The New History in an Old Museum

Road Apples

There is no more evocative symbol for the current state of American history museums than the horse droppings that decorate the neat streets of Colonial Williamsburg—America's premier outdoor history museum. Manure is authentic dirt, an instance and symbol of natural disorder. Museums are carefully managed realms of classification where every thing is kept in its place. If Colonial Williamsburg lets the horse chips fall where they may, and indeed wants those chips to be something every visitor notices, what does that signify?

Colonial Williamsburg is a place not ordinarily associated with a dirty past. For many years, the museum has attracted a million visitors annually, people who come to see a tidy and elegant Revolutionary-era community. They come to watch the fife-and-drum corps and the militia parade down the Duke of Gloucester Street, or to observe the many craftspeople—blacksmiths, gunsmiths, silversmiths, weavers, coopers, cooks, and many others— hard at work. On sweltering summer days, these visitors are willing to stand in long lines to enter the well-appointed homes of the colonial burghers, where they will admire the furnishings of a satisfying domesticity—the wallpaper, the draperies, the furniture, the prints, the dried flowers, the china on which are set the simulacra of meats, pastries, and fruits. They wish to gaze at the good life, and they eagerly buy expensive reproductions or facsimilies of what they see displayed in the town's restored houses. Ultimately these visitors come, so nearly every one of them will tell you, to learn about "the past," "their past"—the collective truth about the way life "really was" back at the founding of the great American nation.

At Colonial Williamsburg, manure on otherwise clean streets signifies something about the way Americans generally think of life in "their past." Life was at once less pleasant and more organic—closer to nature. But the recent purposeful leaving of horse droppings on the streets also signifies something about a change in the way Colonial Williamsburg wishes to portray the past. The manure represents the coming of the new social history.

Social history came to Colonial Williamsburg in the 1970s. It had developed, so say its acolytes, out of the turmoil of the previous decade as a new way of telling the American story. And it was brought to Colonial Williamsburg at a time of declining visitation. According to social history's proponents in the museum, the entrenched version of the American story focused too narrowly on "great men" and elites, and ignored the works and lives of the vast majority of the American population. Moreover, it was too exclusively celebratory. It privileged national consensus and ignored social conflict, thereby cleansing American history of oppression, exploitation, injustice, and struggle. That fewer Americans were coming to Colonial Williamsburg indicated that after Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the Civil Rights movement, the public was no longer willing to buy the old history of consensus and celebration. The new social history was meant to redress the balance and reclaim Colonial Williamsburg's market share. The museum would continue to celebrate American identity and American community, but it would no longer be silent about past injustices and their ramifications in the present. In short, the past that social history introduced into the museum was to be a dirtier past, both literally and metaphorically.

The new social history challenged established history making in another, perhaps more profound way. It was more explicitly "constructionist" or "relativistic" than the histories it sought to supplant. Its proponents argued that historical truths are socially produced by particular people with particular interests and biases. The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made. Other people, elsewhere, might use the same events and facts to tell different histories or, prompted by the desire to tell different stories, might work to discover previously overlooked facts. The new social historians wanted to acquaint the public with these constructionist arguments. They wanted to encourage their audiences to think critically about the relationship of present-day politics and culture to the histories they were hearing, reading, or seeing. If history, anybody's history, had an agenda, how was one to recognize it? From this critical perspective the authoritarian objectivism of history museums had to be challenged, and the museum had to be made to teach a different theory of history.

When they were brought onboard in the mid-1970s, the new generation of social historians and administrators knew that changing Colonial Williamsburg would not be an easy task. Blocking the way, first, were the interests and attitudes of those who sponsored the patriotic ideology the institution had always purveyed. Critics of museums in general, and of Colonial Williamsburg in particular, have long pointed out that these venerable institutions represent hegemonic values, values congenial to the elites who establish, fund, and administer them. At Colonial Williamsburg, the American story had been a story celebrating the success of the colonial upper crust, and, by extension, of wealthy individuals like the Rockefellers who used philanthropy to link their genealogies to the American founding fathers. Not only did this version of the Williamsburg story celebrate these great men, it also celebrated America's greatness, asserting that every American citizen has a fair chance of achieving similar success because the American social order, based on universal democratic values, is fundamentally just. The entrenched Williamsburg story, then, affirmed the status quo. Thus it was (and is) reasonable to suppose that those who profited from the status quo—those who controlled the museum—would resist changing that story.

A second obstacle to change was built into the very structure of the institution. Colonial Williamsburg was set up, in the late 1920s, as a hybrid organization, a nonprofit foundation with one "side" devoted to the general business of running the place and the other devoted to the museum's cultural and educational work. When the museum became a mass tourist destination after World War II, it developed increasingly complex organizational structures and routines for dealing with a large, paying public. Like many other large museums, it increasingly found itself operating on the border between mass entertainment and mass education. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation's mission statement spoke of high educational principles, but the museum catered to an audience that was not captive, and one, moreover, that was often "on vacation." If the social historians...