October 6-7, 2018: National Historical Parks

[On October 1^st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to this special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historical Parks.]

On one particularly impressive thing each at three of America’s many wonderful National Historical Parks.

1)      Appomattox Court House: I’ve visited Appomattox with my sons on each of our last few Virginia trips, and each time I was struck by the same thing: the incredibly impressive short informational film at the visitors center. That might be a strange thing to highlight at a site surrounded by such history, but at the same time the informational film is a key part of any historic site visit and experience. And I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a better one than Appomattox’s: in just a few minutes it manages to feature not only the specific military and diplomatic contexts of the Civil War’s closing moments, but also broader histories of the build-up to the war, the war overall, and (most importantly and impressively) the aftermaths of peace and abolition for African Americans and the nation as a whole. If you’re ever in the Lynchburg, Virginia area, I recommend Appomattox Court House National Historical Park for that wonderful film alone (and a lot more, but the film by itself is enough to get you there)!

2)      Lowell: I’ve been to the Lowell Mills National Historical Park a handful of times, each of the last two with my sons’ respective 5^th grade class field trips. That has given me a unique appreciation for how the site teaches its histories and stories to elementary school kids, and I have nothing but great things to say about those educators and their tours and programs. But on those two visits, just as on my prior ones, I was most struck by one particular exhibit: Mill Girls & Immigrants, an exhibit that makes perfect use of one of the mill’s early 19^th century boardinghouses. There’s a lot of great stuff in that exhibit, but it features perhaps my favorite single museum space: a recreated boardinghouse bedroom where, at the press of a button, the voices of a group of mill workers (quoting from actual letters and journals) emerge from different corners of the bedroom, overlapping and fading and reemerging in a combination of individual identities and communal experience. I can’t possibly do it justice, so if you’re ever in Lowell, be sure to visit the second floor of that Mill Girls & Immigrants exhibit and see and hear it for yourself!

3)      Minute Man: My sons’ other big 5^th grade field trips were to Concord’s Minute Man National Historical Park, but I didn’t get to tag along on those. I’ve been to Minute Man a few times, however, and have each time been particularly struck by one core element of the park. While the park features a visitors center and a number of individual sites, its main attraction is the long winding path on which visitors can follow the trail of the colonial Minute Men and the British Redcoats on that historic April 1775 day. While the highway is visible from certain spots along the path, from many others it’s not; and overall the path, the surrounding historic buildings, and even I believe the woods and other natural landmarks have largely been preserved as they were in 1775. The effect reflects the best kind of immersive experience that these National Historical Parks can create, a sense that we have truly entered into a historic world and are experiencing a partial but powerful version of that place and time.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Historic Parks or National Parks you’d highlight?

October 5, 2018: National Park Studying: Acadia

[On October 1^st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]

On a few telling moments in the strikingly French history of the Maine National Park.

French explorer Samuel de Champlain named Maine’s Mount Desert Island when he sailed past it on his second voyage to the Americas, in September 1604; Champlain noted that “the tops of [the island’s mountains] are bare of trees, because there is nothing there but rocks,” and so Mount Desert it was. Nine years later, in 1613, the Jesuit priest Father Pierre Biard and forty settlers established the first French missionary colony on the island, in the area of Southwest Harbor; but later that same year, the English Captain Samuel Argall sailed north from Jamestown and destroyed the settlement, taking two priests back to Jamestown as prisoners. As that last hyperlinked article illustrates, the early 17^th century was full of such back and forth conflicts between the French and English up and down the Eastern seaboard, and the earliest history of what would become Acadia was defined largely by those shifting European American winds (while the region’s Wabanaki people were of course an established part of that history as well and remained a vital part of it through each evolution).

The island changed hands between the two nations at least a few more times over the next century and a half, but a late 18^th century moment reflects a very different international relationship as of the period of the American Revolution. Mount Desert Island had been under the control of the English Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Sir Francis Bernard, since 1760, and in 1780 the newly independent state of Massachusetts granted the western half of the island to (or, I suppose, kept it in the possession of) Bernard’s son John. But the eastern half was granted instead to Marie Therese de Gregoire, a Frenchwoman and granddaughter of the French explorer and island’s 17^th century titleholder Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. Both John Bernard and Marie de Gregoire were of course the descendants of elite families, reflecting a continuation of landed gentry roles even in Revolutionary and post-Revolution America. But at the same time, this joint US and French ownership of the island was from what I can tell a first in its history, and illustrates both France’s vital role in the American Revolution and the ongoing relationship between the two nations (one that, of course, would be severely tested before the end of the 18^th century).

When much of Mount Desert Island was first preserved by the federal government in the early 20^th century, the two initial such efforts overtly honored these Franco-American histories. In July 1916 President Woodrow Wilson established Sieur de Monts National Monument, naming it after an early French explorer and compatriot of Champlain’s (Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons). Three years later, when the area was upgraded to full National Park status, it was named Lafayette National Park in honor of the Revolutionary War hero the Marquis de Lafayette. Even Acadia, the name given to the park instead in 1929, is a tribute to the French legacy in the area, as Acadia was a French colony in northeastern North America that included Maine. But Sieur de Monts and Lafayette more directly highlight and embody those Franco-American figures and stories, and better remembering them as part of the establishment and development of Acadia National Park helps us keep those contested, conflicted, crucial Maine and American histories in our collective memories.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?

October 4, 2018: National Park Studying: Mesa Verde

[On October 1^st, 1890, Congress established California’s Yosemite National Park. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Yosemite and four other amazing National Parks, leading up to a special weekend post on their counterparts, National Historic Sites.]

On two distinct but complementary effects to a foundational AmericanStudier moment.

When I was in 7^th grade, my family and I took a trip out West to visit a number of Southwestern National Parks. We saw Zion, Bryce, Four Corners, and the Grand Motherfucking Canyon (pardon my French, but I’m pretty sure that’s the full official name), and even checked out a bit of Las Vegas when we flew in and out of the city. But there’s no doubt at all that it was Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park that most affected this 12 year old AmericanStudier. There were lots of spaces and moments in Mesa Verde that hit me, but by far the most moving was a post-sunset encounter with a coyote as we explored an aboveground (ie, not a cliff dwelling) Pueblo ruin in the park. Probably didn’t hurt that I had been reading a bunch of Tony Hillerman mysteries on the trip, as the moment felt right out of such evocative Southwestern thrillers (although luckily we didn’t stumble upon a dead body or awaken an ancient curse or the like). But I would say that the moment affected me, and indeed was foundational for my lifelong AmericanStudying, in a couple key ways that go well beyond Leaphorn & Chee mysteries and that also reflect essential elements to a site like Mesa Verde.

For one thing, the moment made crystal clear something that a know-it-all 12 year old (or 41 year old…) can sometimes have difficulties remembering: just how much I didn’t and don’t know. As I wrote in that same blog post on Hillerman, Mesa Verde has long been defined by a couple central mysteries of its own: the question of why the Anasazi people abandoned their cliff dwellings, and what happened to them after they left. It appears that some significant recent progress has been made in answering those questions, which of course is part of the historical and cultural process as well. But in truth, the mystery of Mesa Verde is just a more extreme version of a fundamental but all too easily forgotten fact about all historical knowledge—there’s a lot more that we don’t know than we’ll ever know, and most of the things we do know we only kinda know (to get all Rumsfeldian on ya). And that’s never more true than when it comes to the simple but crucial question of what it meant, or really what it felt like, to live in these historical periods and places. I love the interpretations of the past at places like Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg, but that’s all they are, interpretations; we’ll never really know what life was like for those folks in those worlds, and I felt that divide, acutely and potently, as I stood atop that darkened Mesa Verde ruin.

But at the same time, I felt something else, something I’d call not contradictory so much as complementary: I wanted to bridge that divide. I wanted to learn as much as I could about periods and places and peoples, really all of ‘em but most especially all those that felt most distinct from me and mine. I wanted to read about them and talk about them and, perhaps most of all, write about them, help create stories that could, not exactly bring them back to life of course, but make them a part of our own moment and world as fully as those unavoidable gaps would allow. I don’t think that was the first time I felt that desire so acutely (I’m sure I did on my Camp Virginia trips, for example), but it was one of the strongest such moments, and it has stuck with me to be sure. I’ve visited and been inspired by a lot of cultural and historic sites in the decades since, including a number of federal National Historic Parks, and will write about some of my favorites in that latter category in the weekend post. But Mesa Verde remains striking and perhaps singular in that regard, a place and moment with which I was confronted with especial force with both the challenges and the call of all that I’ve tried to spend my career doing. So, y’know, it’s well worth a visit if you’re out that way!

Last Park tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other National Parks you’d highlight?