The 20th Century: It's History

Undoubtedly, if you've read other posts here, you're detecting a bias toward history museums. True -- though I'm fascinated by the innerworks, springs, levers, and cogs of all types of museums, I've worked only in history and science/technology museums. Presenting information about the past involves choices: Which parts of the past do we put on exhibit? Whose stories shall we tell?

Not every aspect of history gets presented, and it's interesting to try to understand why. Sometimes it's because of entrenched ideas about what history is. And for many people, museum professionals as well as museumgoers, history is the study of A Long Time Ago. You know, The Olden Days. Yore. Back Then.

The place I'm working now has a pretty progressive strategy for interpreting the past. We've got a major collection of furniture and decorative arts displayed in recreated home interiors which, until the early 90s, covered the 18th and early 19th centuries. But in about 1989, a radical decision was taken: to create some displays of 20th century domestic life.

That made for some interesting reactions, and they haven't slowed down. Just yesterday we were interviewing an intern candidate who expressed some surprise that we curated objects from the nineteen-teens, -forties, and -fifties. In an art museum, recent objects aren't so strange, because the collecting criteria is more about aesthetics than about oldness. But in a history museum, people still expect antiques and lots of 'em. Our curator explained a bit of the philosophy that led us in this direction so many years ago, and then said of our visitors, "They like it. They may not see it as history, exactly, but they like it."

Visitors do approach this stuff differently than they do our exhibits of the more distant past. They're calling on their own stored knowledge and personal experience to understand what they see, rather than calling on received wisdom and academically acquired knowledge about a time they've never experienced, such as the American Revolution. Often we see people taking a walk down nostalgia lane, having what's been evocatively described as a "memory bath." And indeed, it's awfully hard to look at a retro Jello box, a ration book, an alumninum Christmas tree, or a true icebox without thinking of Grandma's place, or your own childhood if you're old enough, or at least your squirrely aunt who never threw anything out.

The challenge is to make it more than nostagia: to get people to percieve it as history. It's a strange moment to stand in an exhibit that displays a scene from within your living memory. Seeing your past under Plexi forces you to realize your place in time, to confront the facts of your age, your mortality, and the cultural shifts that have moved these objects out of the focused frame. When guiding visitors through these exhibits, we often hear half-joking, half-uncomfortable elaborations on the theme "Never thought I'd be old enough to see my stuff in a museum!" But think: to a 70-year old who was ten during World War II, these seem like exhibits of Just Yesterday. It seems ridiculous that we're carefully conserving MadMagazine and TV Guide. Sure things have changed, but can it have been so very long ago? Is Life Now different enough that we have to go to a museum to learn about Life Then? The answer is yes. To today's ten-year-old fifth grader, World War II is as distant as the Civil War was when our 70-year-olds were ten. To another child, 60 years hence, Gulf War II will be an equally distant concept.

And the lessons of the recent past are valuable. The insight that 20th century experiences give us into life during wartime, and times of recession, depression, and privation are useful. Our history of hate crime, civil rights, and the slow wheels of justice will continue to be relevant into the future. Our ever-growing consumption of natural resources can be traced straight through this past hundred years. Why, the increasing pace of techonological change alone is an interpretive topic that any 20th century exhibit can highlight beautifully. Want to get a sense of how quick such change is? Try giving our 5th graders one of those plastic inserts we used to put into the center hole of a 45, so that it would play on a standard turntable. Ask them to figure out what it is. Be prepared to wait. A long time.

Getting beyond nostalgia means asking visitors to view their lives anthropologically. Who were these people? How did they solve the universal problems of being human on earth? How did they cope with the challenges of their times? Viewing the 20th century as history may be difficult, considering we just lived it. Yet it is history, worthy of collection and preservation.

We, today, are in the enviable position of being able to collect and record more information than any historian of the 19th century or previous can dream of having. It is up to us only to accept the challenge, to use the 20th century to help teach us who we are today. To take it seriously. In 20 years' time, wouldn't you like to take kids to see exhibits on grunge music, on 1980s Wall Street, on the coffee obsession of the 90s, on the birth of hip-hop, on the AIDS movement, on the fall of the Berlin wall? Wouldn't you like to see the next generation of kids check out an Atari 2600 in a museum setting, learning about the electronics revolution into home computing, but bringing a completely unique take to the experience, an experiential background that we could never imagine? Aren't these important pieces of history? Now is the time for us to realize that what we had is gone, what we were is past, and what is past is the stuff of our history. If museums don't do it, these stories will be left to quasi-museums/cultural attractions like the Doo Wop Preservation League and the Experience Music Project. These places are capable of nostalgia, of piquing interest, of some preservation and of drawing a warm, relaxing memory bath; but they're not necessarily great at placing their subjects in broad historical perspective -- what the stuff means, and what it says about who we are.

So, props to exhibits like Greenfield Village's Disco: A Decade of Saturday Nights, and to programs like the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project, and organizations like Recent Past Preservation. The 20th century is history. Let's get it -- and put it on display -- before it's gone.