What's History?: Museums

As part of my recent research travels, I visited the National Museum of American History. I was fortunate enough to receive a Travel Research in Equity Collections (TREC) award, so I was able to meet with one of the historians of disability I most admire, curator in the museum's Division of Medicine and Science, Dr. Katherine Ott. I first became interested in disability history in a course which used Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, the volume she edited along with David Serlin and Stephen Mihm. Her contribution to that volume fascinated me at the time; her recent theoretical work on the special role of material culture in disability history has informed my PhD scholarship.

In preparation for meeting up with her, however, I revisited Making Disability Public the interview she gave to David Serlin for the Radical History Review. 2005 Smithsonian exhibit she curated, Whatever Happened to Polio? as well as the 2000 exhibit for the anniversary of the ADA about the disability rights movement. In the interview, Ott and Serlin discuss what it means to do public history, and Ott's approach to both exhibits supplies one possibility: to center the public, not medical establishments or curatorial voice, in the creation of an exhibit. This is accomplished through talking to affected people (in the case of these exhibits, people with disabilities and polio survivors) through surveys, interviews, or conversations, and "serving as the medium for [these] stories" (200), as well as letting the objects available guide the direction of the exhibit (205).

The piece is delightful for a variety of reasons: it is conversational and easy to read, yet both participants' contributions are deeply thoughtful; there are discussions of academic versus public history which not only value both spaces but offer insightful insights into the workings of each space and the considerations necessary to inhabiting both spaces. There are obvious points of interest to professional historians of all types. There are also elements which are clearly valuable to a class on disability history or disability studies. But on this reading I began thinking for the first time of how much I'd like to share the insights of this piece with the students I most frequently teach, those taking a more general, lower level introductory course. 

Many students come into history classes thinking that they are there to learn facts and straightforward narratives about history, when most people who teach college-level history will tell you that a large part of their goal is to teach broad skills-- the practices of interpretation, research, writing, and critical thinking that are applicable to many arenas outside the discipline. Many courses end up being a combination of these two attributes. But there's also a third element which often is considered only relevant to those who intend to pursue the major. This is the idea of specifically historical practice, the way in which history is done and made. I have a real passion for incorporating these ideas into courses which are not for majors, which are relatively low level, and which are ostensibly about a variety of other topics.

To me, it's critical for students who never dreamed of studying history professionally to know how history is made-- to learn how its made is to have some conception of how to judge the quality of the history that someone may be trying to teach you. Though some of them wish to learn discrete facts which they can use to build a knowledge base, some of them are less excited to learn that the process of finding and building these facts into a transmittable narrative is both subjective and laborious. Public history, especially in the form of museum exhibits, is a critical way in which history is made and transmitted-- yet it is so rarely interrogated in general history classes.

Not all aspects of this interview will be of interest to most students I teach. A discussion of the many problematics of the concept of "public(s)" (199) may not play a leading role in a discussion I might have of this piece with my class. However, the detailed discussion of the way museum exhibits are built and the idea that there are multiple goals one can have with an exhibit is something that I think would play a valuable role in classroom discussion.

As an assignment to go along with this article, I would encourage students to head to a local museum and visit an exhibit. They should try to figure out how the artifacts available informed the creation of the narrative, and whether it is "object driven" or "narrative driven" (209).

Other potential questions include:

Audience interviews about the polio exhibit suggested that age informed people's interest in a polio exhibit (207). What do you think a breakdown by age of the exhibit you viewed might look like?

Take a survey of interest in the topic of the exhibit from at least five people from two of the following groups:

Under 25s

25-30

30-35

35-40

40-45

Over 50

What role does emotion play in the exhibit you viewed?

Did your exhibit have a comment station? What would your comments be?

How would you redesign the exhibit, and to what end?

Anything else you'd like a discussion about museums to focus on at this level? Questions about the piece? Let me know in comments or email! 

Related Links:

A digital version of the polio exhibit. 

For Illinois affiliated folks, logging in at this link should lead you to Serlin, David. 2006. "Making Disability Public: An Interview with Katherine Ott." Radical History Review no. 94: 197-211. Academic Search Ultimate, EBSCOhost (accessed October 29, 2017).