On the living history site with a profound organizing argument.
I’ve already blogged briefly, as part of this
post on Virginia AmericanStudies connections across the centuries, about
Mechal Sobel’s amazing The
World They Made Together: Black and White Values in 18th Century
Virginia (1988). What made Sobel’s book so unique and impressive to me
when I read it in college—and what made it a significant influence on the idea
of cross-cultural transformation at the heart of my own Redefining
American Identity—was her use and analysis of seemingly small, everyday
items and details to develop her sweeping and convincing argument about how
Virginia’s multiple cultures and communities came together to produce its own unique
and enduring identity. She located some of our biggest and most defining ideas
in some of our smallest and most intimate practices, a skill that exemplifies
what AmericanStudies can do and offer.
I’m not sure exactly what I expected as my boys, my Dad, and I drove out to
Staunton’s Frontier Culture Museum,
but I know it had a lot more to do with Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone than
Mechal Sobel. But while the Museum did indeed include replicated or reassembled
versions of 18th
and 19th
century Virginia cabins and homes (in which young Davy and Daniel and their
peers certainly could have been born and raised), it also included exhibits on
old world homes that were just as painstakingly and lovingly constructed and inhabited:
English, Irish, German, and West African
sites and homes, to be exact. (The newest exhibit, on Native
American homes, is still under construction but promises to be just as
compelling.) Each site was staffed by historical interpreters dressed in period
costume but offering a 21st century perspective on the place, time,
and details, a choice that interestingly complements how Plimoth
Plantation presents its histories and stories.
That diversity and depth of sites was already surprising and effective to
this AmericanStudies visitor, but the Museum took things one big step further.
As the orientation film (narrated by David McCullough!) notes, the Museum’s
exhibits are divided into two distinct sections: the old world sites in a first
part, linked to one another as some of the places from which these Virginian
arrivals came; and the new world/Virginia sites in a second part. As such, for
those visitors who travel through the exhibits in that suggested order (and the
site is spaced so as to make it difficult to do so in any other way), the
Virginia exhibits quite literally build on those old world starting points,
making clear how much they developed out of the cultures that came here but
became part of a new and shared culture all their own. Without losing sight of
all the individual details and aspects that define each particular site and
moment, that is, the Museum as a whole builds, just as Sobel’s book does, to a
broader, defining argument about the Virginian and American culture composed
out of those details and all the peoples they comprised.
Next Virginia trip tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Daytrips you’d suggest?
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