existing archives. Such a digital exhibit allows us to explore the middle space between raw archival data and a finished piece of work (like a book or documentary). The National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) digital exhibit is built around thirteen ways to reflect upon and assemble the history of the institution, which is based in Bangalore, India. (A nod to Wallace Stevens' poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”). The exhibit tries to bring to light multiple interpretations of NCBS, weaved by the voices of over 70 story tellers. The material for the exhibit is curated from records collected to build the Centre's archive. The oral history excerpts, along with over 600 photographs, official records, letters, and the occasional lab note, give a glimpse into the Centre's multifaceted history and show connections with the present.

In Living Color: Early “Impressions” of Slavery and the Limits of Living History

2019 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1732-1748
Author(s):  
Drew Swanson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Living History ◽  
Mount Vernon ◽  
Jim Crow Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Historical Sites ◽  
Embodied History

Abstract In the 1970s, American historical sites began to more thoroughly and critically interpret slavery’s history, with a few institutions employing living history as an interpretive form. At sites like Virginia’s Mount Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg, the hope is that these historical “impressions” will engage audiences with a more authentic or credible representation of racial bondage. An earlier wave of living historical representations of slavery suggest the challenges and hazards of embodied history, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a significant number of southern sites employed African American interpreters who claimed to have been born into slavery, often on the very sites where they were currently working. Historical attractions used the “authenticity” and “credibility” of these interpreters to advance the narrative of a happy Old South. Historians have noted these performances as part of the sectional reconciliation of the Jim Crow era, but have rarely interpreted them as public history. Although the contemporary living history of slavery has different—and far better—goals than impressions of a century past, this long history of embodied bondage suggests the implicit dangers of interpreting slavery and race through living people.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document