National Trust Conference, Day 1: Historic Trails, Atomic Bombs, and Some Questionable History

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is in the house! This is one of the largest conferences that Spokane has hosted, certainly the largest history-themed conference, and it seems to be going really well. Today I gave a presentation, learned about plotting historic trails, explored three sites of a proposed new national park, heard some dubious historical interpretation, and met a lot of interesting people.

I only attended half the day today, and my first activity was presenting at my own session, Using Mobile Interpretation to Strengthen Preservation Communities. Here are the slides--though I am not sure how much sense they make without my presentation:



In the afternoon I attended two sessions. Happy Trails! Going to Great Lengths to Preserve National Historic Trails was fascinating but should have been subtitled Going to Great Lengths to FIND National Historic Trails. The three panelists described their work on three historic trails--Dave Crowley of the BLM on the Oregon Trail, Angie Krall of the Forest Service on the Old Spanish Trail, and Julie McGilvray of the NPS on the Butterfield Stage Route. What fascinated me was the incredibly painstaking work each person did with old maps, surveyors notes, and painstaking archaeology to pinpoint the routes and campsites of these long-vanished routes. Their identifications hinged on such items as a copper shell casing, a broken Spanish bridle bit, and a shard from a whiskey bottle. Locating these routes is fine-grained detective work.

My second afternoon session was  Interpreting the History of the Atomic Age. This session featured presenters for the three sites of the proposed Manhattan Project National Monument. Ethiel Garlington explained some of the preservation issues at Oak Ridge in Tennessee, Colleen French ("I'm just a girl who fell in love with a reactor") explained the special problems at Hanford where historic preservation takes a necessary back seat to cleaning up hazardous materials, and Heather McClenahan told us about Los Alamos.

I have to think that this session was planned, earlier in the year when proposals were submitted, as an announcement of a new national park. As late as this summer it seemed like the proposed park was on the fast track. But in September the bill failed, at least for now, partly on the objections of Congressman Dennis Kucinich. "At a time when we should be organizing the world toward abolishing nuclear weapons before they abolish us, we are instead indulging in hideous admiration at our cleverness as a species. The Bomb is about graveyards, not National Parks," said Kucinich. The Park Service will likely try again, but for now there is no Manhattan Project Park

One of the reasons for the failure was unintentionally made clear during the session, where two of the five presenters engaged in weird digressions from their subjects to deliver endorsements of the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Session chair Sean Smith of the National Parks Conservation Association stated that there was absolutely no evidence that the Japanese were considering surrender and gave very high estimates of casualties if the Americans had invaded. McClenahan added at the end of her presentation (which until that moment had been about preserving historic buildings in New Mexico) that some people disputed the high casualty figures if an invasion had been necessary  but how do those people explain then why the U.S. manufactured so many Purple Hearts for the invasion of Japan that the military did not use up the the supply until recently?

These asides were both completely irrelevant to the presentation and bad history. Smiths claims were naive. Japan sent out what many historians believe was a peace feeler to the United States before the dropping of the first bomb. There is plenty of evidence that some of the high casualty figures for an invasion of the Japanese mainland were manufactured after that war as post-facto justifications for the use of atomic bombs on civilian populations. And as for the purple hearts surplus--the United States also exited the war with a surplus of toilet paper, so much that some government agencies used WW2 army toilet paper into the 1960s. Gentle reader, I will allow you a moment to make your own joke here. You do not have to be opposed to the decision to drop the bomb (I personally feel it was the right call) to object to these presentations.

Besides being poor history, the pro-bomb arguments were wildly out of place and do real damage to the laudable cause of creating this national park. It was very like hearing a presentation on why we need a new Civil War park interrupted by an explanation of how the South was right about states rights, or "Manifest Destiny: Not So Bad" as the tagline for a new westward expansion monument.

In the question session an audience member mentioned that the mayor of Nagasaki had sent a letter to President Obama, opposing the creation of the park. I wonder why?

I should not make too much of this--both presenters spent only a few minutes defending the bomb in otherwise excellent presentations. I look forward to tomorrow!

Burton Holmes Archive of 20th Century Travel Films

Check out this charming silent travel film of a 1920-something visit to Glacier National Park:



The film is part of the Burton Holmes Archive:


The Burton Holmes Archive is the world’s largest repository of films, photographs, programs, scrapbooks, and other ephemera related to the life and career of Burton Holmes, the “Father of the Travelogue”, and that of his cameraman and associate, Andre de la Varre.  If you’d like to see more of this collection, take a look at our Photostream, our Photo Sets, or watch a slideshow of the entire collection. In addition, you can watch films made by Holmes at: Burton Holmes Films, as well as those by de la Varre at Andre de la Varre Films.

The above film appears to be the only one from the Northwest, however there is also a film of a 1920s visit to the Grand Canyon (check out the clothes on the tourists!) and such exotic destinations as Bits of Life In Japan 1920s or Nine Glories of Paris - 1920s. The casual racism of some of the captions are striking to the modern eye (the Japanese entertainers are "charmingly childlike") but overall the films are striking and intimate glimpses into the world of 90 years ago.

Debate Over Little Bighorn Battle Monument

NY Times: Debate Over Little Bighorn Battle Monument: "A political tug of war has raged between the National Park Service, Custer buffs and Indian tribes over how best to fix a litany of problems with the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, in south central Montana."

"Custer's Last Stand" by Thomas Hart Benton, 1943.

The above is an interesting article about how a decaying infrastructure at the Little Big Horn is forcing interested parties to come up with a compromise solution. The Crow Nation in particular is flexing its political and moral authority over the issue and demanding a leadership role in interpreting and event which is a turning point in their history and happened right on what became their reservation.

The NY Times has an archive of Custer stories that provide background and snapshots of the man's declining historical reputation:

• A review of Nathaniel Philbrick's new volume on Custer (Times Verdict: meh.)
• A 1997 article about the controversy to build a monument at Little Big Horn dedicated to the Indians killed at that battle. The monument was eventually built.
• A 1993 decision to rename George Custer Elementary School to Thurgood Marshall Elementary School. And in his home state of Michigan!
• A 1991 article about how what had been Custer Battlefield National Monument had just been renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, to much anger is some quarters.
• A 1921 article by Custer's long-surviving widow Libby about how the battle should be remembered.
• An 1880 article describing widow Libby Custer's complaints about a statue of her husband erected at West Point (she considered it insufficiently heroic and eventually succeeded in having it removed.)
• ... and so on, back to this 1876 "Sketch of Gen. Custer" written right after the battle, which informed Times readers that "Major Gen. George A. Custer, who was killed with his whole command while attacking an encampment of Sioux Indians, under command of Sitting Bull, was one of the bravest and most widely known officers in the United States Army." Oh hogwash.
• And my absolute favorite, this article about John Martin, who fought with Garibaldi in Italy before immigrating to America, enlisting in the army and becoming one of Custer's buglers. Martin escaped the fate of his company when he was dispatched just before the battle with a message pleading for reinforcements. Later her served in the Spanish American war and eventually became a subway conductor in New York.

You might notice no articles between the late 1920 and the 1980s above. It seems that the Times has put articles from that era back behind a pay wall. I am  not sure when this happened or why!

Introducing Guest Blogger Greg Shine

We are trying something new at Northwest History. This week Greg Shine, Chief Ranger & Historian at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, will be posting here. Shine is a pioneer in expanding interpretation at the National Parks into the digital realm. Check out Fort Vancouver's multimedia page for some of his work--podcasts, Flickr photos, a Twitter feed and slideshows--and you will see that this is not your father's National Park Service.

Shine is working on even more ambitious digital efforts at Fort Vancouver, including efforts to harness mobile devices to bring new levels of interpretation to park visitors. He writes about these efforts at his blog New Media & Historic Site Interpretation.

Shine also runs the Fort Vancouver Public History Field School camp and is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of History at Portland State University. Take it away, Greg!

[Photo: Greg Shine at work. The image is from the Fort Vancouver Public History Program page.]

Does the Northwest Need a Heritage Area?

Why are there no federally-designated National Heritage Areas in the Pacific Northwest? And if we were to propose some, what would they be?

I came to these questions after reading Carroll Van West's nice article in the current Organization of American Historians newsletter: Historians and the Opportunities of National Heritage Areas: "National Heritage Areas are a significant development in the United States’s national parks system. Since 1984, Congress has created forty-nine National Heritage Areas, stretching from the Essex National Heritage Area in Massachusetts to the newly designated Kenai Mountain-Turnagain Arm National Heritage Area in Alaska."

National Heritage Areas have been around for 25 years now but I think it is fair to say that they are little-understood. Van West does a nice job of explaining the heritage area concept and practice and suggesting ways that historians can become more involved. "For public historians and scholars who wish to take their research and classes into historic settings, National Heritage Areas are potentially valuable avenues to explore," Van West writes. "With justification, historians have long decried the incomplete history, out of step with prevailing scholarly research and interpretation, which they encounter at local and state parks and museums. The same criticism may be launched at heritage areas, but this federal program also offers opportunities for engagement between universities and communities that potentially gives historians a way to bring new questions, sources, and understandings to large public audiences." Amen!

So with these ringing words echoing in my head, I went to the NPS Map of National Heritage Areas to find the ones in the Pacific Northwest. There aren't any! OK, there is that one in Alaska, but none at all in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. Friends, we wuz robbed! And since the heritage areas seem to be organized from the bottom up, it is no one's fault but our own. Let's fix this, shall we?

Fortunately, the National Park Service has a handy set of resources title Becoming a National Heritage Area. These include the very-objective-looking "Suggested Criteria" which include:

"1. The area has an assemblage of natural, historic, or cultural resources that together represent distinctive aspects of
American heritage worthy of recognition, conservation, interpretation, and continuing use, and are best managed as
such an assemblage through partnerships among public and private entities, and by combining diverse and sometimes
noncontiguous resources and active communities;

"2. The area reflects traditions, customs, beliefs, and folk life that are a valuable part of the national story;

"3. The area provides outstanding opportunities to conserve natural, cultural, historic, and/ or scenic features;

"4. The area provides outstanding recreational and educational opportunities;

"5. Resources that are important to the identified theme or themes of the area retain a degree of integrity capable of
supporting interpretation . . . "

There are five additional criteria, mostly addressing planning and cooperation.

So what broad historic themes are uniquely illustrated/supported/preserved by historic sites, institutions, and peoples in the Pacific Northwest? My quick thoughts include:

A heritage area based around the continuing historical interactions between Indians and whites on the Columbia Plateau with emphasis on the fur trade, missions, and military conflict. I sketched it out by creating a custom Google Map (which for some reason is not centering properly!):


View Cultures in Collision National Heritage Area in a larger map

Some other possible PNW heritage areas include one focused on mining along the Silver Valley in Idaho, a maritime heritage area in the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound, and a pioneer Oregon heritage area in the Willamette Valley.

Does anyone have additional ideas? Would anyone like to work on this?

New Bill to Boost History Education, Reignite Culture Wars

Senators Robert Byrd, Edward Kennedy and Lamar Alexander have introduced a bill titled "Restoring American History and Civics to Classroom Prominence." Alexander (pictured here) described the bill in his floor speech, saying it "will help to put the teaching of American history and civics back in its rightful place, in our classrooms, so our children can grow up learning what it means to be an American. The legislation which we have introduced would expand summer academies for outstanding teachers, authorize new teacher programs, require States to set standards for the teaching and learning of U.S. history, and create new opportunities to compare the tests that students take on U.S. history."

Alexander's office also issued a press release which boiled the legislation down to bullet points, stating that the legislation would:

• Authorize 100 summer academies for outstanding students and teachers of U.S. History and align those academies with locations in the national park system, such as the John Adams House or Independence Hall
• Double authorization for funding “Teaching American History” programs in local school districts, which today involve 20,000 students as a part of No Child Left Behind
• Require states to develop and implement standards for student assessments in U.S. History, although there would be no federal accountability requirement as there is for reading and mathematics
• Allow states to compare history and civics test scores of 8th- and 12th-grade students by establishing a 10-state pilot program that would expand the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP)

The most exciting parts of the bill are the first two items. One hundred summer academies is a lot! Tying them to the National Park Service is an interesting idea, and a tribute the NPS lobbyists, who deserve a big raise. Summer academies or institutes have been among the most successful parts of many, many Teaching American History projects, and the model is also used by the NEH and Gilder-Lehrman Institute. If one goes to the NPS History pages, and begins exploring the many historic National Monuments, historic trails, and National Heritage Areas (and when were those created, anyway? I had not heard of them) you can see the many possibilities for these institutes. I am already thinking of the NPS historic sites in my region, and the possibilities of summer institutes.

The second item, doubling the funding for the TAH program, is wonderful news. The Teaching American History program is designed to improve the teaching of American history in the schools by bringing together teachers, historians, and enough resources (by which I mean funding) for them to do some interesting collaborations. I have been deeply involved in the TAH program from the beginning, writing grant proposals, teaching the teachers, and most recently as an evaluator and consultant.

I really dislike the third item. I can see the goal here, making states develop history standards will help to ensure that history is taught and valued in the public schools. But who writes the standards? I see these standards becoming a political football and reigniting the culture wars of the 80s and 90s on the state level. Remember the disastrous reception to the 1994 National History Standards? This was a top-down attempt by an idealistic but politically naive history profession to impose a new set of historically sound standards on the nation's schools. Denounced (unfairly, but predictably) by Rush Limbaugh and Lynne Cheney as being politically correct, they were condemned by the U.S. Senate, 99 to 1. Lets pick that scab, shall we?

The last item, using NAEP to roll out a pilot project for standardized testing in history, also runs the risk of politicization. The great dilemma here is that in the era of NCLB high-stakes testing, that which is not tested does not get taught. And that which does get tested is "taught to the test"--stifling the teacher creativity that is one of the great strengths of our system.

Overall this bill is great news. Thank you, Senators!

Historians: Let's get out in front of this. Go to the NPS site and see what historic site matches your specialty and pick up the phone. But then make contact with your university School of Education (I know, I know) and find out how to get involved in the drafting of those state standards. This kind of bureaucratic work is time consuming and unrewarding. But not nearly so time consuming and unrewarding as teaching your survey classes in ten years if you do nothing and your class is full of young people who were taught all sorts of incorrect historical mischief in the public schools!