By Kristen Thompson
My internship with Historic New England has been a valuable learning experience. It has opened my eyes to some of the real work that goes on in the public history field, and all of the moving parts that go along with it. Historic New England oversees many historic house museums throughout the region and those houses, obviously, come with a plethora of objects that are not always savory to the modern mind or eye. Thankfully, and in a practice I think should be emulated by other institutions – historic or not -when dealing with some of the more uncomfortable aspects of the past, Historic New England does not attempt to hide away the less than appealing parts of their collection; instead they seek to contextualize them and acknowledge that, while the problematic themes of the pieces are not and have never been okay, they existed and here is the reason that it is at this particular site. This has been the focus area of my internship.
Under the project that Historic New England calls “Sensitive Objects Research,” the interns have been tasked with researching some of the more, well, sensitive objects that are a part of Historic New England’s collection. I have spent the majority of my internship researching a figurine that can be found at Roseland Cottage in Woodstock, Connecticut. The figurine, created sometime between 1875 and 1890, was previously described as a “Turk or Indian rifleman,” (Historic New England) a rather vague description that does little to actually contextualize the piece. Upon first glance, the figurine, which stands only eighteen inches high, is a bit jarring to look at and is a good example of the problematic art that was often produced during the Orientalist movement, an academic and artistic field of study that portrayed an exoticized image of Eastern cultures. The figurine is nearly a caricature of a Muslim man, wearing a turban on his head and a lion’s skin on his hip.
In my research, I have been able to ascertain that the figurine is most likely of Islamic origin, but whether it is from the Middle East or the Moorish Iberian Peninsula is uncertain. Either way, the experience I have gained in researching these objects that have very little pre-existing context or information has been invaluable. It has forced me to be a bit more creative in my research process, learning to look at things in different ways and to come at them from different angles in order to find relevant information on a piece that is a bit of a mystery. For example, leaning more into the history of the Orientalism movement and the history of the silk trade has been extremely helpful in this case. The Orientalist movement had turned the East into a spectacle for Western consumption, and has been criticized as being a more accurate portrayal of what the East was made to be in the eyes of the Western world than what it actually was. Orientalism was rooted in the offensive ideology that Eastern civilizations were stuck in the past and could not represent themselves, and that they needed the more advanced Western world to guide them into the future. In Edward Said’s critique of the field in his 1978 book Orientalism, he sums up what he felt the attitude of many so-called “orientalists” to be: “They are a subject race, dominated by a race that knows them and what is good for them better than they could possibly know themselves” (Said, 1978). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, Orientalism began to shift from a more niche, male dominated field to a commodity in the American market, particulary among upperclass white women (Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism, Mari Yoshihara, 2002). Objects such as the figurine I have been researching would have been seen as a fashionable status symbol, and while individual collectors might have had an appreciation for Asian inspired styles, there was generally little respect for the actual cultures that inspired it.
Photographer David Bohl
Historic New England’s efforts in contextualization are commendable, and should serve as an example for other institutions that may have to reckon with sensitive historic material. It can be all too tempting to shy away from the grittier parts of the past in favor of highlighting the more palatable, but that paints only half a picture and it is our duty as historians to present our audience with all of the information that we can, otherwise we risk a grave misunderstanding.
As Timothy Baumann, Andrew Hurley, Valerie Altizer, and Victoria Love say in their 2011 article “Interpreting Uncomfortable History at the Scott Joplin House State Historic Site in St. Louis, Missouri” in The Public Historian, “Uplifting versions of history that refuse to acknowledge shameful, tragic, or repulsive events, they [scholars] argue, not only violate professional standards of objectivity but ultimately damage the credibility of the institutions that deliver history to the public” (Baumann, Hurley, Alitzer, and Love, 2011).
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