public history – Public History at UMass Boston

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A photograph of the Tavern Wall, A wooden bulletin board covered with posted papers in the basement of Faneuil Hall.

Internship: Designing for the Public

By Maci Mark.

Over the past few months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to work on my internship project with the National Parks of Boston while also serving as a Seasonal Park Ranger. For this project I have been working with the Digital Humanities and Innovation Team to research, write, and design new waysides for the USS Cassin Young. The goal of this project is to provide more context, interpretation, and connection for the ship for people who do not come aboard (due to restricted mobility or other factors like weather). When coming on board this project I was excited to further develop my skills of writing for the public; this is something that I know is important, as it is often a first impression and is the first chance to help people connect to a historic site. But I was surprised by another skill that I worked to cultivate over the past few months as well: designing for the public.

I had experience in writing for the public in other contexts, writing blog posts for UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, in my work in Hist 682 Digital Public History, and as an undergraduate student at Gettysburg College working on digital humanities projects there. But writing for waysides was a new to me task, both in how it provides information, the constraints of limited text, but also because of the important role played by design. If it is not eye catching, easy to read, and in an accessible location people are not going to stop and read. The design is a key aspect of a wayside.

I first got the chance to work with design this summer when working on the Tavern Wall we have at Faneuil Hall. Located in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall, the Tavern Wall is a space where we can anonymously engage with visitors to read their thoughts and reflections. We pose a thematic question, provide background information, and further reading through a QR code if interested. Our Tavern Wall acts similarly to the way that literal tavern walls would have had papers, flyers, and pamphlets posted on them. Literally planks of wood with nails in it for visitors to post their responses to our prompt, it also creates an anonymous forum for engagement.

Tavern Wall prompts and information are generally changed monthly, and when I started my season in May I was given the opportunity to work on the June Tavern Wall and create one for Pride Month. I worked alongside my coworkers to help write the EQ (Essential Question which guided the theme of the wall) and was then given the opportunity to design the wall myself. I strove to create an eye-catching wall that was easy to read and did not overwhelm with information.

A photograph of a poster about Pride Month being laminated. — *The posters are laminated for longevity, one of the final steps in creating the Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

The Pride Month Tavern Wall ended up with two informational posters about the 1977 Gay and Lesbian Town Hall Meetings that occurred there and posted QR codes so that visitors could read further on the town hall meeting if they were interested. It evolved around the EQ: What does Pride Mean to You? Overall, this Wall was a success with 80+ responses over the three weeks it was up, ranging from all age groups, and varying from a picture of a pride parade to a long paragraph about someone’s journey to coming out.

Working on this Tavern Wall both showed me how meaningful anonymous interactions like this can be, and also the importance of design. Ease of engagement also contributed to the success of this Tavern Wall, as it offered multiple forms of engagement, from reading, to answering, to scanning QR code, to even just reading others responses. I included a rainbow at the top of the posters I designed, to help make it eye-catching and topical, but I also included plenty of pictures of the town hall meetings as well. When walking by the space or checking on the wall I often found visitors reading the signs and reading others’ answers. I learned a lot about design from this project, about the importance of accessibility through easy-to-read language as well as easy-to-read text, via contrast in text and background, and images, which tend to draw people in. Images, especially of the site in the past, tend to draw people in as people love to see what places looked like in the past. The NPS has accessibility standards which guided my practice. After working on this I saw good examples of both good and bad accessible writing everywhere.

A poster about Pride Month and Town Halls. — *One of the posters that was posted for the June Pride Month Tavern Wall.*
*Photo credit: Maci Mark.*

I have had opportunities to work on and assist with two more Tavern Walls over the past few months. And I am taking what I learned about design work over the past few months with me as I enter the final stages of writing and designing the new USS Cassin Young waysides. While waysides are very different from the Tavern Wall, they are similar in providing opportunities for anonymous interaction, establishing connections, and most importantly, providing a first impression.

The lessons I learned about designing for the public can be applied in all my future public history work: the importance of font, coordinating colors, making texts accessible to read, images, and that brevity matters. But most importantly what I have learned over the course of the past few months is how important it is to make information easily accessible whether that is through diving into specific stories with Tavern Walls or through waysides, helping to provide a positive first impressions and provide a deeper understanding of the site.

Two women paint portraits in the foreground. In the background, a large portrait of a woman with plants covering her eyes sits on an easel.

Internship: No Such Thing as a Perfect Interview: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 2

July 29, 2022 / Rebecca M Beit-Aharon / 1 Comment

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Hello again!

In my first post, I talked about the origin of the research project I’m working on, including how we identified artist-in-residence programs at historic sites across the country. Of course, knowing programs exist—or existed—isn’t enough.

As you might have guessed, connecting with the sites we identified had mixed results. In many cases, my supervisor Ken Turino had personal connections thanks to his extensive public history career. I was able to connect directly to a few contacts of my own. In Professor Jane Becker’s public history practicum in Spring 2021, I worked closely with Eric Hansen-Plass of Boston National Historical Park, who confirmed that there hadn’t been an artist-in-residence program there for years. Over the summer, a colleague at the Old North Church clued me in to Ryan Ahlwardt’s song “Granary” about Paul Revere. While not a result of an AIR program, the song and music video are still fantastic examples of public history by a contemporary artist.

While some site administrators did make introductions, I mostly reached out to site personnel cold through emails, phone calls, and contact forms. I was impressed by how many responding staff were interested in our work—the ones that weren’t were generally closed or understaffed due to the pandemic. I’m particularly sorry to have missed out on interviewing staff and artists from Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, which was closed along with the rest of the Diné (Navajo) Nation due to the pandemic; I was hoping to learn how a site that prioritized Native artists—and functioned under multiple governing bodies—ran an AIR program.

…

We began the interview process by creating two parallel sets of questions: one for artists-in-residence and another for site administrators, curators, and other historic site staff who worked with AIRs. These questions were broken down roughly in terms of the timeline of creating/participating in an AIR program, starting with questions about the genesis of the program, moving on to selecting an artist and the residency itself, and closing out with final products, evaluations, and lessons learned.

Overall, we interviewed twenty-five site administrators and twenty-two artists from twenty-two sites across the country. These sites ranged in size (both physical and budgetary), but there was a notable concentration of sites in the northeast—a huge bulk of our interview sites are in New England or New York. We’re not sure if this actually reflects reality or results from our northeastern network.

A graph showing the number of full-time staff at interviewed historic sites.

Interviewing artists and site administrators—in other words, growing my network!—was a pleasure. I love talking to people about both art and history, so learning about that in tandem both practically and creatively was a joy.

While there’s no such thing as a perfect interview, certain practices helped them go smoothly. As a stickler for structure, I generally sent the interview questions in advance and followed them closely. While a more conversational style would have been more natural, I didn’t want to miss any questions. No one I spoke to had answers to every question, whether because some weren’t relevant or because institutional knowledge had been lost over time. My notes, at least, were extremely easy to organize and analyze once we hit the data analysis phase.

I spoke to people from all sorts of sites, and I ended up interviewing just about all of the artists and administrators we spoke to connected to the National Park Service. As a government institution, there are more regulations to deal with, but some of the near-universal traits of NPS AIR programs were, frankly, mind-boggling. For example, a much higher percentage of NPS sites treat AIRs as volunteers than other historic sites do (and seem almost surprised that one might pay an AIR). There’s also a clause in very fine print on the NPS volunteer contract that gives the government rights to any artwork/etc created while volunteering.

The AIR-as-volunteer model has serious drawbacks. Unpaid artists must donate not only their work but their valuable time, and only artists with enough disposable income—which leaves out a significant portion of artists, particularly emerging artists and economically disadvantaged artists—can realistically participate. By not paying the artists, these sites reinforce the notion that art is not a proper profession: as one artist pointed out, sites pay professionals to restore woodwork, artwork, and more, and they pay them at professional rates. Not paying (and underpaying) artists devalues their valuable work. Sites lose out too. Minority artists are more likely to be economically disadvantaged. One of the benefits of AIR programs is their ability to bring new eyes to historic sites traditionally interpreted with narrow lenses. Minority voices are vital to expanding the stories told, and AIR programs are one way to reimagine sites, as Historic New England did with the portrait of Cyrus Bruce by Richard Haynes Jr. that I wrote about previously.

New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park’s AIR program provides a notable exception to this apparent “rule.” Here, the program is run by historic-site-AIR superstar Lindsay E. Compton, who created AIR programs at two other NPS sites: Congaree National Park and San Antonio Mission National Historical Site. New Bedford Whaling NHP provides an incredible example of a robust AIR program that pays its artists, taps into their community’s talent, and creates programming and art that speaks to varying and deep themes at the site and in the community. The current (when I interviewed Lindsay) artist-in-residence was doing a project on Polynesian women in whaling. Lindsay did in depth research to support the artist. For a more community-based example, April Jakubec, the AIR from January-March 2020, created four large portraits of women in the community who self-identified as having mental illness/struggles, sparking rich discussions around mental health. As an attached workshop, women were invited to paint a self-portrait and adorn the art with flowers, gems, and more to demonstrate different areas of healing (i.e. flowers over mouth: someone felt silenced).

A ground of women stand and kneel with painted self-portraits, many adorned with painted plants or flowers. — *April Jakubec’s AIR workshop in 2020. Courtesy of New Bedford Whaling National Historic Park.*

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Check back for the final installment, where I’ll talk about data analysis, preparing a panel agenda, and presenting at conferences for NEMA, Connecticut Local History Organization, and AASLH.

Corridor to Revolutions (2021)

September 12, 2021 / Jane S Becker / 0 Comments

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In spring semester 2021, students in “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” (HIST 625) collaborated with the Boston National Historical Park and Revolutionary Spaces to create a web exhibit on the multiple social, political and cultural movements focused on equality led by generations of Bostonians on the same landscape where the events leading to the American Revolution played out in the 1760s and 1770s.

The team brought the methods and skills of public historians to the documentary, material, and visual historical evidence to narrate this history for NPS audiences. This web-based exhibition is installed on a WordPress platform created for and managed by the NPS. Corridor to Revolution connects a curated collection of historic artifacts and documents to social, political and cultural activism performed in the Boston landscape spanning the 18^th to the 20^th centuries.

This web exhibition explores the struggles for social and racial justice, political action, equality, and cultural change. Short articles on featured topics that draw on a wide range of primary source materials offer audiences new ways to consider the “revolutionary landscapes” of Boston, and the city’s role in inspiring social and political change.

Corridor to Revolutions encourages us to reconsider the meanings of “revolution” and how these meanings shape our lives, past, and present. In this project, our project team joined Boston’s 2020 activities in commemorating and interpreting the 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution. The colonial town proved a crucial center to the events of the American Revolution, witnessing meetings, protests, and even violence in the 1760s and 1770s. Today’s Washington Street, leading from Downtown Crossing to Old South Meeting House, the Old State House, and Faneuil Hall at Dock Square, served as the core corridor of Revolutionary Boston. In 2020, another generation of Bostonians engaged in protests, gatherings, and even violent confrontations on the very same ground. The 250^th anniversary of the American Revolution is not simply an occasion to remember what happened 250 years ago, but an opportunity to reflect upon the past 250 years that leads to our current moment. For 250 years, generation after generation of Bostonians came to this same corridor to protest, meet, and fight their own revolution.

Internship: “Ways We Couldn’t Even Imagine”: Artists-in-Residence at Historic Sites, no. 1

April 19, 2021 / Rebecca M Beit-Aharon / 0 Comments

By Rebecca Beit-Aharon

Public History student Rebecca Beit-Aharon offers the first of a series of three blog posts reflecting on her internship experience.

A framed crayon portrait of a faceless Black man in fashionable 18th century clothing standing at an open door. — “Cyrus Bruce” by Richard Haynes Jr. is currently on display at Historic New England’s Eustis Estate in Milton, MA in “Artful Stories: Paintings from Historic New England.” Image courtesy Historic New England.

In Summer 2018, Historic New England’s Governor John Langdon House in Portsmouth, NH and the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail invited artist Richard Haynes Jr. to make an invisible man visible. Haynes served as Langdon’s artist-in-residence to create a portrait of Cyrus Bruce, a formerly enslaved Black man with a “gentlemanly appearance” who worked for Governor Langdon in the late 1700s. Haynes studied written sources, historical artifacts, and the Langdon House itself to bring Bruce to life.¹

Before and after, the Langdon House has brought in other artists-in-residence. The success of Haynes’ residency showed just how powerful contemporary art at historic sites can be: the Langdon House found a community partner in the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail; a previously hidden history has been revealed; and bringing in a Black artist to showcase a Black historic figure increased its modern diversity as well. Ken Turino, Manager of Community Partnerships and Resource Development at Historic New England, was particularly impressed.

AIR programs at historic sites aren’t new or particularly uncommon, but there’s surprisingly little information available about actually running one. Different sites will naturally have different needs and capabilities, but the state of the field so far has generally been that each site ends up reinventing the wheel—with varying degrees of success.

In this display in Mining the Museum, “Metalwork 1793–1880,” Wilson places a silver service with iron slave shackles. The wealth of white Marylanders who owned such silver services depended on the enslavement of Black Africans and African-Americans. Image courtesy Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 157.

I started working with Ken Turino in August 2020 as a Community Engagement Research Intern to research existing and former AIR programs at historic sites with the goal of creating a set of industry best practices. We’ll be presenting our findings at at least one industry conference (AASLH 2021, here we come! Our panel will be on Friday, September 24 from 11am–12:15pm); making our materials—sample contracts, e.g.—available to the public; and (hopefully) submitting our findings for publication.

My background reading began with Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum, an arresting 1992–93 exhibit at the Maryland Historical Society. Mining the Museum swept the industry with its curatorial critique of the museum’s dominant narrative. Rather than maintain the veneer of separation in the regular collection, Wilson juxtaposed artifacts reflecting upper-class white history with their antecedent: artifacts of enslavement.² His exhibit exemplifies what AIR programs can do: bring untold stories to light, incorporate diverse voices into historic sites and museums, and push historic institutions to rethink how they tell history.

A photograph of wooden statues of a cluster of Black children in front of church pews. — “The Children of Whitney” by Woodrow Nash. Courtesy of Whitney Plantation Museum.

Public historians today continue to echo Wilson’s message as we reframe history at sites like the Whitney Plantation and Slave Museum in Edgard, LA. Visitors’ introduction to the plantation and slave museum is through contemporary art in a historic building: sculptor Woodrow Nash’s “The Children of Whitney” grabs your attention when you enter the restored 1870 Antioch Baptist Church, built by emancipated African-Americans in nearby Paulina, LA after the Civil War.³ “The Children of Whitney” represent real Black children at the time of emancipation through the work of a Black artist, giving multiple generations voice.

Of course, not all AIR programs are equally successful: The Cut, a 2015 week-long public excavation at the site of the Warsaw ghetto run by Turkish artist-in-residence Aslı Çavuşoğlu at POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, has had no lasting impact. In a 2020 review, Maria Magdalena Dembek argues that The Cut failed to evoke a shift in perspective among audience members or encourage an evaluation of its host museum’s narrative. POLIN actively leans away from interpreting the Holocaust, instead focusing on the life of Polish Jews—perhaps, as Dembek suggests, to “avoid critical discussion of the cultural mechanisms behind the Holocaust, mainly anti-Semitism in its local, Polish variant.”⁴ Despite the facts that Çavuşoğlu’s work was directly located in and conducted by the community and that he needed POLIN’s support to conduct his project at all, The Cut seems to have existed in a vacuum. Çavuşoğlu’s project was thoughtful and promising, but at the end of the day, a blip is a blip.

“Sheep Is Life” by JoAnne Doshier, 2008 Artist-in-Residence at Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site. Watercolor on paper. Courtesy of NPS.

POLIN in Poland, MHS in Maryland—historic sites run AIR programs around the globe, but as English-speaking Americans, Ken and I have tended to focus on American historic sites. Of the fifty-five relevant programs that we initially identified, fifty-one are in the United States. One major source of AIR programs was the National Park Service, though the interactive map listing their AIR programs is woefully out-of-date. The map lists programs that current employees have never heard of, such as at Boston National Historic Park, and omits many current programs, including Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site in Apache County, AZ, which has run its AIR program on a limited basis since 2007.⁵ And I only looked at the historic sites on the map—never mind the non-historic ones!

The NPS’ unhelpful masterlist is illustrative of two larger issues for AIR programs at historic sites: public awareness and confusion. AIR programs are often under-advertised; sometimes, opportunities are only posted on the site’s website, meaning that only artists aware of an individual site (and AIR programs in general) have a chance of knowing where to look. Additionally, “artist-in-residence” means multiple things. Our research focuses on AIR programs where the artwork and the artistic process is engages with the site of the residency, but there are other similarly-named programs—historically called artist colonies, a term currently being retired throughout the industry—that serve as retreats for artists to create without engaging with the host site. Not only is this difference poorly explained in available literature, but I haven’t found anywhere that treats them as separate types of programs. Even within the NPS, both types of programs are advertised under the same name (artist-in-residence program) with no way to distinguish them beyond looking at each individual site webpage.⁶ The same holds true on the Alliance of Artists Communities website, the biggest online clearing house for AIR programs.⁷ Clarity, communication, and openness are important first steps for historic sites with AIR programs, a finding continuously reinforced in the next phase of research: interviews.

Check back for the next installment, where I’ll talk about interviewing artists and site administrators—and more lessons learned.

Footnotes

1. “Video: How Richard Haynes creates a portrait,” Historic New England, August 14, 2020, https://www.historicnewengland.org/how-richard-haynes-creates-a-portrait/

2. Fred Wilson and Howard Halle, “Mining the Museum,” Grand Street, no. 44 (1993): 151–72, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25007622; and Noralee Frankel, “Review: Mining the Museum by Fred Wilson,” The Public Historian 15, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 105–108, accessed August 5, 2020, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3378741.

3. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Time, Space, and Memory at Whitney Plantation,” Black Perspectives (blog), African American Intellectual History Society, March 14, 2015, https://www.aaihs.org/time-space-and-memory-at-the-whitney-plantation/; “The Children of the Whitney,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-children-of-the-whitney; “The Antioch Baptist Church,” Whitney Plantation, accessed April 12, 2021, https://www.whitneyplantation.org/history/the-big-house-and-the-outbuildings/the-antioch-baptist-church.

4. Maria Magdalena Dembek, “Archaeological fever: situating participatory art in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto,” Holocaust Studies 26, no. 2 (2020): 202, accessed August 5, 2020, https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/10.1080/17504902.2019.1578458.

5. “Be an Artist-in-Residence,” Arts in the Parks, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/arts/air.htm; “Artist in Residence,” Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hutr/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.

6. Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site’s Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program in Danville, CA is a performing arts residency where the works produced do not need to be related to the site; on the other hand, Harpers Ferry National Historic Park’s AIR program in Harpers Ferry, WV requires artists to create work relevant to the site. See “Travis Bogard Artist in Residence Program & Travis Bogard Day-Use Program,” Eugene O’Neill Foundation, accessed April 11, 2021, http://www.eugeneoneill.org/artist-in-residence-program; “Artist in Residence,” Harpers Ferry National Historic Park, National Park Service, accessed April 11, 2021, https://www.nps.gov/hafe/getinvolved/artist-in-residence.htm.

7. “Residencies,” Alliance of Artists Communities, accessed April 11, 2021, https://artistcommunities.org.

1919 Boston Police Strike (2019)

September 12, 2019 / Jane S Becker / 0 Comments

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On September 9, 1919, more than 1,100 City of Boston police officers walked off the job to fight for union recognition and improved working conditions. In the days that followed, they lost their employment and public sympathy, and Boston’s streets erupted in lawlessness and riots. The replacement police workers hired in the wake of the strike received the concessions that the strikers were denied, while the fired police officers were left without jobs and unable to find employment in Boston. The strike was one of the most dramatic incidents in Boston’s history, and had long-lasting local and national political impact, including helping to catapult Calvin Coolidge into the U.S. Presidency.

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston launched the 1919 Boston Police Strike Project to document and preserve the stories of the more than 1,100 police officers who were involved in this highly influential labor strike. By September 9th, 2019–the centennial of the strike–the team will have compiled an online biographical database documenting each of the officers who went out on strike, for the benefit of researchers, historians, students and others, including family members of the strikers.

In Spring 2019, graduate students in HIST 625 “Interpreting History in Public: Approaches to Public History Practice” partnered with UASC to document the participants in the 1919 strike, its impact on the city, and and explore the ways that the Boston Police Strike of 1919 has been remembered by descendants, and the public. Our historical research and interpretation will require us to consider questions such as: How we can understand this local event in the context of broader local and national histories? What are the histories of individual strikers? How did their participation shape their personal and family histories? How did strikers function within the local and police communities? How have the strikers’ descendants remembered the strike? How did organized labor respond to and understand the strike, and how did they publicly acknowledge it? What is the meaning of this event today? To whom does the history of this strike matter?

Public History students contributed to the Boston Police Strike website in multiple formats. They wrote brief biographies of strikers based on material in the striker database and other primary sources; created a digital map of the 1919 strike, using images and text that incorporates various perspectives on key places prior to, during, and just after the strike; collaborated with strike descendants to document family stories and memories of the strike and impact on their family/community; and explored primary sources to understand public commemorations and interpretations of the strike by labor and non-labor perspectives. All of these endeavors found its way onto the Boston Police Strike website and is available for public use.

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