[On December 4th,
2016, James Monroe was elected the
fifth president of the United States. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five
histories and contexts linked to Monroe’s life and presidency.]
On two
very different, yet equally meaningful, ways to use a historic site.
James
Monroe’s longtime home, Ash Lawn-Highland (renamed in recent years as simply Highland, but I’ll always know
it by that hyphenated name!), sits just down the hill from Thomas
Jefferson’s much more famous Monticello, and it’s
fair to say that Monroe’s home will forever be in that shadow of that most
prominent Charlottesville, Virginia, and American landmark. The relationship
between the two houses and sites, much like that between the two
Founding Fathers and Presidents (and their neighbor and the president
who served in between their terms, James Madison), is certainly an interesting
one, and could lead to plenty of American Studies analyses in its own right;
but I believe that we owe it to Monroe and his home not to analyze them solely
in that light. Moreover, having had the opportunity to spend two high school
summers working at Ash Lawn-Highland, I came away particularly interested in
the relationship between two quite distinct elements of the site.
The first,
and far more traditional, is the site’s recreation of Monroe’s home and era, its role
as an educational and performative historic site. There are a couple of
interestingly unique components to that role, to be sure: Monroe, an alumnus of
the College of William and Mary, left his house to that institution, and so its
educational
connections are long-term and multi-layered; and the site is a working farm,
making its recreations not just performative but in many ways quite productive
as well. Yet despite those unique qualities, Ash Lawn-Highland’s identity as a
historic site parallels it very fully to other similar sites, from Monticello
and Madison’s Montpelier to
America’s many other historic
houses. Such sites, as we discussed at length at the Spring
2012 New England ASA Colloquium, have their strengths and weaknesses,
their opportunities and limitations in how they connect audiences to the past;
they are in any case an invaluable part of our national heritage, and Ash
Lawn-Highland is certainly a representative and interesting example of the
type.
But every
summer for many decades, Ash Lawn-Highland has featured a very different event:
the Opera Festival (known,
when I worked for two summers in the ticket and box office, as the Summer Music Festival). While
some of the shows perfomed in the Festival are period pieces from the era of
Monroe’s life, many are not—each summer includes at least one 20th
century musical, for example; and many of the operas that have been performed
over the years are likewise outside of the context of Monroe’s era. Yet what
struck me about the festival, which for most of its run saw the shows performed
on the site’s grounds (they have moved in recent years to a different
Charlottesville theater), was precisely what it contributed to the experience
of Ash Lawn-Highland: a new perspective on the home, in every sense; a chance
to sit behind the main house on a summer evening, to see it in a different
light (literally and figuratively), to have an experience that felt not at all
disconnected from the goals and identities of America’s founders and of the
educational, historical, and cultural legacies of their lives and era and
purposes of the sites that remember them. There are many ways to connect to a
figure like Monroe, and the world of which he was and is a part; in the
Festival, Ash Lawn-Highland highlighted precisely the variety and power of
those different approaches.
Next
MonroeStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Monroe histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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