Tag Archives: memory

The telephonic heart: A “machine autopsy” in Ottawa

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allen ginsberg poem on iphoneThis spring, I’ve been teaching an urban anthropology class at Tufts University. In the class session before I left for the National Council on Public History conference, we talked about how digital technologies have become ever more interwoven with urban experience. The session before that was on sites of urban violence and memorialization. Although the course has a global focus, I frequently use Boston as a case study, since that’s where we are. We talked about the Great Molasses Flood of 1919 and the Cocoanut Grove Fire of 1942 and—because Marathon Weekend was coming up—about how people interact digitally with urban spectacles, including sports, and how the layers of memory embedded in iconic places and sports events filter into our contemporary uses and understandings of them.

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. Continue reading →

Queenston on and off the field: A Q&A discussion with Adam Shoalts and Cathy Stanton

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Reenactors at the bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights. Image courtesy of Andrew Amy.

Editors’ note:  This conversation responds to Adam Shoalts’ report on the October 2012 bicentennial reenactment of the Battle of Queenston Heights  and is part of the collaborative coverage of War of 1812 commemoration in History@Work and The Public Historian. Read more here.

Stanton:  Your piece really captures the playfulness and sense of adventure and discovery that reenactments often offer to participants.  Yet at the same time, “officialdom” of various kinds is usually involved in staging a big event like this.  How much of the success of this event, for you, was due to the more improvisational moments (like your exploration of the cliff path or your infantry partner’s impulsive firing at “Brock”) and how much resulted from the more scripted and managed aspects of the day?

Shoalts:  While it is true that I am a former employee of the government agency that oversees Queenston Heights and that I have been involved with quite a number of reenactments, I confess that much of the higher planning that goes into staging these events remains a mystery to me. Continue reading →

Memory and Monument Building: Using “Reacting to the Past” to teach about historical memory

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It is May 1, 1981.  A jury of eight internationally renowned architects and sculptors has announced its pick for the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, set to be constructed at the western end of the Constitution Gardens on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.  The unanimous pick is Maya Lin,  a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University.

So begins the new Reacting to the Past (RTTP) module, Memory and Monument Building: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1981-1982, currently in development.

Developed at Barnard College in the late 1990s by historian Mark Carnes, RTTP calls on students to play the parts of historical actors in key moments of great change.  Students act out and react to historical episodes as though they are genuinely inhabiting that space.  As they imaginatively enter the worlds of 1791 France in the midst of revolution, of 1861 Kentucky on the brink of secession, or of 1963 Birmingham in the throes of civil rights struggle, students are called upon to make historical arguments and then support those arguments with primary sources and contemporary secondary scholarship.

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Maya Lin’s original design submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial sparked both admiration and controversy

RTTP provides a unique lens through which to bring issues of historical memory into the classroom.  Physical spaces–here, monuments and memorials–offer particularly compelling ways of measuring collective memory.  The way we interpret the past through these concrete structures provides insights into how the creators of those spaces constructed the past, how they intended for audiences to do the same, and how those meanings can be challenged. Continue reading →

The Ruskin College records: Destroying a radical past

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The Walton Street site of Ruskin College, where Raphael Samuel and others founded the History Workshop movement in 1966.

In the course of moving Ruskin College, the trade union and labour movement college founded in central Oxford in 1899, from its prime location to a site on the outskirts of the city, the college has been re-branded and much of its archive destroyed or dispersed to other institutions. Most importantly, thousands of historic student records from the first years of the college until the last few years have been shredded. Continue reading →