The Queerest House in Cambridge

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-69
Author(s):  
Hilary Iris Lowe

One of the great challenges for public historians in LGBTQ history is finding and developing interpretation of the history of sexuality for public audiences at current historic sites. This article answers this challenge by repositioning historic house museums as sites of some of the most important LGBTQ public history we have, by using the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a case study. At this house museum, we can re-see historical interpretation through a queer lens and take on histories that have been until recently “slandered, ignored, and erased” from our public narratives of the past.1

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 55-86
Author(s):  
Beth A. Uzwiak

Inequality in Bronze is a two-year project (2018–20) reckoning with the history of slavery at Stenton, a plantation house museum in Philadelphia, by commissioning a new memorial to Dinah, a woman enslaved at the property in the mid-1700s. Drawing on data collected throughout the project, this article argues that historic house museums need to move from “community participation” to “community integration” in their efforts to forefront racial equity. This article asks how we can redress centuries of erasure and the absence of Black lives at historic sites. It offers points of consideration for other historic house museums contemplating similar projects as the collective work to address the legacies of American enslavement continues.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 70-93
Author(s):  
Christopher Hommerding

This essay examines the interpretation of the lives and work of two queer men, Robert Neal and Edgar Hellum, at the Pendarvis Historic Site in the small town of Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Using this interpretation as a case study, the essay addresses how public historians might more fully incorporate the history of sexuality into historic site interpretative models. It suggests a number of strategies for helping visitors think critically about the history of sexuality and how our current understandings of sexual identity are not always useful or accurate ways of thinking about queer pasts.


2012 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Elias

Abstract Although historic homes are increasingly popular sites for exploration of the past, such museums seldom, and for practical reasons, are able to give visitors an actual taste of the past. The desire for just such a taste, however, is part of what brings many people to historic homes. An interest in how people lived in the past often begins with questions of what and how they ate. This article explores ways in which what I term the “food ghosts” can be summoned up in historic house museums. Based on research for the New York Tenement Museum, this study explores methods for making food history powerfully present in public history sites.


2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Iris Lowe

Challenges to historic house museums are often mired in the rhetoric of crisis. Toward countering that rhetoric, this essay attempts to draw attention to it and to the complicated history of narrative (and storytelling) in interpretation and the academy. It argues that literary house museums are sites of innovation within the house museum sector with lessons for us all. These lessons include a willingness to leverage “the old, bad history” toward reflective practice and continuity for multigenerational audiences; creating inventive university and school partnerships toward insuring strong community stakeholders; embracing the history of race, gender, and sexuality; and perhaps most importantly, making the most of fiction toward embracing multiple points of view about the past.


2006 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 297-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Litt

Abstract This paper examines how history is interpreted and understood at the Niagara Apothecary, an early 1970s heritage restoration project that is operated as a Victorian-era pharmacy museum in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. It recounts the history of the restoration of this historic site to show the variety of influences and interests that have shaped the history it presents. The apothecary's setting in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a mecca for heritage tourism and consumerism, makes it an interesting case study of how history is communicated to a popular audience. To this end, the nature of the tourist experience at Niagara-on-the-Lake in general and the apothecary in particular are explored. The paper contrasts the professional historian's emphasis on objectivity and context with the material, romantic, specialised and consumer-friendly strategies that are employed in the presentation of the past at the apothecary.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alevtina Naumova

Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alevtina Naumova

Historic house museums allow for reconceptualization of the meaning of tangible objects around us. We establish this new relationship with materiality through our sensory bodies. We conceive of ourselves differently and allow ourselves to move and behave in ways that are not acceptable in the world outside of the museum. We perform our new selves with permission granted by the sense of place that cannot be understood other than through embodied experience–of things, of selves, of the environment that brings it all together. In the coming together of all these elements in the immediate, intimate present, the notion of the past is defined as cultural heritage as mediated through the historic house museum curatorial work and space. I approach historic house museums as socially created and lived kinds of spatiality and sites of social practices and focus on the experiences of people that spend considerable amounts of time there–the museum staff. As a researcher, I have inserted myself within the environment of a historic house museum and attempted to open it to social inquiry through various ways of being within it–observing, writing, interviewing, interacting, sensing, entering it and leaving it. I have carried out a form of phenomenological ethnography, which included a two-year autoethnographic study at the Mackenzie House Museum, in Toronto, Canada, where I volunteered in the position of an interpreter and a historic cook; 24 participant observation visits to other historic house museums in Toronto; and 13 in-depth unstructured interviews with museum staff from various historic house museum sites in the city. The three methods addressed the key conceptual clusters–emplacement, materiality, and performance, which form three analytical chapters of the dissertation. The dissertation positions historic house museums as forms of heterotopia that function as contestations of the accepted spatial, social, and temporal norms within an urban environment. These museums come forth as attempted reconstructions of anthropological places, in the form of domestic sites that assert significance of material manifestations of familial relations and historical heritage. These sites are immersive environments bridge the gap in the current experience of body, time, and space.


2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Carson

Abstract Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobiles and floppy disks?? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound, but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of The Public Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is simply passéé. Instead he offers a ““Plan B”” that takes account of the new way that learners today organize information to make history meaningful.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Chris Urwin ◽  
Quan Hua ◽  
Henry Arifeae

ABSTRACT When European colonists arrived in the late 19th century, large villages dotted the coastline of the Gulf of Papua (southern Papua New Guinea). These central places sustained long-distance exchange and decade-spanning ceremonial cycles. Besides ethnohistoric records, little is known of the villages’ antiquity, spatiality, or development. Here we combine oral traditional and 14C chronological evidence to investigate the spatial history of two ancestral village sites in Orokolo Bay: Popo and Mirimua Mapoe. A Bayesian model composed of 35 14C assays from seven excavations, alongside the oral traditional accounts, demonstrates that people lived at Popo from 765–575 cal BP until 220–40 cal BP, at which time they moved southwards to Mirimua Mapoe. The village of Popo spanned ca. 34 ha and was composed of various estates, each occupied by a different tribe. Through time, the inhabitants of Popo transformed (e.g., expanded, contracted, and shifted) the village to manage social and ceremonial priorities, long-distance exchange opportunities and changing marine environments. Ours is a crucial case study of how oral traditional ways of understanding the past interrelate with the information generated by Bayesian 14C analyses. We conclude by reflecting on the limitations, strengths, and uncertainties inherent to these forms of chronological knowledge.


2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (4) ◽  
pp. 959-985
Author(s):  
Melissa Graboyes ◽  
Zainab Alidina

AbstractFrom nearly any perspective and metric, the effects of malaria on the African continent have been persistent and deep. By focusing on the malady of malaria and the last century of biomedical interventions, Graboyes and Alidina raise critical historical, ethical, and scientific questions related to truth telling, African autonomy, and the obligations of foreign researchers. They provide a condensed history of malaria activities on the continent over the past 120 years, highlighting the overall history of failures to eliminate or control the disease. A case study of the risks of rebound malaria illustrates the practical and moral problems that abound when historical knowledge is ignored. In light of current calls for renewed global eradication efforts, Graboyes and Alidina provide evidence for why historical knowledge must be better integrated into global health epistemic realms.


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