The Whole Story?

I want to begin by saying that I was amazed at the quality and sheer quantity of footage and photos Ken Burns managed to find for his The War.  I could definitely see myself using the photos and footage he found to supplement future lessons on WWII.  However, it is also clear that there was an intent to the “FUBAR” episode we watched.  I found myself asking, “What is the goal of the film?” “What is he [Burns] trying to achieve?”  According to an interview in “Echoes of War“, Lynn Novick says that they wanted viewers to be able to “gain an understanding of what war really is.”  I think this video does achieve this.  It shows the reality of how unpredictable war is.  However, it shows more than that.  It also portrays a very specific message about soldiers and leaders of war.

It portrays soldiers as the real heroes.  It emphasizes their sacrifice, while also emphasizing the incompetancy of the leaders.  It portrays the leaders as unaware of the reality of what the soldiers were actually facing (either unaware or ambivalent).  They show how soldiers weren’t valued as they should have been, but seen as expendable.  Burns achieves this “heroization”  of the soldier by portraying thema s the all American – your dad, brother, friend, neighbor.  They built up the back story (sometimes interviewing people who knew the soldier) before emphasizing the horror of what the soldier faced, how he suffered, and sacrifices he (and his family) made.

I also happened to watch The Longest Day (aptly named since it is a 3 hour film) this weekend, which tells about Normandy from the Allied and Axis perspectives.  This provided an interesting contrast, because this film portrayed the Allied leaders in a positive light.  However, The Longest Day portrayed the German leaders in a similar way that Burns portrayed American military leaders.  Like Burns did with Americans, this film portrayed Axis leaders as incompetent, unaware of the actual reality of the soldiers on the field, and unwilling to give the supplies necessary for the soldiers to be successful.  Also, Burns and The Longest Day were consistent in showing how the soldiers were viewed as expendable.   It is interesting that about thirty years later, Burns would shift the view and portray American military leaders as Nazi military leaders had been portrayed previously.  So, it makes me wonder…was this the initial intention of the film?  Did Ken Burns set out to make a film that portrayed soldiers and their leaders in a certain way or is this where his findings led him?

It would seem like on some level it had be a conscious decision because of what he left out of The War.  In an interview in “We Live in a Digital World,” Burns says that they had “hundreds of hours of interviews, hundreds of hundreds of hours of still photographs and thousands of hours of footage.”  So how did he choose to include what he did and exclude the rest?  He didn’t talk about successful military campaigns – only ones that were admittedly mishandled.  Thus leading viewers to assume that this was the norm.  He also portrays the American soldiers as heroic because it is easy to see the Germans and Japanese as the obvious bad guys.  So, the film talks about American casualties, but never mentions the Japanese or German casualties.  It is also interesting that he makes a point to include the stories of a Japanese American soldier and an African American soldier, portraying them as no different than any other soldier.  Yet, he doesn’t mentions that Japanese Americans were being sent to internments in the U.S. – so why wasn’t this covered as part of the back story?  He never discussed the fact that the U.S. had  segregated armed forces at this time.  So, more than likely, this African American soldiers wouldn’t have served along side the other soldiers that risked their lives.

Would this have changed the message of the film?  I don’t know.   However, it is also clear that Ken Burns doesn’t present all the details.  Does this make it any less useful?  Does this make it a less adequate picture of what war is about?  Does this affect its usefulness as a tool of public history?  How about in the classroom?  I don’t know think because the film becomes not useful in the classroom simply because it doesn’t show all the details.  It simply means the teacher has a responsibility to help her students see these limits in the film ( and hopefully identify these shortcomings in all sources).

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Radio’s Holy Experiment

Today I listened to an episode of Cavalcade of America, which was a radio program done by the American Historical Association. I had heard old radio shows about Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Monsiour Poirot, the Green Lantern, and others. However, this was my first exposure to this program, which ran from 1935 until the mid 1950s. It was meant to bring history to the masses in an entertaining way. As Ian Tyrrell says in Historians in Public, “Cavalcade sought to use the the past to legimate the present…” (105).  This episode supported this argument.

The episode I listened to was called “William Penn and the Holy Experiment,” which originally aired on October 13, 1937. By reading the title, I thought this was going to be about the type of colony William Penn created in Pennsylvania, specifically how he extended religious freedom to many different religions (hence the “Holy Experiment”). I was mistaken. It was about how Penn set up a colony, but had little to do with the religious freedom extended. While, the issue of the persecution of Quakers did come up (Penn defended them to King Charles II) and it was mentioned that everyone would be free, the majority of the episode focused on relations between newly arrived Europeans and, as they were called in the show, Indians/Injuns/Painted Red Men. You hear Penn refuse 6,000 pounds from a company that wanted to have a monopoly to trade with the Native Americans. To which Penn responds, “‘There shall be freedom and equality for all”‘ and that they should try to ‘”make friendship and a league with them.”‘ This topic continues to arise throughout the episode as you witness Penn making peace and friendship at the first meeting with the local tribes, trying to convince his friend that the Native Americans are good, and as he discovers that one of the local tribesmen rescued his friends daughter who was lost in the woods. This validates Tyrrell’s claim that the purpose of the series was to legitimize the present with the past. By showing Penn’s relationship with the natives as kind, giving, and understanding, it argues that Europeans presence and then the creating of the Untied States here is okay and just because the Native Americans wanted us to be like brothers (as the Chief tells Penn in the first meeting, “Injuns brothers with Yankees”).

The “Holy Experiment” refers not to the experiment of extending religious freedom to all as I had assumed, but instead refers to the experiment of colonizing Pennsylvania. It is holy because Penn describes it as a gift from God. God chose them (him and his brother were talking at this point) to create a country there. Once again, the past is serving to legitimize the present by insinuating that the United States was a gift of God.. If God wanted Penn to create a colony there, who are we to argue with God?

There were some other aspects of the show that I found very interesting.

First, at the beginning of the show the explain when and where Penn was born and then move quickly to his meeting with King Charles II. Through this, though, we discover that Penn lived in England his whole life (36 years) at the time of his meeting with the King. I find it interesting that although he has lived there for 36 years, he has no English accent. The King and his brother, who was also at the meeting, had British accents, but Penn did not. The only explanation I came up with for this is that the writers, producer, whomever, wanted to further show Penn as an American, not English. It does nothing to legitimate American present if an Englishman did all these things; it is only possible if he is American. By choosing not to give Penn an English accent, they are accentuating his “Americanness”.

Also, I found their choice of background music interesting. The background (and three minute introduction) to the show was an instrumental version of “Here in My Arms” from the operetta Dearest Enemy. Throughout the show, the narrator continued to make connections between Penn and the formation of the United States that would happen about a century later. This choice simply continued this trend since this operetta was about the Revolutionary War. It just serves as another reminder for the audience of Penn’s influence on where America was in 1937.

While this did make the audience faintly aquatinted with William Penn. It seems that this is not the intention. When truly reviewing the content of the show, it becomes clear that very little is actually told about Penn. The only thing one truly learns about him is his date of birth, he was married, had a daughter and son, and wanted to create peaceful relations with the Native Americans (which seems accurate). However, it doesn’t discuss how these peaceful relations seemed to be the exception rather than the norm. It doesn’t discuss how this did not apply to Pennsylvania after William Penn. It doesn’t talk about the role of religion in Pennsylvania. The list could go on and on.

Why not include these things? The answer relates back to the intention of the show. It would be harder to legitimize the present through the past if the show had presented the ways Native Americans had been negatively treated. My best guess as to why the freedom of religion wasn’t covered was because this show was run on popular radio (CBS and NBC), so they were trying to draw in the most listeners possible. By not discussing religion, they did not isolate any groups of people (like anyone who was anti-Catholic or anti-Semitic) and could thus get more people to listen.

So, is this good or bad? Is it better to provide a more accurate picture and have less people receive it? Or is it better to give a general (or partial), glossed over, only positive picture that more people will listen to? I don’t actually think these are the only options though. I think it is possible to provide a more accurate picture of history in an engaging way that pushes people to challenge what they know and think. This is what I hope to do with my audience. I don’t want to use history to legitimize anything. Instead I want to use history to challenge my future students to think critically. I would want them to question what their history books are telling them. What is being told? Who’s perspective is this? What is missing? What does all this mean to us today? To assume that the audience of the Cavalcade of America or my future students are incapable of doing this is a misperception. I believe they are capable of this and would actually become more interested and engaged in history in the process.

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Just throw me a life raft!

As I read the Prologue and Part 1 of Ian Tyrell’s book Historians in Public and Alan Brinkley’s article “Historians and their Publics” from The Journal of American History (Vol. 81, No. 3), I found myself picturing historians and their publics in a very peculiar way.  Picture historians in a boat in the middle of the sea.  All around this boat are the public (audiences).  They are trying to get on the boat and want to get on the boat.  However, the historians are unable to help them for several reasons.  First, because they split up into little groups to try to reach the people.  Second, they are trying to create complex machines and riggings to pull the people in instead of simply throwing the buoy overboard and pulling the people up.  So instead the people are swimming to shore, finding pieces of drift wood, etc.  While this is a crude, and not completely accurate picture, this is how the academic historical field seems to appear to me from these authors explanations.

Both authors identify specialization as a key reason for dispute within the field and its failure to reach outside audiences.  However, I do not think specialization is necessarily the problem.  Some specialization is required in the historical field.  Just like the general public may not be interested in a 300 page book on some minute detail of one battle of the civil war, they will also not be interested in a 1,000 page book that covers the entire civil war.  There needs to be some balance in between when trying to reach the public in general.  Rather than specialization, I think language, discourse and presentation is the greater culprit.  When the general public is looking for history, which they are, they are not looking for a school lesson.  They are looking to learn while enjoying themselves.  Lofty, complex language filled with words that would easily win you a scrabble game do not entertain.  This isn’t to say that the goal of history should solely be to entertain.  However, if you are interested in a nonacademic audience, than one must consider what that audience is looking for.

Even I, as a history major, are just as likely to go to a non-history scholar source as I am to something else when looking at historical issues outside of a class.  Why? Because when I am not in class, I don’t want to be taught through dry facts, simply because they are facts.  I want to be engaged.  I want to learn, but in an engaging manner.  In many ways historical scholars have lost this ability.  It is not enough to string together facts, but instead they must be presented in a way that invites the public to engage in the topic with the scholar rather than simply learn from the scholar.  The public is out there waiting for a life raft.

As a future teacher, I feel like I am in an interesting position of both waiting for a life raft and eventually being the one trying reach those in the sea.  These ideas are so important for me to remember as well.  I cannot simply give my future students the information and facts assuming they will engage because the facts themselves are interesting.  I have to make the interesting and accessible, which is sometimes easier said than done.  I think this is not something I or history scholars can simply learn once and be done; it is, and should be, a conscious struggle with each topic, book, lesson or unit.  It is important to not only know the facts, but to keep your intended audience in mind.

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Denton Township Cemetery

For the first assignment of the semester, I went to a local cemetery in my hometown.  It is actually the only cemetery in the area.  I am from a rural community, so many families have someone buried here.   As I was there I came up with several different questions people might ask.  I found it difficult to distinguish whether some questions would be asked by historians or visitors.  I realized this is because often they may share the same questions.

So here are some questions that I thought historians and visitors both might ask:

1. When was this cemetery created?
2. Who takes care of the cemetery?

Visitors might have some additional questions.

1. What is the oldest headstone here?
2. What are the hours of visitation?
3. How would you have a family member buried here?

I think historians would have more questions to ask though.

1. Why was this created when it was?
2. Why was it created where it is?
3. Who does it “serve”?
4. What types of people have been buried here? Has this changed throughout its existence?
5. Why is it designed the way it is?
6. What purpose does it serve? (i.e., is it simply a place to bury the deceased or does it hold other symbolic, religious, or emotional significance for the community?)
7. How does the community see this place?

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My Mission

I am actually kind of excited about this blog – to have a place where I can explore my feelings about the readings for my HST 480 course, history in general and how I want to present history to my audience.  As a future teacher, it would seem obvious that my audience would be my future students.  However, I think it is actually much broader than that.  I think I have to think of my audience as the community I would work in and the others my students would come in contact with.  This then really increases my audience exponentially.  So, then the question becomes how do I present history so that it is not an isolated subject to learn inside a classroom with no relevancy outside of the classroom?  How do I help my students connect with history, engage in it, and be excited to see, use, and share it outside of the classroom?  At this point, this is how I see my mission this semester: exploring my ideas about history and how I present this in a meaningful way to my audience.

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