By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

This past June, I jumped into the deep end of twentieth-century labor history with my graduate internship at the Lynn Museum. Lynn, Massachusetts has been an industrial town for well over a century, with a radical labor voice exemplified by IUE-CWA Local 201, the labor union at Lynn’s General Electric complex. For my internship, I have been building an exhibit about Local 201—building a research library, listening to the oral histories conducted by UMass Boston’s Labor Resource Center, finding digital and physical assets, building an interpretive plan, designing an exhibit script and panels, and working with community stakeholders. It’s been an amazing ride.

In Spring 2023, I worked again with Professor Becker in a practicum course to design an interpretive plan for a hypothetical reworking of Faneuil Hall’s Great Hall. While our work was purely hypothetical (and therefore unrestricted by timelines and budget), it was an excellent exercise in developing the shape of an exhibit.

Going in, I knew my weak spots for this project were my lack of a labor history background and my inexperience with designing a real, physical exhibit. However, I knew I had great mentors in my internship supervisor Doneeca Thurston, Executive Director of the Lynn Museum, and Professor Nick Juravich, who teaches labor studies and history.

Getting Started

Luckily for me, the LRC and Professor Juravich had done a lot of work on the Local 201 history project before I came on board in June. The LRC has conducted over fifty oral histories of Local 201 members as of this August. Professor Juravich had compiled a number of sources by and about union members, and in my early research I found even more—newspaper articles, academic articles, and videos, to name a few.

In early June, I met with stakeholders from the Local to help determine the main themes of the exhibit. Unlike other projects I’ve worked on, this exhibit is inextricably tied to a vibrant, passionate organization. Knowing their desires for the exhibit was crucial to building an interpretive plan and the exhibit script itself, their feedback has been vital.

Interpretive Plan, Exhibit Script, and Panels

I developed an interpretive plan based on the key themes from that first meeting using the template from Professor Becker’s Spring 2023 practicum, which includes historical themes and topics, the “big idea,” material evidence, audience and goals, and presentation. For a big idea, or overarching interpretive message, I came up with the following:

The IUE Local 201 union at GE Lynn has enabled members to engage in community, work to improve their working conditions, and exert their rights through a democratic structure and militant activism throughout their ninety-year history.

Key words for the exhibit, to carry us through, were militant, democratic, activism, labor, and community. Key themes include working at GE (i.e. what does the work entail); union independence, democracy, and leadership; the Women’s Committee; fighting racism; health and safety; and surviving in the new economy (i.e. neoliberalism, globalism, and supplier migration).

These key themes mapped nicely into a semi-chronological exhibit script, starting with defining key terms (what exactly is a union? good question!), early union history, and working at GE, then moving through the various committees that were founded in the 1970s, and ending with more recent history like NAFTA, supplier migration, and current community engagement. I am very grateful for Professor Juravich’s help with the early panels in particular—thanks to his background in labor history, his introduction to the exhibit is engaging and succinct.

Finding arresting assets (photos, videos, and material objects) was one of the major challenges of this project. While the Local has an enormous archive, it’s mostly paper records, which aren’t best suited to engaging visitors. However, they prepared a selection of materials for my perusal, from which I was able to find some fascinating assets that showcase the communal, activist spirit of Local 201: photos of floats at rallies; shirts for various campaigns and strikes; buttons for elections, events, strikes, campaigns, and more. Beyond that, the Lynn Museum has some gripping photos, and they just discovered a 1920s-era toolbox from a GE employee as well.

Moving onto the physical side of the exhibit, I drafted exhibit panels using Canva (protip: nonprofits get access to Canva’s premium service for free with a simple application). I was grateful here for Beverly Serrell’s Exhibit Labels, which helped me figure out font size and word counts for my panels. Because a large part of our audience—union retirees—are older, I went with larger text to ensure they’d have an easy time reading, not least of all because some of our panels will be over a piano!

Professor Juravich and I both spoke to concerned union members, and together with Doneeca, we drafted a plan for moving forward. I spoke with one stakeholder over the phone, to whom I said, “If you’re not comfortable, we’re not comfortable!”

Getting over the sting of critique and focusing on the important partnership was key to rebuilding accord with our stakeholders. I’m excited to move forward with the project knowing that everyone is more comfortable with it! Our goal is to tell varied stories, not just one, and it’s stakeholder feedback that pushed us further in that multivocal direction. With our new plan, we’ve got key steps for moving forward to highlight Lynners, broaden the types of voices and stories being told, and create an exhibit everyone can be proud of.

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.

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.

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).