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Postmodern Past: Historical interpreters search for ways to reach a point-and-click generation

Imagine a postcard-perfect day. A tourist family ambles around the Old State Capitol Plaza in downtown Springfield. Mom and dad and two pre-teens have posed for digital images in front of the grand, eroded columns of the Old State Capitol Building. They have discovered that this old sandstone building was erected through the efforts of Lincoln and "the Long Nine," a group of Springfield legislators who finessed the movement of the state capital from its former site in Vandalia. The family has sniffed around the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, a few paces north on Sixth Street, and peered with obvious interest at the adjoining museum, nearing completion and scheduled to open in the spring. 

Now family members are focusing on the life-sized bronze statuary group, Springfield's Lincoln by sculptor Larry Anderson, which symbolically evokes the Lincoln family on the critical day of October 4, 1854. Always attentive to her husband's appearance, Mary is smoothing Abraham's bronze lapel, while their favorite son Willie stands dutifully at their side and Robert, the eldest, scampers away — always the independent soul. Lincoln's first major speech, on the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, is tucked into his hatband and his long journey to the White House is about to begin. Encircling the group of bronzes is an inlaid circle containing the opening lines of Lincoln's Farewell Address to the citizenry of Springfield, one of his most poignant and heartfelt utterances: "To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything."

Now this imaginary contemporary family is drawn to exhibits that flank the statues, storyboards in aluminum erected by the community consortium Looking for Lincoln Heritage Commission, with considerable assistance from the Illinois Historical Preservation Agency. This first pair of exhibits highlights the key events of 1837 (the year Lincoln settled in Springfield) and 1854 (the year dramatized by the statues). Each has two tracks of commentary, one on Lincoln himself, and the other on Springfield history and culture. These two exhibits are the first of 33 that have been funded among the 75 that are planned. 

The visitor will feel a kind of historical doubleness, simultaneously experiencing the present moment and the resonant events of the past, for each exhibit of this Springfield walking tour is situated on the exact physical spot it commemorates, including the location of Lincoln's barber, William Florville; of his carriage-maker, Obed Lewis; the handball alley where Lincoln played; the site of George Hall's haberdashery shop where he bought his famous stovepipe hats; Samuel Ball's Bath Shop where he took his weekly baths; Dr. French's Dentist Office where the future president received dental care; and Brunswick's Billiard Hall where the usually disciplined lawyer could unwind with his friends.  

Each features a 4-inch medallion, or raised disk, that can yield a handsome rubbing, and the overall effect of the completed exhibits will be educational. Each will provide factual information about Lincoln's life and about the everyday culture of 19th century Springfield. This family of tourists — and the thousands who will follow — will learn about the personal habits, hygiene, dress and amusements of Americans who lived a century and a half ago. 

Directors of museums and historic sites have long recognized that older patrons were already suffering from information overload.  And the younger patrons, increasingly comfortable with cyberspace, were simply turned off by the glass-case exhibits of traditional museums. So the new historians wanted — and urgently needed — high-profile exhibits that were palpable, accessible and instantly memorable. They learned that by piggy-backing on famous political icons such as Lincoln, Jefferson or Washington they could attract a wider audience and communicate a broader range of cultural information. The goal was no longer to merely introduce Lincoln or Jefferson, say, but to dramatize the day-to-day life of the world in which each lived and breathed. 

And this user-friendly, interactive historical instruction will build upon the exhibits at the Lincoln museum, which will feature state-of-the-art technology, including holograms of President Lincoln, an exact walk-through replica of the Lincoln Log Cabin and historically accurate period costumes. 

The 75 Lincoln sites in Springfield (in addition to the Lincoln Home operated by the National Park Service, the Lincoln Law offices and the Lincoln Tomb) will be linked to a larger heritage network of Lincoln sites throughout central Illinois, many of them administered by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. These sites include the David Davis Mansion (McLean County), the Lincoln Log Cabin (Coles County), the Mount Pulaski Courthouse (Logan County), the New Salem State Historic Site (Menard County) and the Vandalia Statehouse (Fayette County). 

If one adds such culturally significant structures as the Vachel Lindsay Home (also administered by the state historic preservation agency), the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Dana-Thomas House and the James Millikin Home in Decatur (on the National Register of Historic Places), it is no surprise that the Looking for Lincoln coalition is petitioning Congress to expand its 10-county base of operation to include at least 41 additional counties, making that commission eligible for federal funding. 

Thus, the opening of the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and the ongoing construction of the museum have become catalysts for much broader, grass-roots efforts at preservation. Probably at no other time has the state of Illinois, along with county historical societies and local museums, been so self-consciously active in resurrecting and showcasing the most important sites and artifacts of Illinois heritage. Cynics might argue that cultural preservation makes good business sense because it often brings in tourism dollars. And while that claim may be superficially true, the roots of these initiatives go much deeper.

To understand this contagious interest in Illinois heritage, not merely in central Illinois, but in such places as Oak Park, Galena, Carbondale, Bishop Hill (Henry County) and the Mormon-related sites in Nauvoo, one must appreciate the quiet revolution that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Historical interpreters and re-enactors virtually redefined cultural preservation by laying greater emphasis on commemorative and participatory activities of all sorts (battles, peace treaties, debates and speeches) and by involving ordinary people in re-creating these events through acting, interpreting, storytelling and imitating the craft traditions (sewing, tool-making, cooking and the production of furniture, musical instruments and weaponry) appropriate for each place and event. 

During these decades, historical meccas such as Gettysburg and Williamsburg boomed. "Heritage" became the popular word to encapsulate this phenomenon, a quintessentially American response to history and culture, amounting to personal ownership, a way of laying claim to the past — not merely collecting memorabilia, but making a kind of existential commitment to history and culture by reliving the past.  

Re-enactors at Gettsyburg, for example, would arrive with their families, all dressed in period costumes. And for three days they lived in tents and cooked food that duplicated the period grub of July 1863. The inherent danger, of course, was that these historical interpreters might sometimes place too much emphasis on the physical uniforms, swords and battlegrounds and not enough on the ethical and political controversies that engendered them in the first place. 

So there still remained plenty of work for the academic historians, who could provide the important contexts and interpretations of battles, speeches, artifacts and gravesites. In the best venues, heritage and history reinforced one another superbly. Many deep readers of Civil War history may well have been inspired by mock battles witnessed at Chickamauga, Pea Ridge or Shiloh.

Heritage also became part of the national media when filmmaker Ken Burns, who worked tirelessly through the late 1980s, produced his 1990 12-part miniseries, The Civil War, a beguiling mixture of documentary photographs, photomontage, sound-dubbing, voice-overs and quotations from actual letters of Civil War soldiers (read by the likes of Garrison Keillor and Morgan Freeman), punctuated by edited commentaries from famous historians. Burns performed similar feats of magic with his documentaries on baseball and jazz, and all of these masterworks were aired on the Public Broadcasting System.  

In fact, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as such institutions as the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, the National Air and Space Museum and the Library of Congress, have all played significant roles in our national dialogue about our past. Americans today enjoy a much richer appreciation of their national and local heritage because of the combined efforts of these taxpayer-supported institutions.

Of course, Ken Burns and PBS were not the first to recognize the powerful attraction of the past. Filmmakers have long recognized the national obsession with nostalgia in all its forms. So they typically employed old cars, furniture, swords, ships, houses and automobiles as historical shortcuts and visual cues for American audiences that had to be shown, not merely told, the historical era of the film they were watching. A little rock and roll or big band jazz on the soundtrack provided an equivalent orientation for the ear. The recent "biopic" Ray, about the life of singer Ray Charles Robinson, established its historical authority early on by evoking the cars and clothing of the rural south in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and by duplicating the infectious jive and blues that issued from the roadhouses and honky-tonks.

Nostalgia always appeals to Americans because their culture changes too often and too fast for them to apprehend it; nostalgia offers another opportunity to linger over and appreciate the artifacts of the past. And, as a nation of consumers, Americans really do identify themselves with objects and brands, Hershey candy bars, Campbell soup cans, Ford automobiles and the blue and butternut gray of Civil War uniforms.

The Smithsonian Institution recognized and encouraged this nostalgic love of things, thereby becoming the most American of museums by saving the jukeboxes, arrowheads, kitchen gadgets and cars that made Americans American. 

The Smithsonian has been in the business of cultural preservation of artifacts since the Civil War era, while another Washington institution, the Library of Congress, has struggled to preserve our written past, including books, letters, pamphlets, catalogs, broadsides, proclamations, treaties and other archival documents, including photographs, films  and recordings. 

Many of the books and papers housed in that vast repository have become dangerously brittle, and it may not be technologically feasible to save them all. But many can still be digitized before they flake and crumble into dust. The Library of Congress is now transferring its most fragile recorded materials — ambient sounds and spoken words more than a century old — onto compact discs. If they don't save these sounds, children of the future may never know what Henry Ford's Model-T sounded like or recognize the chugging and puffing sounds of a typical steam locomotive.

Preservation of culture has evolved dramatically over the past few decades, and saving our heritage nowadays goes far beyond walking tours or interpreters sporting period costumes.  

The Library of Congress has most recently inaugurated the National Digital Infrastructure and Preservation Program, an initiative designed to save Web sites and other Internet material, thereby creating a kind of digital archive. Today's point-and-click generation of students routinely uses Internet sites to write term papers, just as professional researchers depend on even more sophisticated sites for access to academic articles, historical documents and other archival material. 

Yet, Internet sites often have a short shelf life and can disappear without warning, leaving their precious data in an electronic limbo. Avoiding that frustrating loss is the precise intent of the new infrastructure initiative at the Library of Congress. 

But that is only one of the potential problems with the exciting new information technologies. As media philosopher Marshall McLuhan warned his readers two generations ago, the "medium is the message." For a new generation, raised on computers, cell phones, e-mail, I-Pods, Palm Pilots, BlackBerries, Game Boys and PlayStations, information and entertainment have become de facto digital experiences. Cyberspace becomes real space. To a sixth-grader, for example, the older technology of printed pages may seem like a hopelessly dull or nightmarishly slow way to access information. The challenge for teachers, artists, interpreters, curators, historians and librarians is that pop-up ads, instant messaging and surfing the net tend to create a mind-set that is radically different from the mentality of traditional readers, who may be more patient and detail-oriented. Traditional learners may actually enjoy teasing out the subtle meanings and implications of a text without having them spelled out in telegraphic style within a colored box on an illuminated screen in what might be called "Power Point Style."  

There is abundant evidence that electronic technology can safely preserve printed texts and data; the problem is how to teach new generations to "read" (literally and symbolically) those earlier texts, such as Shakespearean plays, Victorian novels and key political speeches, many of which (such as those of Lincoln) are already available online. The English language itself is a highly sophisticated technology that, after all, precedes any digital communication.

Educators — not merely classroom teachers but historical and cultural interpreters of all stripes, including site interpreters, professional historians preparing background material, archaeologists and literary critics — will probably be practicing some form of what is now called "cultural criticism" as the technologies catch up with the different expectations of a new generation of students and tourists. 

Cultural criticism means that anything under study will be seen in its broadest possible context, and nothing will be studied in isolation from its cultural and social environment. Many educators  already are heading in that new direction and the Looking for Lincoln walking tour already has appeared on the scene.

Cultural understanding can be enhanced by creative uses of available computer software and by devising more interactive programs. Tenth-graders, for example, could read a true, not a "dumbed-down" copy of Shakespeare's Hamlet, perhaps with interlinear or parenthetical definitions of archaic language and easy links to sites on Elizabethan culture and music, complete with lute music and madrigals that could be downloaded, along with spoken versions of the speeches. And for heritage enthusiasts, an on-site digitized recording of an actor reading, for example, theFirst Inaugural or Second Inaugural addresses or the Gettysburg Address already is possible and probable. 

Digital texts of all kinds will surely become more ubiquitous, and the more links, the more opportunities to point and click, the better. Technology should exist, finally, to make all culture more "user-friendly." The written word, then, may be challenged, but also ultimately rescued by the digital culture that is clearly becoming the contemporary norm.

Even today, a visit to the Vachel Lindsay Home on Fifth Street in Springfield is not complete without reading one of his poems and appreciating his original artwork in the physical setting where he lived most of his life and where he died. In the 1920s, this Illinois poet was the most famous bard in the Western world, better known than Robert Frost. Each year, the Vachel Lindsay Association helps to commemorate and preserve his verbal artistry by inviting members of the Lindsay family to present public programs and to conduct workshops in the schools. The association also sells videotapes about the life of the poet and colored reproductions of his distinctive artwork. 

This small-scale outreach echoes a larger literary showcasing that occurs at the Illinois State Library with its biennial Illinois Authors Book Fair, an event that celebrates and honors the Illinois writers of poetry, history, crime fiction and children's literature. And the Illinois Arts Council regularly offers enabling grants so that poets and writers may visit schools and colleges to conduct workshops and read their work.  

So preserving and extending the state's and the nation's cultural heritage are indisputable mandates, the results of popular will and public policy. If anything, the trend seems to be growing stronger as new museums open their doors to the public. The Under the Prairie Museum in Elkhart preserves the "material culture" of early Illinois settlers, including buttons, clay pipes, medicine bottles, teacups, knives and other artifacts unearthed by Illinois Department of Transportation workers as they excavated and graded sites for new roads and bridges. The Hieronymus Mueller Museum in Decatur is being rebuilt on the actual grounds of the Mueller factory, where the 19th century German immigrant, a gunsmith turned industrialist, invented a water-main valve still used all over the world.

The Illinois State Museum recently completed major renovations using more digital technology. The entire first floor was redesigned to make it more accessible, and new interactive displays colorfully and effectively tell the complex story of Illinois' geological past.   

Indeed, the overall efforts at cultural preservation in the state of Illinois, symbolized by the new Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, might even be taken as a model for other states. 

Recently, the Macon County Historical Society in Decatur unveiled a new Abraham Lincoln statue by acclaimed sculptor John McClary, who also will be producing the Lincoln statue in the entrance to the new Lincoln museum.  McClary's bronze in Decatur depicts a life-sized Lincoln in ordinary clothes, studying a map of Illinois in 1837, imagining its future growth and seemingly limitless possibilities. Seen in this context, the use of new information technology by such agencies as historic preservation, especially in the new Lincoln museum, and the many grass-roots heritage activities occurring throughout the state may be precisely the sort of thing that old Abe anticipated. 


 

Dan Guillory is professor emeritus of English at Millikin University in Decatur. He has written essays on Abraham Lincoln and Vachel Lindsay and currently serves on the board of the Vachel Lindsay Association. His most recent book is Images of America: Decatur.

Illinois Issues, December 2004

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