Turning nature into history: The professionalization of public history in the National Park Service during the 1930s

Meringolo, Denise D The George Washington University 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation analyzes the formation of the National Park Service History Division in order to track the professionalization of public history. Debates about the relationship of public historical production to academic professional standards have dominated the field's discourse for the past 25 years. As a result, public historians both inside and outside the academy have been reluctant to theorize the ways in which their profession is distinct from that of their academic peers. Yet, a close reading of the early days of Park Service history demonstrates the persistence of particular themes and concerns in the larger field of public history. Over the following four chapters, this dissertation theorizes and historicizes persistent sources of conflict in the field of public history; namely, the role of public history in mediating vernacular and official authority, the tensions that emerge between public historians and their audiences, and the insecurity that marks relationships between public historians and their academic peers. Historical professionalism has roots in the Progressive Era. As a result, historically specific trends in commemoration, preservation and collection established particular relationships among public historians, academics, audience constituencies and agents of official culture and government authority. This configuration set the stage for the creation of a unique habitus---or work culture---that we now recognize as public history. Public history's transformation from avocation to profession took place in the years between World War I and World War II. During these decades, several landholding institutions inside the federal government engaged in a series of power struggles concerning the governance of land and the ownership of artifacts. One of these power struggles, between the Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution, contributed to the creation of a new way of assigning meaning to artifacts. It also reconfigured the relationships among science, history, landscapes and meaning, establishing intellectual parameters for public history. In addition, during these decades, the maturation of mass culture and the ascendance of middle class professionalism created some anxiety about the power of official authority. Audience desires, far from simply outside sources of controversy, became embedded inside the discourse that is public history. Further, public history might have been better served by imagining academics as simply another audience constituency. However, by situating them as the guardians of standards and the gatekeepers of historical meaning, early public historians structured their own authority as inherently insecure.

History and human experience in the art of David Wilkie, 1806--1835 (Scotland)

McCurdy, Melinda Ruth University of California, Santa Barbara 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores the relationship between written and painted history in early nineteenth-century Britain as it was carefully negotiated in the work of Scottish-born artist David Wilkie. In eighteenth-century Britain, historical writing was closely allied with the discipline of rhetoric, designed to persuade its young aristocratic audience to model themselves on the great heroes it described. By the 1824s, however, history had come to be more concerned with social aspects of everyday life that contribute to a broader understanding of a culture and its institutions than with the deeds of heroes and statesmen. This period's re-evaluation of the relationship between individuals and the past also forced a change in written history's visual counterpart, whose sophisticated references to past art geared toward an elite audience had now become obsolete. The major thesis of this dissertation is that the visual language required by new forms of written history evolved out of the work of genre painters, and that it was Wilkie, mainly known as a genre painter, who first successfully used it to express the elevated themes of history painting. I suggest that genre painters, with their focus on everyday life, were better equipped to express the new history than artists working within the stylistic confines of traditional history painting. Through an analysis of three of Wilkie's paintings, contemporary accounts of their reception, and comparisons between his works and those of two of his contemporaries, Benjamin Robert Haydon and Richard Parkes Bonington, I consider how artists struggled to adapt to changing views of history in this period. This study also places Wilkie's art within the contemporary political context in which it was made, when war with France, economic depression, widespread agitation for political reform, and the rise to power of the middle class, challenged Britons' notions of what history meant, and to whom it spoke. A conservative artist with elite patrons, Wilkie found his hybrid works particularly vulnerable to shifting interpretations centered on the struggle between individual enfranchisement and the rights of the established order.

Visual culture in eighteenth-century natural history. Botanical illustrations and expeditions in the Spanish Atlantic

Bleichmar, Daniela Princeton University 2005 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation investigates the visual culture of natural history in the eighteenth century and its connection to European colonialism. In the second half of the century, Spain sponsored almost thirty scientific expeditions to its colonies, eight of which focused specifically on natural history. The almost 10,000 images produced by the Spanish expeditions, far from being mere ornamental byproducts of natural history investigation, were central to the project. Expeditions constituted visualization projects that enabled naturalists to identify, translate, transport, and appropriate nature. Natural history, I argue, was an overwhelmingly visual discipline whose notion of sight went beyond the physiological act of seeing to involve acts of expert viewing that required training and specialized practices of observation and representation---not sight, but insight. This visual culture of science was very much a material one linking vision to images, drawn or engraved, and to specimens in collections. Furthermore, the act of viewing nature was inextricably linked to colonialism, as visual culture allowed Europeans to identify, translate, transport, and appropriate foreign natures. The visual culture of nature can not be divorced from its colonial exploitation. More than mere representations, images acted as visual avatars replacing objects that did not survive travel and would otherwise remain unseen and unknown by Europeans. Images defined nature as a series of transportable objects whose identity and importance was divorced from the environment where they grew or the culture of its inhabitants. Pictures were used to reject the local as contingent, subjective, and translatable, favoring instead the dislocated global as objective, truthful, and permanent. In the Spanish Americas, however, hybrid scientific and artistic traditions emerged, presenting alternatives that contested and reappropriated nature from this European uniforming vision. The dissertation discusses, among other topics, the status and uses of images in eighteenth-century natural history; the importance of visual material in training the expert eyes and skilled hands of naturalists, artists, and collectors; the role of print culture in establishing a common vocabulary of scientific illustration, and the ways in which colonial naturalists and artists appropriated and transformed European models, producing hybrid, local representations.

The battles of Germantown: Public history and preservation in America's most historic neighborhood during the twentieth century

Young, David W The Ohio State University 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines how public history and historic preservation have changed during the twentieth century by examining the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1683, Germantown is one of America's most historic neighborhoods, with resonant landmarks related to the nation's political, military, industrial, and cultural history. Efforts to preserve the historic sites of the neighborhood have resulted in the presence of fourteen historic sites and house museums, including sites owned by the National Park Service, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the City of Philadelphia. Germantown is also a neighborhood where many of the ills that came to beset many American cities in the twentieth century are easy to spot. The 2000 census showed that one quarter of its citizens live at or below the poverty line. Germantown High School recently made national headlines when students there attacked a popular teacher, causing severe injuries. Many businesses and landmark buildings now stand shuttered in community that no longer can draw on the manufacturing or retail economy it once did. Germantown's twentieth century has seen remarkably creative approaches to contemporary problems using historic preservation at their core. What was tried, together with what succeeded and failed, help to explain how urban planning, heritage tourism, architectural preservation and museum studies have evolved in the country overall. Each decade offered examples of attempted solutions and success stories, frequently setting standards for historic preservation nationally. In Germantown's case, history was identified early and throughout the century as a useful tool to build into an economic engine for the neighborhood. And yet, history has not proved to be as beneficial to the neighborhood as had been hoped. Why did history not provide the development spark that people thought it would?. The answer to this question is beset with many ironies to be explored in this study. Germantown's greatest feature, its history, often got in the way. More specifically, the practice of history, locally and more generally, did not always help Germantown's expressed goal to make its history more effective in the economic development of the neighborhood. Beset with many competing groups and unable to overcome entrenched traditions, Germantown's primary selling point, its historic assets, often paradoxically served as a barrier to achieving those goals. Institutional, systemic, and cultural factors have all played in to how Germantown has not been able to take full advantage of its history for the benefit of the entire community. Germantown offers a way to study life in a twentieth century city through the ways that people think about history. Germantown history shows how thinking about preservation went from a notion of attempting to seal off the past in reverent isolation to one of the responsible management of change. The former required authority, the latter requires respect for multiple narratives. The process required the evolution, over many years and many contested issues, of the historical profession as whole.

Importing Italy: Representations of Italian history in Britain, 1790--1830 (Edward Gibbon, William Roscoe, Lord Byron, J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, Felicia Hemans)

Insalaco, Danielle Janiene New York University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British writers found inspiration in tales from Italian history. Byron, for instance, is well-known for adapting Italian history in his poems and plays. Yet the histories of Italy published in English during the period have been all but ignored by students of literature, despite the current interest in cultural history. For many British writers, Italy was viewed less as cultural “other” than as “likeness,” an instructive mirroring of Britain itself. Italy's history was constructed by these writers sometimes as cautionary tale, sometimes as exemplar of libertarian values that Britain might profitably emulate. This “identity paradigm” is embedded in their historical prose, whose narratives were frequently mined by later poets. “Narrative” is an apt term for these histories, for in them the historical format is infused with literary elements that are ideological in implication. In <italic>Antiquities of the House of Brunswick</italic> Edward Gibbon emphasizes both the literary nature of history and its ideological ground. In tracing the Italian ancestry of the current kings of Great Britain, he posits the cultural growth of medieval and renaissance Italy as a metaphor for a comparable growth in Britain. In his <italic>Life of Lorenzo de' Medici </italic> William Roscoe narrates the grandeur of the Italian past, finding in renaissance Florence worthy models of human behavior. The voluminous <italic> Histoire des républiques italiennes du moyen âge</italic> of J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi, an historical “epic” published in French and English, is a call to emulate the independence of the medieval Italian republics through a revolution in modern Italy. In turn, the poetry of Lord Byron and Felicia Hemans utilizes episodes from these histories to advocate an internationalist, republican perspective. In the hands of these writers, Italian history <italic>qua</italic> literature becomes an ideological vehicle for presenting a wide range of views on contemporary British and European sociopolitical events. The dual trends of history as literary narrative and history as ideological and cultural statement are brought together within one discourse, each document of which becomes a project of the imagination whereby the past can be explained and the future considered.

North Star state history: Minnesota historiography in the twentieth century (Theodore Blegen, William Watts Folwell)

Abram, Dominic Francis Indiana University 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation examines the role of written history as a part of a model of studying the interactions of historians and the public. The model uses three elements of historical presentation—written, visual, and participatory—to analyze how historians interpret and present history and how the public perceives the past. History books, both textbooks for elementary and secondary students and general histories written for the general public, provide a foundation for the public's understanding of history. This foundation forms the basis for the public's perception of the past. Examining the written elements of state history provides a manageable and useful level of analysis in order to describe the important role that written history plays in the model. Analyzing Minnesota's historical writing, three different eras of historiography are identified, the Folwell Era, the Blegen Era, and the Modern Era. The first two eras are named for the preeminent historians of their periods. The third era does not have one predominant historian, but does show how the presentation of Minnesota history incorporated modern historiographical trends. Comparisons of a common set of historical subjects—including Indian-white relations, the Dakota Conflict of 1862, pioneer ethnography, as well as other selected topics—formed the core of the study. By examining how historians interpreted and presented these topics and by relating those interpretations to the predominant national historiographical school of thought during each era, the work of Minnesota's historians can be used to demonstrate what historical information the public has been taught. The examination finds that historians presented Minnesota's history within a context of stressing the importance of studying state history to understand the past. These results are the first step in using the model of historical understanding proposed in this dissertation.

Symbols of authority: Religion, Islamic legitimacy, and historiography of the sultans of Delhi

Auer, Blain Howard Harvard University 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores the intersections between religion, Islamic legitimacy, and historiography. It investigates the ways Muslim historians, living in India during a dynamic and conflictual age, attempted to narrate the religious and ethical values of Muslim courts and their sovereigns through the creative process of history writing. The period I explore spans the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries, a time when the history of Muslim communities takes a dramatic turn, ushering in an age of wide-ranging social change. Significantly, it marks the first sustained political, military, and cultural presence of Turko-Persian speaking Muslims in North India. With the establishment of Muslim courts at Delhi, the sultans who ruled from there initiated a process of empire building that eventually spread across the entirety of the Indian subcontinent. While their political expansions were achieved through diplomacy, forged alliances, and the sheer force of military arms, those gains were sustained by the careful projection of Islamic religious symbols that legitimated their rule. To propagate an ideology of imperialism the sultans of Delhi patronized history writing. Historians of the Delhi Sultanate utilized historiography as a mode of representation to legitimate the conquests of their patrons and demonstrate their affinity, equality, and superiority to the exemplary religious figures of Islamic history. To accomplish this, historians aligned the history of the sultans of Delhi with an idealized and universal history of Islam. In the process, Islam was interpreted and projected as a religion of empire with the mandate of divine guidance. The primary question that motivates this study is how did historians articulate paradigmatic notions of religious and political authority in India through historiography? By looking at historiography as a mode of representation this study seeks new avenues for the interpretation of Islamic history writing. It approaches history writing as historical consciousness shaped by religious and literary imaginations and offers new perspectives on conceptions of political authority exemplified by pre-Islamic prophets, Muhammad, the early caliphs, the friends of God, and sultans. By doing so it reveals the processes by which ideologies of Islamic authority were reinvented and reinterpreted in the context of India. This work proposes to be the first monograph that applies readings of Qur`anic exegesis, h&dotbelow;adith, stories of the prophets, sacred biography, and legal texts to historiography of the Delhi Sultanate for a fuller and more complex understanding of the forms of religious representation. By highlighting the Islamic ideals of religious and political authority, this work furthers scholarship in a multidisciplinary way, in the fields of religion, history, and Islamic studies.

He polis gar dustokei: The question of Alcibiades in Aristophanes' "Frogs" and Thucydides' History (Greece)

Warren, Brian Matthew The Johns Hopkins University 2003 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation investigates the controversies that surround Alcibiades as presented in Aristophanes' <italic>Frogs</italic> and Thucydides' History. In Chapter 1, I use Aristophanes' <italic>Frogs</italic> to illustrate the way in which the question of Alcibiades was a real and immediate historical question for the Athenians. It also introduces two of the basic themes of the controversies that surround Alcibiades also in Thucydides' History: the problematic relation between public and private interest, and the tensions in the relationship between the powerful individual and the city. In Chapter 2, I use Aristotle's <italic>Poetics 9</italic> to begin developing a reading of Thucydides' History which sees Alcibiades as a crucial figure. In Chapter 3, I examine the four passages that pertain to Alcibiades in Thucydides' History which can be classified as narrator interventions. In these passages, Thucydides' evaluation of Alcibiades and his role in Athens' defeat take a very complicated, often “double-edged” form. Furthermore, these passages show that the same issues that emerge in connection with Alcibiades in the <italic>Frogs</italic>—the problematic relation between public and private interest, and the tensions in the relationship between the powerful individual and the city—also receive attention from Thucydides. In Chapter 4, I examine the way in which Thucydides has woven Alcibiades into the fabric of his History. In particular, I examine the parallels between Alcibiades' story and the stories of Pausanias and Themistocles as developed in Book 1 of the History. On a larger scale, Thucydides' History, especially at 6.15, develops an analogy between Alcibiades and Athens which speaks to many of the History's most important themes. Especially at 6.15, there begins to emerge a connection between Thucydides' presentation of Alcibiades and his History's elaboration of <italic>to anthropinion</italic>, the principle according to which events in the past have transpired and will transpire in the same or a similar way. In Chapter 5, I consider three readings of Thucydides' Alcibiades in modern scholarship, those of Westlake, Gribble, and Forde. I conclude by offering a perspective on the profound ambivalence and studied ambiguity of Thucydides' presentation of Alcibiades in terms of Aristotle's categories of rhetoric.

Reading, Interpreting, and Teaching African American History: Examining How African American History Influences the Curricular and Pedagogical Decisions of Preservice Teachers

King, LaGarrett Jarriel The University of Texas at Austin 2012 해외박사(DDOD)

African American history and how it is taught in classroom spaces have been a point of contention with activists, historians, and educators for decades. In it current form, African American history narratives often are ambiguous and truncated, leaving students with a disjointed construction about U.S. history. Additionally, the pedagogical decisions made by teachers regarding African American history are sometimes problematic. To fix this problem, critical scholars have surmised that both pre- and in-service teachers need to be more knowledgeable about African American history. This knowledge will help teachers move past simplistic constructions of the past and provide a transformative educational experience. In essence, these scholars believe that teachers cannot teach [African American history] because they do not know it. This study, however, examines what if they do know [African American history], will they teach it? The purpose of this study was to investigate how knowledge influences teachers’ pedagogical decisions. Using the theoretical and conceptual frameworks of cultural memory and knowledge construction, this qualitative case study explores how four preservice teachers interpreted African American history after engaging in a summer reading program and how that knowledge was implemented in their classroom during their student teaching semester. The reader, entitled A Winding River, was a collection of scholarly journal articles, book chapters, and primary and secondary source documents. Data collection measures included three classroom observations, reflective journals, three interviews, and other classroom documents related to the participant’s student teaching experience. Findings indicate that knowledge acquisition is complex and the process to teach is a generative process. Although, knowledge is an important component in teaching, sociocultural factors also influenced the divergent ways African American history was interpreted and taught. The study indicates that the access of African American history is not always a prerequisite in teaching the subject in transformative ways.

Custom and history: Common law thought and the historical imagination in nineteenth century America

Parker, Kunal Madhukar Princeton University 2007 해외박사(DDOD)

History was an obsession of American legal thinkers throughout the nineteenth century. Sharing the historical sensibilities of their non-lawyer contemporaries, American legal thinkers of varying stripe thought of their society as being in history and brought their historical sensibilities to bear upon the law in general and the common law in particular. Viewed in terms of these historical sensibilities, themselves shifting over the course of the nineteenth century, the common law could be seen as contingent, set in context, and subjected to critical analysis. It could be systematized and organized, explained and criticized, parts of it rejected or retained. Yet at the same time, even as they brought varying historical sensibilities to the common law, many nineteenth century American legal thinkers nevertheless retained an affiliation to the special non-historical temporality of "immemoriality" associated with the common law in its claim to represent the "custom" of the community. "Immemoriality" was a special time given by the common law to itself: a time that came from a place outside history and that was not reducible to it. According to the logic of "immemoriality," the common law was both thoroughly temporal and utterly resistant to being pinned down in historical time. It embodied the wisdom of multiple generations. It began but could not be seen to have begun; it changed but could not be caught in the act of changing. It blurred distinctions among past, present and future. In focusing on nineteenth century American legal thinkers' incessant shuttling between the times of history and the time of custom, the dissertation draws attention to a rich and varied conversation, itself historically sedimented and theoretical, about the relationship between history and law. This conversation stretches from the late eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, and includes a range of legal and non-legal thinkers, from James Kent to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., from Edmund Burke to Herbert Spencer. It continues in our own day. In its focus on the intertwining of historical and legal thought, the dissertation contributes to American intellectual history, the history of American legal thought, and the philosophy of history.