A screenshot of the Google Hangout interface, courtesy of Adina Langer

And then…one by one, our panelists began breaking the bad news. They couldn’t make the trip. What to do? Everyone was still excited to talk about their work and their audiences, but we couldn’t fund them to get to Canada. Adina and I decided to turn to some of the same technology that had allowed us to collaborate on planning the panel in the first place, and see if we could make the show still go on.

In working up a panel proposal, the two of us had used a collaborative Google Document that we both had access to, and as the conference neared, we expanded that into a shared Google Drive folder that the whole panel could see, where we all could share our notes for our presentations, to foster a sense of conversation between everyone. It made sense, then, to try to keep it within the Google family for the actual presentation. With a quick download of a free plugin, everyone could be invited to join a Google Hangout for voice and video chatting.

This worked very well between just Adina and me, and we were even able to share Powerpoint presentations from each other’s screens. Would the day be saved? Well…let’s just say that the trial run with the whole cast was not so smooth. Screens froze, people were kicked out of the Hangout for no apparent reason, and nothing worked as it does on the charming commercials.

We arrived in Ottawa very worried, with copies of everyone’s Powerpoints, and as much of their presentations as possible. We booked a conference call through Adina’s cell phone as backup. Would this be a disaster?

But then, a conference miracle. Everything, more or less, worked. Yes, there were moments of hesitation, where we feared we had lost people to the depths of the internet. Yes, we had to ban people from live-tweeting the panel to reserve bandwidth for the Hangout. But it worked the best it had at any point. It was not perfect. But the NCPH audience got the benefit of our panelists talking on their subjects, even in the face of budget cuts. Our panelists were able to see and hear the audience, and take some questions. The two of us who were able to make it to Ottawa were joined virtually by the full complement of other panelists. It was definitely better than what we thought might happen when it first became clear only Adina and I would make it in person.

So given that budgets are tight all over, and this situation is likely to happen again to other panel organizers, what went right and what went wrong?

I would have preferred a format that allowed more conversation to happen organically among members of the panel, and between panelists and the audience. As it was, the technology hindered much of that, and created artificial barriers to communication. I am not sure there is a free solution to that, however. Google Hangout seems to be, at this moment, the only free, multi-person video-chat platform. It does work better with fewer numbers of people. The best ways to enhance the experience are to have no other programs running on the computer at the time, have a wired, rather than wireless, connection, and use a microphone or headset to minimize background noise.

We found that having panelists use Screenshare to run their own Powerpoints was too much for the Hangout to sustain, so Adina and I had to work the Powerpoint from Ottawa, while panelists spoke. This, understandably, had its awkward moments. It also meant that the panelists could not be seen as they spoke. Having two projector screens would have been nice to help with this problem.

We would have benefited from higher bandwidth in the conference center, so that panel attendees could have continued tweeting, blogging, and notetaking as they listened. I think as conferences continue to be live-blogged, bandwidth and other tech amenities will increasingly be upgraded.

All in all, this experiment in far-flung panel presenting worked better than I feared it would, though less perfectly than I perhaps had been led to expect by a world in which every problem is presented as having a high-tech solution. It would have been preferable to have all of our panelists on site, as the “conferring” part of the “conference” was hindered, and only a basic level of presenting was possible.

The virtual panel worked for us, to solve a problem that emerged at the last minute. I do worry though about this becoming the wave of the future, as travel budgets tighten perhaps permanently. If it becomes only the representatives of the well-endowed universities that can afford to be physically present, while NPS or other government and non-profit staff are confined to their computer screens in the digital conference, it might create separate experiences that cannot be easily bridged by technology, however advanced the interface. Our Google Hangout meant that we did not hang out at the Scone Witch with any of our 9/11 panelist colleagues, and that was a real shame, for them and for us.

 ~ Alima Bucciantini, Appalachian State University

Then I went to Ottawa for the conference and, like many people there, ended up fixated on something between a disaster movie and a cops-and-robbers drama unfolding at a distance, mostly via my Facebook feed on my iPhone. Mobile phones were not only a way to keep up with the story of the Boston Marathon bombing and its aftermath, but part and parcel of the story itself, with spectators’ cell-phone photos and video circulating virally once the suspects in the bombing were pinpointed. Throughout the day when much of the city was on “lockdown,” I was receiving text alerts from Tufts telling me how to “shelter in place.” Everything we’d been covering in my class was playing out on my phone’s tiny screen almost simultaneously with the actual events in Boston.

So there was a lot to talk about when I went back to class the following Monday. And all of it made Vittorio Marchis’ dissection of a telephone at the conference particularly fascinating for me.

Vittorio Marchis anatomizes a telephone

Marchis is a mechanical engineer and historian of technology who directs the Historical Documentation Centre and Museum of the Politecnico of Turin, Italy. He has developed a performance form he calls a “machine autopsy,” based on the late 18th century public lectures presented by anatomists but interweaving an extraordinary variety of illustrative material—everything from patent applications to poetry and pop culture—to create a close reading of the physical, social, and cultural body of a given machine. In this case, the corpse was a late 1970s telephone manufactured in Canada, which Marchis dismantled into its component parts. A lecturer read key texts interspersed with Marchis’ commentary on the dissection, producing a deconstruction of not only the machine but also the human/telephone relationship across its 140-year span. “What kind of histories,” Marchis asked as he removed the molded plastic cover—so 70s!—“are hidden under the carapace of this animal?”

“Moralité, tranquillité, félicité. – La cour téléphonique” from Albert Robida’s “Le vingtième siècle” (1883).

Perhaps because I’d spent the previous couple of weeks finally overcoming my own reluctance to join the smart-phone era, I was particularly struck by the evidence of how long a history there is of uncertainty about this relationship. For every upbeat embrace of the new techology—Albert Robida’s vision of phone-enabled courtship in a futuristic 1883 novel (at left) or the exuberant “Telephone Hour” in Bye Bye Birdie—there have been other, more anxious expressions, ranging from the careful instructions for use that have accompanied every new generation of telephone technology to the classic Sesame Street scene of Martians attempting to identify and communicate with a telephone—“a metaphor,” Marchis noted, “for what happens when people enter into a connection with something impossible to understand.” Elizabeth Richards’ punning 1890 poem “Eletelephony” was an early articulation of the strange blends and disembodiments that the telephone created, while Allen Ginsberg’s “I am a Victim of Telephone” cursed the growing ubiquity of the technology while also recognizing how embedded it had already become in our lives by the 1960s:

When I listen to radio presidents roaring on the convention floor
the phone also chimes in ‘rush up to Harlem with us and see the riots’
Always the telephone linked to all the hearts of the world beating at once…

That poem seemed bizarrely apt on that Friday in Ottawa while I was sneaking glances at my own phone to see what was happening in Boston. What would Ginsberg make of a world so hyper-connected that atomized bits of information transmitted by geographically-distant friends have become, for many of us, a primary kind of news media? How should we parse the moment of silence the following Monday that marked the precise instant of the Marathon bombing, during which the Boston Globe blacked out its online operations for a minute while the Twitter commentary on the tribute generated lots of digital noise?  How to frame the fact that I can download a recording of Ginsberg reading his poem onto my phone with just a few taps of my finger?

The dissected pieces made the rounds of the audience. Photo: Serge Noiret

These moments are dense and often baffling. By grounding them in specific technologies and inventions, Vittorio Marchis helped to re-embody and re-emplace histories of technology and discourse that are, on the one hand, stunningly ordinary, and on the other, unimaginably complex. I don’t know why it reassures me to know that I’m part of a long history of ambivalence about the telephone, but it does. It also helps to know that the twists and turns of this cultural history can be traced in surprisingly precise ways. In the guts of the half-dissected machine, for example, Marchis pointed out a couple of mechanisms where the analog was just beginning to give way to the electronic—a tiny opening toward the digitally-mediated culture that most of us now inhabit.

Sharing the pieces of the telephone after the autopsy

To me, these kinds of insights are where public history can take us when it doesn’t try too hard to resolve all the questions or tidy the edges of knowledge. Marchis refused to be concerned about which category things belonged to—science, art, history—and pursued his own curiosity across all of those boundaries. At the very end of his performance, he also underscored the ritual aspects of this kind of exploration, when he said that he saw this kind of public lecture as a rite undertaken with the participation of the audience, whom he then invited to come forward and take a piece of the anatomized body. People flocked to the front of the room and reached for bits of wire and plastic that had been transformed into meaningful artifacts by an hour’s close and careful attention. Several paused first to memorialize the dissection table with a quick photograph on their phones. Ordinary and extraordinary reality merged for a moment, exposing the essential strangeness of our attempt to connect across time and distance and the near-miraculous quality of human imagination that occasionally allows us to do it.

~ Cathy Stanton teaches in the Anthropology Department at Tufts University and practices public history in a variety of settings.

(Photos are by the author unless otherwise credited.  Additional photos from the April 19, 2013 machine autopsy in Ottawa can be found in NCPH’s Flickr stream and Serge Noiret’s Google+ album.)

• What the Public Thinks About Museums.  A recent survey by the Museums Association in Great Britain. “What the public sees as essential purposes – care, preservation and display of heritage; entertaining education for all children; and trustworthy information for all adults – explain why museums are held in such high regard.”
• Strengthening NPS.  The National Park System Advisory Board released its report this month, “Engaging Independent Perspectives for a 21st-Century National Park System.”
• Tough Times to Be Lobbying for History on Capitol Hill.  HNN reports on the presentation by National Coalition for History executive director Lee White at the OAH in San Francisco.

NCPH CONFERENCE RECAP

• Beginning to make a DIF. Digital media reverberated throughout the NCPH meeting in Ottawa and will play a bigger role next year. We announced a Digital Integration Fund (DIF) during the conference and are asking for your support.  Help us make a DIF!  The fund will support the creation of a lively central gathering-place for practitioners, scholars, and their many publics and expand the possibilities for peer review. http://bit.ly/Y4dBID
• Refreshed. Reinvigorated. Connected. Challenged. These are some of the buzz words we are hearing from participants in the 2013 NCPH conference in Ottawa, “Knowing Your Public(s).” Thank you to every one of the 537 colleagues who attended the event and for cultivating a conference focused on meaningful conversations, interactivity, and collaboration.
• Tweets and More from Ottawa. For a recap of the conference excitement, check out @mlundrig’s Storify archive of #NCPH2013 tweets at http://bit.ly/11JcABk
• Check out the NCPH Flickr page for photos from the meeting.  Check back as we’ll continue to add more. We encourage you to share your own images from the conference on the NCPH Facebook page or by tweeting using the #NCPH2013 hashtag.
• For conference coverage by Joel Ralph of Canada’s History click here.
• Most Importantly… We also want to thank all the members of the Host and Program Committees, the speakers, and the many volunteers who made this conference possible. For more information, see http://ncph.org/cms/conferences/2013-annual-meeting/.
• Fired Up about the Annual Meeting or the Field?  Suggest good people for next year’s NCPH election slate.

• “London Works:  Labouring in the Forest City” at the Museum of London (Ontario).  Students from Western University showed an image (at top) of a component of the exhibit that they’d worked on, a single case containing 150 unlabeled work-related objects.  Visitors could learn more through a tablet version of the image, geo-tagged to the specific objects.
• The Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia is an ongoing project based at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden University.  The encyclopedia includes community engagement in the form of roundtables and requests for nominations for new topics to be covered.  The site also includes links to primary sources and other materials from outside the encyclopedia space.
• Edifica:  History in Hand is a cell phone app from Canada’s Historic Places, a federal/provincial/territorial collaboration that aims to be the definitive register of all historic places across Canada.  The project has launched with materials from three cities (Victoria, Quebec City, and Halifax) and a thematic focus on the War of 1812, with plans to expand as time goes on.
• 9CHRIS (the 9th Circuit Historical Records Index System) is a “labor of love” by Erik Nystrom of the Rochester Institute of Technology, based on the digitized records of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals from 1891 to the late 1960s.  Like many digitized sources, these are difficult to search or assess;  Nystrom’s project creates a kind of finding aid by digitally collecting title pages and generating keywords.
• The Georgia Virtual History Project from eLearning design firm MoWerks Learning enables the visualization of an urban landscape over time.  Built on a platform of raw data collected by students, the program connects to interpretive tools like the Atlanta Lamp Post, which uses an everyday locale to unpack the complexities of pre-Civil-War Atlanta.
• The Alberta Women’s History Project, based at Athabasca University, is an online archive and resource that also promotes collection and donation of materials relating to women’s history in Alberta.  The site also includes undergraduate papers on prairie women, drawn from universities across Canada.
• UTSIC, the University of Toronto Scientific Instrument Collection, was also described as a “labor of love,” in this case to rescue, catalog, and eventually display scientific instruments that are no longer in use in university labs.  Along with a blog and collections catalog, the volunteer graduate students and faculty have created one online exhibit to date, “Taking Toronto’s Health Care History.”
• The Museum of Healthcare in Kingston has created an app to accompany self-guided visitors on a walking tour of the Kingston General Hospital campus.

~ Cathy Stanton

Lightning Talks (12:30-1:30 p.m.) – An informal brown-bag lunch session in the Frontenac Room where you can showcase your own digital project and hear what’s new and exciting in the digital humanities. At this brown-bag lunchtime session, presenters will each have two to three minutes to describe their projects. At least twentyspaces will be available on a first-come, first serve basis. Advance sign-up suggested but not required; you can sign up at the registration desk this morning.

Digital Drop-In (5-6:45 p.m.) – Stuck on a digital project?  Looking for some general advice on how to make your digital idea a reality?  At NCPH’s version of the “genius bar,” experienced digital public historians (see list below) will be available to help you with questions about project development and management; audio and visual media; specific platforms like WordPress and Omeka; mapping; social media; user-generated content; and more.  Drop in for quick, targeted advice on your way to the poster session or consultants’ reception.  Remember, there are no stupid questions!

Digital Drop-In Advisors:

• Devon Elliott, Western University
• Mary Larson, Oklahoma State University
• Diana Lempel, Harvard University
• Josh Macfadyen, Western University
• Caroline Muglia, U.S. Library of Congress
• Jon Berndt Olsen, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
• Joel Ralph, Canada’s History
• Ron Rudin, Concordia University
• Will Tchakarides, University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee
• Mark Tebeau, Cleveland State University

For those not following the Twitter feed for #ncph2013, here’s a quick selection of tweeted thoughts from the first day, which featured a number of workshops and working groups and the third THATCamp NCPH.  Even from afar, it’s pretty easy to tell that Devon Elliott’s 3D printer was the star of the day!

@HistoryBoots
Public historians investigating a 3D printer. Soon we will have our own replica statue in plastic.

@rizzo_pubhist: partnership & collaboration–so far on day 1 of #ncph2013 these are the watchwords (no surprise!).

@MarlaAtUmass: 18 countries represented at this year’s meeting — largest international turn-out yet.

@cjceglio: #THATCamp is getting underway! Have used my analog sign making, paper hanging, and scissors skills-all before 9:30

@munitionette: Listening about p.h. programs and tensions between theory and practice around the world. Lots of common issues.

@material_world: Impt. to think about how the Best Pract Document on Public History Programs might be used. Will some programs be found inadequate?

@MarlaAtUmass: Now in session on students & digital skills. How do digital tools replicate &/or disrupt trad’l methods?

@ModupeLabode: When is a digital project finished? When the class is over? When it’s no longer active? When it becomes inaccessible?

@conservadora: rich ideas of articulated intentions in teaching PH linger from my working group discussion earlier today.

‏@material_world:  Imagine a university hiring a public historian NOT charged to begin a PH program. What would that look like?

‏@MarlaAtUmass:  Metaskills of conceptualizing a project more important than learning particular tools.

@rizzo_pubhist:  deli across the street from #ncph2013 not only had great smoked meat, but a manager with a deep love & knowledge of local history.

@DDMeringolo:  The creation of Ottawa as a capital city nearly eradicated the history of Ottawa’s labor history. #laborwalkingtour

@pubhisint:  How can we best use the Public History Commons? Its like a year round and continuous annual meeting!

@ModupeLabode:  At #THATCamp learned about @HowHoraceRolls : Invertebrates, too, can tweet

@HowHoraceRolls
Just a simple office lobster that found myself living in the walls of Canada’s largest history organization. This is how I roll.
In the baseboard @HDInstitute

~ Cathy Stanton

Canadian War Museum, 1 Vimy Pl, Ottawa. Tim Cook, Acting Director of Research; Andrew Burtch Curator of “Eleven Women Facing War” and “Khandahar: the Fighting Season;” Peter MacLeod, Curator, Pre-Confederation Canada. Open weekdays between 9 A.M. and 5 P.M., and Thursdays until 8 P.M. Free admission after 4 P.M.

Just a short walk from the Delta Hotel in Ottawa, the Canadian War Museum offers conference attendees an opportunity to see award-winning architecture and experience two photographic exhibits (one open until April 21), in addition to the museum’s expansive exhibits on war and conflict from a Canadian perspective. Visitors can easily spend four or more hours touring the galleries. Below are a few of the highlights that may be of interest to NCPH members.

The Canadian War Museum stands out on the barren land of LeBretton Flats, once covered with a thriving working-class neighborhood, felled by “urban renewal.” Now, nearly forty years later, mixed-used development is beginning to fill in the space. (Photo courtesy of Jo McCutcheon.)

The Canadian War museum moved from its earlier home in the former Archives building to a new purpose-built facility in 2005.^[1] The new museum building is a stunning piece of art designed to push visitors to consider the grim reality and devastating consequences of war. Architect Raymond Moriyama is himself a casualty of conflict; at the age of twelve his family was interned in the interior mountains of British Columbia for several years, along with other Japanese-Canadians living on the country’s west coast. He told Maclean’s magazine in 2005 that his design for the war museum began with a sketch of the tree house he built as a boy in that internment camp. The tree house was both a refuge and a place of contemplation and regeneration during a time of conflict, and Moriyama wanted to bring these elements to the design of the War Museum.^[2] The building’s low profile resembles a hideout or bunker, while the tall fin rising at the east end is reminiscent of the prow of a ship (the small windows on it spell out “Lest We Forget” in Morse code). Most of the building’s windows are on the east side, facing the sunrise – a symbol of hope – in keeping with Moriyama’s theme of regeneration. Inside, the low ceiling in the entrance hall, combined with the slanted and stark concrete walls, create a slightly claustrophobic and disorienting feeling. This is a building designed to make visitors slightly uncomfortable even before they get to the exhibit galleries.

Two architectural features inside the museum deserve special mention: Memorial Hall and Regeneration Hall. Memorial Hall is a small chamber off the entrance hall, empty except for a single tombstone once used to mark the grave of an unknown soldier in France. The room itself is angled so that the windows high above cast light on the tombstone only once a year – on Remembrance Day, November 11. Regeneration Hall, located at the east end of the building, is also precisely aligned for a symbolic purpose. The tall angled windows of the hall reveal the Peace Tower, on Parliament Hill, built following the First World War to commemorate those killed. As visitors descend the curving staircase the tower disappears from view. At the base of the stairs, in front of the window, is a statue symbolizing hope. All the statues in the hall are plaster models used in the construction of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial, designed by Walter Allward and unveiled in 1936. The Vimy Memorial commemorates Canada’s 60,000 dead soldiers during the First World War (more than 10,000 with no known grave). These two sites – Memorial Hall and Regeneration Hall – demonstrate the influence of the First World War on Canadian history, memory and identity.

Especially notable are two temporary photographic exhibits: “Khandahar: The Fighting Season” and “Eleven Women Facing War.” These exhibits highlight the ways that men and women experience war, and prompt reflection about how war and gender have been captured through the camera lens.

“Eleven Women Facing War” tells the personal stories of eleven women’s encounters with armed conflict. International photographer Nick Danziger photographed the women in 2001 in co-operation with the International Red Cross. He returned ten years later to locate the women and see how their lives had changed. The initial photographs were displayed at locations in Paris, the Balkans, and the Middle East, and the current exhibit appeared in Paris and Monaco in 2011. The exhibit will be at the Canadian War Museum until April 21, and will open at the Military Museums in Calgary, Alberta on August 8, 2013.

Although many of Danziger’s excellent photographs can be viewed on his website—and the Red Cross videos from 2001 are also available on the War Museum website—they are worth seeing in the large and airy space of the museum’s John McCrae Gallery. The museum’s temporary exhibit space might easily dwarf the exhibit, but the low lighting and dark colors create a sombre and intimate environment that keep the photographs from getting lost. Each woman’s story is presented separately in a combination of video footage (with audio available on headsets) and photographs.

Two elements of the display make it particularly effective. Danziger has created an arresting visual distinction between the 2001 and the 2011 images by displaying the former in black and white and the latter in color. There is very little contextual information about the conflicts these women have experienced. Visitors are told where the women are and what has happened to them—injury, loss of family member, imprisonment—but there are no timelines here, no political figures. The armies are in the background, the women, fore-fronted. The women’s personal struggles—for formal assistance, for evidence of a loved one’s death—speak to the way war destroys records and resists being documented in a narrative way. For many of these women, the official history of the war matters little; the conflict has knitted itself into the fabric of their lives.

“Khandahar: The Fighting Season” includes fourteen images, highlights from awarding winning Canadian photographer Louie Palu, who, “…launched a personal effort to capture the face of Canada’s war in the Afghan countryside.” The photographs are located in a narrow hallway, and located closely to a large tank, contrasting the space afforded to Danziger’s exhibit. Each image draws the audience into the harsh landscape, the dust, the heat, and pain of war and loss.

The museum’s permanent exhibit is divided chronologically into four galleries, three of which are almost exclusively dedicated to overseas conflicts. This provides visitors with the opportunity to see the ways that global conflicts have been emphasized and curated in different ways.^[3]  For example, visitors may be interested in the imagery of the poppy, rooted in John McRae’s poem, In Flanders Field, and seen throughout the museum in paintings including some by Turkish artist Hikmet Çetinkay displayed in the windowed cafeteria. Conference attendees more familiar with military and war exhibits in the United States may also be interested in the artifacts and displays related to the battle of Vimy Ridge, which will be commemorated in April 2017.

Domestic conflicts, or “Wars on our soil” are interpreted in Gallery 1, the smallest of the four galleries.  In comparatively less space, this gallery covers a large time frame (“earliest times to 1885”) and a diversity of experiences including: pre-contact conflict, colonial and imperial conflict in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the War of 1812, and conflict on the prairies after Confederation in 1867. Updates to this Gallery will be enhanced by the extensive ethno-historical research that has focused on First Nations, Inuit and Métis over the past decade.

History and Hockey? A must-see film at the Canadian War Museum, 30 Minutes that Changed Canada…and the World: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, offers a take on historic interpretation public historians will love. (Photo courtesy of Jo McCutcheon.)

If you are not able to spend a lot of time in Gallery 1, it is indeed worth stopping in the small theatre to view the film, 30 Minutes that Changed Canada…and the World: The Battle of the Plains of Abraham, a ten minute film that appears in French and English and has a two minute break between viewings. The most entertaining and perhaps most curious aspect for non-hockey fans and non-Canadians is the commentaries and interjections by two and then three men sporting Montreal Canadian (French), Toronto Maple Leaf (English) and later, Vancouver Canuck (Aboriginal) hockey jerseys. It is an interesting interpretation of ‘race’ relations and sure to generate discussion and debate among museum visitors and hockey fans!

~Katherine Rollwagen  and J.M. McCutcheon, University of Ottawa

Vodou.  Dr. Mauro Peressini, Ravel Beaucoir-Dominique, and Didier Dominque; Curators.  The Canadian Museum of Civilization.  November 15, 2012 –February 23, 2014

Rèn Kongo (Queen of the Congo)
Concrete
This representation of Rèn Kongo is rich in symbols. The lwa bears the word “Guinée” (Guinea) on her right breast, a reference to a mythical ancestral Africa. Her left breast has been cut off, like that of an Amazon. Rèn Kongo is portrayed as a female warrior holding a machete, evoking the female cavalry and infantry units of the Kingdom of Dahomey (present-day Benin). The children at her feet represent the human race, over which she reigns.
© MCC/ CMC, Frank Wimart

On the bank of the Ottawa River directly across from the Parliament of Canada sits the Canadian Museum of Civilization (CMC)—soon to become the Canadian Museum of History.  Representing the nation’s social, cultural, and community history, it is Canada’s largest and most popular cultural institution.^[1] While many of the permanent galleries and exhibitions are undergoing renovation, the collaborative Vodou exhibit will be the one permanent feature open to the public for the coming year.  Produced in collaboration with Haitian and Montreal diaspora communities, the Musée d’ethnographie de Geneve, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Fondation pour la presentation, la valorisation, et la production d’oeuvres culturelles haïtiennes (FPVPOCH), this exhibit makes use of Marianne Lehmann’s extensive private collection of Vodou artifacts to re-interpret Haitian Vodou history, beliefs, and culture to a contemporary Canadian audience.^[2]

Before visitors enter the exhibition space, they are introduced to the collection through a video explaining Marianne Lehmann’s connection to the objects as a non-practitioner of the religion, which the museum assumes is also true of most visitors.  The exhibit “proposes a straightforward encounter” with the objects and the practitioners through textual, material, visual, and spatial means of interpretation.  According to Dr. Mauro Peressini, CMC curator of Southwest Europe and Latin America, and of this exhibition, these four means of interpretation were intended to give voice to the practitioners of Vodou, whose religion has been much maligned by years of changing colonial occupation, Western popular culture, and programs of disinformation.  By allowing these voices to be heard in collaboration with the curators at the CMC and in this nationally prestigious institution, the exhibit aims to relate a complex spiritual and cultural history on its own terms.

In the opening two spaces of the exhibit, the visitor is met with historical and contemporary symbols of Vodouism narrated through points of contact with Western civilization.  The elements of Vodou history interpreted in this space are not, however, wholly subservient to Western historical conventions.  Dominant “slave” and “master” narratives are questioned by placing these terms in quotation marks; and the map of the Atlantic mounted on the wall is rendered so as to appear hand-drawn —a map of memorial space rather than solely geographical space.  Beginning with early examples of indigenous art and spirituality (Haitian Vodou is an amalgam of indigenous and West African beliefs with some Christian symbolism), the exhibition ends with a reconstruction of a Montreal wogatwa  (shrine), replete with pictures of Christian saints representative of Vodou lwa (spirits).  This historical progression acts as a place of contact between the Vodouists and the visitor: by recognizing elements of Western tradition in Vodou the visitor is eased into understanding Vodou spirituality in a way that avoids the popular misunderstanding of the religion in North American popular culture.

Following this primer of Haitian and Vodou history, the visitor enters into one of three threshold spaces in the exhibit.^[3]  Entitled “What you see here may not be what we see,” a single Vodou artifact sits on a pedestal in the middle of a white room with no textual interpretation.  Instead, the visitor must listen to the walls, where built-in speakers encourage an intimate encounter with a Vodouist interpreting this object, explaining a “different way of seeing.”  In order to listen to the interpretation, the visitor cannot face the object head-on, effectively forcing a more nuanced interpretation of the exhibit to come.

What follows is what Peressini calls “the ABCs of Vodou.” In this space, the visitor is introduced to the different families of lwa, the role of each lwa in the life of the Vodouists, and what rituals the practitioners must perform to maintain connections with the lwa and their energies.  The room has a circular rather than linear trajectory and all of the artifacts and videos are mounted on wide, open platforms.  Covering the platforms are knee-height wooden poles, representative of wild grasses. It was important to the collaborative partners of this exhibition to keep the artifacts ostensibly out in the open and not behind glass cases, as that would obstruct the physical relationship the Vodouist and the visitor a supposed to have with the lwa. This space, like the two that preceeded it, also maintains many points of contact between the visitor and Vodouist beliefs.  Practitioners explain their beliefs through video, familiar symbols appear throughout the artifacts, and written interpretations encourage parallels between Judeo-Christian beliefs and Vodouist lwa. ^[4]

After this introduction to the Vodouist lwa, the visitor enters another threshold space.  Here, the conversation whispered from the walls questions the visitor’s ability to understand the coming interpretation of Vodouist maji—what the lwa are capable of doing for their believers.  In the following space, the exhibit outlines how Vodou secret societies mounted the 1804 Haitian revolution, and how these lwa and secret societies are still used for revolutionary purposes and justice in Haiti today.  In this darker, more confrontational and historicised space, the tone of the exhibit changes dramatically.  Rather than inviting visitors to find points of contact between themselves and Vodou, the exhibit stresses the privacy and secrecy of the effects of maji.  The artifacts, often representative of revolutionary soldiers, are not meant to be seen by any passive observer.  Their inclusion in this exhibit, though somewhat destabilising and confrontational, ultimately encourages the visitor to re-question his or her suppositions about Vodou and make use of what they have learned thus far.

Like the other threshold spaces, the room of mirrors that follows the interpretation of the maji further reinforces the notion that the visitor is not merely a passive observer of the exhibit, but part of the ongoing story of Vodou’s acceptance.  Just as the Vodouists have made efforts to communicate their beliefs to the visitor, so too must the visitor make an effort to understand and be open towards the practitioners and beliefs of Vodou.^[5]  They are given the chance to do so in the exhibit’s final space, where two of the main protagonists of the exhibit are filmed “waiting for a comment.”  There also are computer stations where visitors are encouraged to share their thoughts.  This final, oblique, stage of the exhibit reinforces the entire experience: not only is Vodou at the CMC a collaboration between practitioners and museum professionals, but it is also a collaboration between the visitor and the exhibit itself.

This exhibit does an excellent job communicating the Haitian Vodou way-of-life to a Western audience.  Visitors  are invited to rethink their preconceptions about Vodou and to enter into a relationship with the artifacts and the community that is represented.  By using textual, aural, and physical interpretation styles that encourage this encounter, the Canadian Museum of Civilization not only alters how visitors have traditionally interacted with the practice of Haitian Vodou, but also how they have traditionally interacted with a museum exhibit.

~ Lina Crompton, Carleton University

The Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum. HENRIETTE RIEGEL, Executive Director.

Diefenbunker: Canada’s Cold War Museum

There is an aura of kitsch about the Diefenbunker, from the cutesy pun of its name, to the ubiquitous sea foam green shade of its unmistakably 1960s décor. As your tour guide will tell you, the brief warning period ushered in by the advent of ground-based nuclear missiles meant that the bunker was somewhat obsolete by the time construction finished, lending a contrasting absurdity to the awe of its labyrinthine massiveness. Nevertheless, the space evokes some of the most deeply-felt realities of the Cold War, and the sheer terror of nuclear conflict. Located at the edge of Carp, a reasonable drive from downtown Ottawa—although probably not reasonable enough to outpace the aforementioned missiles—Canada’s Cold War Museum opened to the public in 1998. Initially a solely volunteer operation, the site now has full-time staff members and follows a mandate to “increase throughout Canada and the world, interest in and a critical understanding of the Cold War.”^[1] 

I first remember reading about the Diefenbunker in high school—during one of those final history classes, into which the whole of the latter half of the twentieth century gets shuffled as an afterthought. I cannot exactly recall the gist of the textbook’s account, but it conjured an image for me of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker using taxpayer money to secretly and obsessively stockpile canned peas for his personal survival, and I knew then that I wanted to see this place for myself. When I came to Ottawa last fall, the difficulty of actually reaching the site without a car indefinitely delayed my pilgrimage. I finally made the trek last month [March 2013], when I happened to have guests with a vehicle. We opted to take the guided tour with a large crowd of March Break visitors, taking turns filing through to squeeze into some of the bunker’s smaller rooms.

The Diefenbunker began its life as a Canadian Forces base, which was to serve as the emergency destination for certain members of the federal cabinet, top-ranking bureaucrats and military personnel in case of nuclear attack. The grand idea was to ensure consistent governance. Construction may have begun in 1958 under Diefenbaker—who never actually visited his namesake bunker—but the base remained staffed until 1994.^[2]

The space had the capacity to support up to 500 unfortunate souls for thirty days. Our tour guide, a knowledgeable former federal employee now volunteering, made it very clear that there were no plans to accommodate the spouses or children of any of the potential occupants. The bunkers’ rooms were designed for post-nuclear government business, including offices, a mess hall, an infirmary, and the quarters intended for the Prime Minister. In one of the meeting rooms our guide asked two of the youngest members of our group to take their places at the conference table as PM and Governor General, and I could not help but be reminded of Dr. Strangelove’s war room. The Diefenbunker has plenty of big boards and maps, and dated office furnishings—it looks exactly as I imagine such a place should look. The curators have successfully captured both the distant datedness of light blue technical equipment, and simultaneously the feeling that these rooms might be inhabited by government employees at any moment (the ash trays in offices are a nice touch).^[3]

To explore the massive multi-floor bunker is to experience a series of jarring tonal shifts. The atmosphere is inherently bleak and claustrophobic, accompanied by the apparent hubris of a ruling body’s attempt to take charge of an apocalypse. There is also, however, the inescapable mundaneness of a workplace designed with absolute utilitarian practicality. Perhaps no spot encapsulates this clash better than the lower-level freezer containing both artificial frozen foods, and the morbid spectre of a sheathed human dummy, demonstrating that the freezer space was intended to double as the bunker’s morgue. I found the scene simultaneously surprising, disturbing, and macabrely funny, but most of all, admirably pragmatic. And I am fairly certain that this was the kind of reaction the curatorial staff were going for when they decided to represent that bit of trivia so viscerally. Ultimately, the period-furnished portions of the bunker evoke the desperate determination of its original purpose, and the bizarre disappointments of a building that was never used to its full potential when that utilization would have required a devastating catastrophe.

Other rooms in the Diefenbunker now contain special exhibits on the bunker and broader Cold War topics, from East Berlin to the Gouzenko incident.^[4]
The length and thoroughness of the guided tour left me less time to observe and reflect upon the organized exhibits, but these displays bring home the greater international context of the bunker’s existence, and Canada’s specific place within that global crisis. One of the most effective spaces is a photograph gallery that depicts the indescribable, brutal reality that lies behind seemingly abstract nuclear panic, with a series of images of the horrific aftermath following the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I was born in 1989, and I consequently cannot prevent myself from interpreting the Diefenbunker through generational ideas of the campy ‘duck and cover’ futility of Cold War preparations against nuclear annihilation. Contemplating the Diefenbunker from within its current context, however, it is hard to deny that this was much more than just a secret stash of canned peas for the country’s elite. The unused utilitarianism of the space and the artifacts left behind (or recovered)—the carefully considered function of every room, the pristinely untouched equipment, an empty vault—imbues its spaces and things with a sad longing to fulfil a duty that never materialized. Just as pervasive is the coexisting prospect of what a miserable place it would have been if that day had ever arrived—as the freezer morgue, and a room reserved for cabin fever victims attests. At the intersection of both of these concepts is the apparent absurdity of governing a country from a bunker, and preparing for that eventuality so methodically. We can only judge the Diefenbunker’s necessity with the benefit of hindsight, but in the present, the museum offers a place to reflect upon all of these paradoxes, and the greater national and international implications. The professional and volunteer staff have created a Cold War Museum that links the immediate and intimate with the international, and the what-happened to the what-if. The Diefenbunker allows those removed from the panic of the Cold War, including those two children delighted to briefly play-act as the Prime Minister and Governor General, to learn not only a little bit about its stark realities, but to critically ponder how much of the Cold War experience was necessarily imagined, and how significant—or ridiculous—the distinction between the two really was.

~FIONA SINEAD COX , Carleton University

• New Online Feature of the Public History Journal of Record.  These “(p)reviews,” as we’re dubbing them, will inaugurate what we hope will be a growing partnership between The Public Historian and the Public History Commons.
• New Opposition to Old Sports Mascots.  Jim Loewen, author of Lies My Teacher Told Me, points out how “Otherizing other people by naming teams ‘for’ them does not help…nor does ‘honoring’ American Indians as mascots help us remember American Indian history as it was.”
• Anger Over Plan to Sell Site of Wounded Knee Massacre.  New York Times story.

NCPH CONFERENCE UPDATES

• Last-minute NCPH Conference Rides and Roommates. Attending the NCPH conference in Ottawa next week and still in search of a ride-share or roommate? Visit the Public History Commons News section to post a request.
• Winners of the 2013 NCPH Youtube Video Contest Have Been Chosen!  Join us at Saturday morning’s Awards Breakfast and Business meeting to find out who they are!  A limited number of tickets will be available onsite for the breakfast if you haven’t made your purchase yet.
• Wikipedia and Women’s History Site: A Mini-Editathon  Join the National Collaborative of Women’s History Sites during the NCPH in Ottawa (Friday, 1:30-3pm, Seigniory Room) to explore the possibility of a Wikipedia edit-athon on women’s history sites.  Drop in and learn what editing involves, suggest edits, and otherwise connect to what we hope will be a larger effort to improve women’s history on Wikipedia.
• A Roaming We Will Go.  If you’re traveling from outside Canada, don’t forget to check with your cell/smartphone carrier about temporarily upgrading your plan to cover your roaming charges.
• Ottawa’s Coolest Indie Food Guide. Do yourself a flavour and check out these delicious photos and fun restaurant suggestions.

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