Public History and Place
Led by Ellie Miles and Professor David Gilbert
Project Overview
This project explores the ways that urban history is represented in New York. By comparing three different public history sites, this project encourages you to consider the significance of place in the presentation of city heritage. Visiting the Museum of the City of New York; taking a Soundwalk audio tour and taking a guided tour of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum will illustrate the variety of ways that New York’s history can be presented in the built environment.
This project will consider how New York’s history has been represented in museums, historic houses and guided tours. Each museum/tour uses location in a different way; re-telling the city within the city, the past within the present.
Research Methods
- Preparatory reading on museums, exhibitions and cultural geography
- Visitor research
- Interviews with museum curators and guides
- Participant observation
- Case studies
Key Research Questions
- How doest he significance of place differ for the museums, the historic houses and the audioguide?
- Public History and place and authenticity – In what ways is authenticity linked to place? Does this seem wholly valid?
- Is the notion of ‘place’ more significant in domestic or civic history? Can the idea of the city be succesfully applied to specific buildings?
- What narratives do the sites convey; how does place and time work together? In what ways do the sites illustrate or authenticate a story? Are they equally effective?
- How has New York been represented as a historic city? What was included and what was excluded?
- How can potentially conflicting experiences of a city be interpreted? What are the ways that people have sought to convey this? Are visitors encouraged to question what they see – are the sites prescriptive or is there space for resistance?
Preliminary Reading
Alpers, S. (1990) ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’ in Karp, I. and Lavine, S. (1990) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution and Press
Buntix, G. and Karp, I. (2006) Tactical Museologies in Karp, I. et al (eds) (2006) Museum Frictions Duke University Press
Butler, T. (2005) ‘Linked: a landmark in sound, a public walk of art’. Cultural Geographies 12(1) 2005: 77-88.
McLean, K. (1999) ‘Museum Exhibitions and the Dynamics of Dialogue’ in Daedalus Vol 128, No. 3, America’s Museums (Summer, 1999), pp. 83-107
Page, M. (1999) The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940 University of Chicago Press
Russell-Ciardi, M. (2008) ‘The Museum as a Democracy-Building Institution: Reflections on the Shared Journeys Program at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum’ in The Public Historian vol 20 (1) pp 39-52
Useful Websites
The Museum of the City of New York
Lower East Side Tenement Museum
Soundwalk
For similar things in London try:
The Museum of London
19 Princelet Street
http://www.19princeletstreet.org.uk/
Dockers and Drifters
http://www.memoryscape.org.uk/index.htm
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Provisional Plan
This is what I’m planning for our visit. I’ve included a range of sites, all of which I think have interesting relationships with place and interesting stories about New York. Some seek to outline a fuller scope of New York’s history than others, but they all discuss the city in some way.
On the Monday we’ll begin by looking at the city as home and we’ll be able to explore the way that the lives of individuals can be used to reflect the history of the city they lived in, about how two buildings can speak about a place and its changes. On Tuesday we will look at how two different buildings have influenced the telling of the city. Exploring Ground Zero through different tours, visitor centres and memorials we will be able to look at the violent intersection of individuals, buildings, city symbolism and the ways that these places and events are created. On Wednesday we will broaden our focus out again, to sites which give an overview of the city. Comparing two established collections we will be able to engage with questions about authorisation and authority; we will ask questions about who narrates the city and how they go about the telling of such stories.
Monday 22nd March- New York as home/ the domestic city/ individuals and the city
Tuesday -9-11 and New York/ interpreting specific city sites and events
There’s a whole range of options of things you may wish to research on Tuesday, here are some ideas and suggestions:
the Skyscraper Museum’s World Trade Center Dossier
National 9/11 Memorial Preview Site
Wednesday – Telling the whole story/ museum histories/ questions of controlling urban history
Museum of the City of New York
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More reading suggestions – all available online this time
Another website you might find useful… The American Association of Museums is a professional body for US museum staff, and this page is updated with various articles about contemporary museum issues.
http://www.aam-us.org/pubs/mn/index.cfm
this article discusses museums and their locations
here is an interesting discussion of ways that museums can categorize their visitors, perhaps useful for people who are looking to do tracking in their research
article about memorials discussing ground zero
something about photography in museums
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I just did a quick jstor search on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial… If you’re looking at memorialization at Ground Zero then you might want to take a look at some of these articles…
