What Can We Learn from Renegade History-Makers?

Benjamin FileneDirector of Public History, UNC Greensboro

It seems straightforward. Public history reaches publics. Yet museums and historic sites, almost as much as universities and colleges, struggle to make history matter to audiences. They fight to sustain attendance, secure funding, and defend their niches in their communities, and they ask, Why don’t people understand history? Why don’t they share our passion for the past? Why don’t they see our institutions as essential to their lives?

But what if the problem isn’t with “them” but with “us”—not “the public” but the museums? While many museums have worked earnestly to make their institutions more engaging and accessible, most fail to capture the spark that makes history come to life. What does that spark look like and where can we find it?

Some clues may lay just beyond the museums’ doors. People working outside museums and universities, working without professional training and, often, without funding, are creating vibrant histories that fire the enthusiasm of thousands. They are genealogists, heritage tourism developers, community oral historians, and artists. Unmoored by institutional expectations, they are “renegade history-makers.” They respect the past but break all the rules about form and function, logistics and location. History is theirs and it is everyone’s and it is here and it is everywhere; these practitioners are eager to plumb its depths and share their findings. For them, the past is not remote and dead but a living memory that they carry with them, feed and nurture. Freed from the burden of scholarly and professional conventions, they create passionate histories and revel in history as a living, sustaining resource.

What does history look like in the hands of these renegades? Often, these path-breaking projects tap into fundamental, even instinctual human values:

Family: Audiences respond passionately to projects that explore family dynamics over time and show how traditions and legacies are passed from generation to generation. Consider, for instance, the legions of amateur genealogists and the popular appeal of Henry Louis Gates’s African American Lives television series.

Place: Audiences connect to projects that make personal connections to the world around them and show change over time through specific places. Amateur historian Andrew Carroll is in the midst of a 50-state tour to mark forgotten historic sites hidden in of our cities and towns. His “Here Is Where” campaign is sponsored by National Geographic Traveler and the Legacy Project.

Voice: Audiences want to hear ordinary people to tell their own stories in their own words. Think of the phenomenal response to the StoryCorps interview project on National Public Radio.

Drama and Play: Audiences connect to stories that appeal to the senses, build and release dramatic tension, and take a loose, playful approach. The In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre in Minneapolis told the story of an immigrant corridor, Lake Street, through a walking tour that deployed six-foot tall puppets, music, poetry, and theatrical vignettes in storefronts.

Some museums and sites have tapped into the passion these values elicit. I think that Open House: If These Walls Could Talk, an exhibit I developed at the Minnesota Historical Society, succeeded because it inadvertently resonated with the genealogical impulse. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum (LESTM) and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia notably draw on people’s fascination with place. Slavery in New York at the New York Historical Society brought a long-ago topic to life with contemporary voices. The City Museum in St. Louis enthralls visitors with its playful blend of art, history, and funhouse.

These projects, though, are the exceptions more than the rule in museums. Why? I fear we may be our own worst enemy. In the last few decades public history has become professionalized, with increasingly elaborated “best practices” standards, more specialized job titles, and the launching of dozens of professional training programs in universities. Yet the most creative work seems to emerge from outside public history’s professional boundaries. Consider again the list of “renegade” projects cited above. Among the creators of these projects, there is not a historian—academic or public—in the bunch. Many of the exciting museum projects, too, came from beyond the historians’ ranks: Ruth Abram of LESTM drew her passion from her training in social work; Bob and Gail Cassily, the City Museum’s founders, are artists.

The professionalization of public history, while yielding some key scholarship, does not seem to be helping the field make the connections it so desperately wants and needs to make. Perhaps we need to shift our approach in our training programs, placing less stress on best practices, publishing, and peer review and emphasizing instead the skills that our renegade history-makers deploy: listening, facilitating, crossing disciplines, telling stories, playing.

If we let ourselves truly pay attention to the passions of our audiences, we can indeed make history matter and create a vibrant future for our museums and sites. Is there a “renegade” in each of us?