Contributing Editor's Note: The next generation of museum professionals will bring to their work vivid memories of provocative experiments in history museums that have resulted in well-publicized success stories—the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for example—and equally well-publicized failures—the ill-fated National Air and Space Museum's planned exhibition on the atomic bomb and the end of World War II. Michael Cole, a graduate student in museum studies at George Washington University, believes that such controversy reveals museums U doing their job," connecting museum visitors to stories in intimate ways. Passionate reaction, Cole argues, is both the benefit of powerful exhibitions and the price to be paid for them. If Cole is representative of the next generation, history museums will continue to present exhibits "with a pulse," exhibits rooted in the conviction that history matters and guided by the belief that controversy does not necessarily mean that something has gone wrong. —Edward T. Linenthal

I remember one of my high school students complaining bitterly about a test he had scored poorly on. "Why the heck do we have to learn this? Nobody cares about history," he had said. But people do care about history. The evidence is everywhere: in re-enactment societies, films, and festivals, the caring is quite apparent. People want to know about history, they want to feel connected to it. Knowledge of history can motivate or entertain. It gives people a sense of identity, of rootedness, of a locus in time. Unfortunately, many people are alienated by academic history because it has traditionally been presented through lectures or texts that emphasize major political or religious movements and larger-than-life characters, rather than ordinary people and events with which the public can identify. Unable to access history through traditional modes of presentation, people often turn to the distorted versions of history presented in films like Braveheart or Nixon. They also slake their thirst for history by visiting museums.

What do museums have to offer that text does not? Diversity of media, among other things. By presenting history simultaneously through objects, computers, films, sounds, interactive devices, and text, museum exhibits are able to appeal to a multitude of learning styles, some of which may be turned off by textbooks. Ironically, the greatest evidence that museums are reaching the public and helping people feel truly connected to history is the recent storm of controversies over history exhibits. Contrary to much public sentiment, I believe that these controversies are a positive sign. They indicate that history is important to those outside professional historical circles and illustrate history's paramount relevance to everyone.

As a graduate student in museum studies with a concentration in history, I have had an excellent opportunity to examine two approaches to presenting history. The first is traditional and academic. The second, the one used in museums, is three dimensional and' sensory. The two approaches differ in one fundamental way: academic history is presented through texts, while museum history is presented through objects. The latter has almost always been both informed and guided by the former, but the recent rising tide of debate over academic versus public history has led museum curators to shape new kinds of exhibitions. Just as traditional academic history tends to produce text that is inaccessible to nonacademics, traditional exhibits have tended to display objects out of context, separate from the world in which they were made. More and more, curators are presenting objects in context, generating a strong sense of human presence. This approach evokes strong human emotion, making the exhibit's message much more powerful and meaningful for the visitor. But evoking such emotion breeds conflict, as the latest spate of controversy over historical exhibits shows.

In an article entitled "Historical Shows on Trial: Who Judges?" Paul Goldberger explores a series of exhibits that have evoked strong emotions by telling a story. The exhibitions include The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II (National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution); A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the U.S. Constitution (National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution); Back of the Big House: The Cultural Landscape of the Plantation (Library of Congress and Martin Luther King, Jr., Library); and Freud: Conflict and Culture (Library of Congress). Although the topics of the exhibits are different, the cause of the resulting controversy is based on the same essential question: whose version of the story are we going to tell?1

When you link human experience to an event or object, you involve human emotion (especially when you are dealing with an event as historically recent as the bombing of Hiroshima). People whose emotions are aroused tend to become very concerned about how their perceptions of history conflict with what is presented. Goldberger laments the position of curators, who are having to become more politically savvy as "fear of offending someone-anyone-now seems to govern the cultural climate of Washington far more than the presentation of ideas." As Goldberger notes, the recent rash of controversies shows that curators are forging meaningful connections between visitor and exhibition by creating exhibits that evoke strong passions. History exhibits are successful when they connect a vision of the past to the visitor in the present; doing so is truly an important and wonderful achievement. Despite the upheavals, curators of history exhibits should continue to evoke these emotions because evoking strong emotional identification through objects helps the visitor feel that he or she has a stake in the exhibit and the story it tells.

The Museum Effect

Svetlana Alpers, in her essay “The Museum as a Way of Seeing," heartwarmingly describes her most memorable museum experience as an encounter with an embalmed crab.' In Alpers's words, the crab was "still, exposed to view, dead." While this mode of exhibition provided an excellent opportunity for Alpers to get a good measure of the beast, it somehow left her unsatisfied. Here was a thing that had lived, a vital creature with habit and habitat, yet Alpers found herself looking at it as if it were an artifact or a work of art. The experience was nevertheless memorable for her.

I also first experienced the electricity of a museum encounter through a motionless artifact when I turned the corner of the medieval wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and found myself in peril of being run over by a charging suit of German tournament armor. For a moment I was transfixed; it was as if some muse had briefly entered the suit and brought it to life. I felt as if it were going to charge forward to prick me with its couched lance. But the moment was fleeting. Soon there was only an empty suit of armor, motionless astride a mannequin horse gleaming under the soft, white light. But the impression remains to this day because for a moment, it was as if there really were a man in there.

Alpers describes her experience with the crab as the "museum effect." By removing an object from its context, curators turn it into an objet d'art, devoid of connection to the world that has yielded it to us. The crab was displayed separate from the sea floor it walked, the detritus it ate, the crabbers from which it fled. Similarly, the armor that I saw was far removed from the smithy where it was crafted, the status it represented, the money it cost, and most important, the man who wore it. The museum effect is often pronounced in traditional history exhibits, where the focus is on objects out of context.

At Dumbarton Oaks, in Washington, D.C., Greco-Roman and Byzantine objects are presented far removed from their meaning for people. The objects are perched in thick glass cases; some are impossible to view from more than a few vantage points. They are presented entirely out of their historical and cultural con- text, with only the dreaded yellowing label to assist the uninformed visitor. The atmosphere of the gallery is sterile and imposing; reflective tile floors and vaulted ceilings make visitors feel as if they are in a place of worship. The objects, set on high with an almost mystical lack of explanation, reinforce this feeling. Visitors desiring to learn more about the objects than the labels relate are welcome to examine the exhibition guides on hand. But visitors go to museums to learn from a medium other than text. The objects, shrouded in quasi-religious mystery, seem to peer down on the visitors and say, “You will never understand us unless you have a Ph.D.; we belong to the domain of scholars, not real people."

Nothing could be further from the truth; here is a sarcophagus that a man purchased for his imminent burial; there is a carved shelf box, possibly for a woman's jewelry or makeup. Here are ecclesiastical objects. Such objects have the potential to convey highly personal messages, such as belief in God or fear of the unknown. At Dumbarton Oaks they are presented as unapproachable and untouchable; their inaccessibility is reinforced by accompanying labels that mock visitors' questions with academic and turgid language.

Such objects could provide fabulous opportunities to connect the present-day visitor with the people who made and used them long ago. By spending some time exploring the hands that crafted and used those objects, the minds that dwell on them, the hearts that adored God enough to craft them, the exhibit could turn brass bowls and silver cups into vessels of the blood of Christ and help visitors to understand the mystical meaning the objects had for the people who used them. Visitors could trace the footsteps of the Byzantines, and realizing that the Byzantines were real people, could allow themselves to "tap the primacy of memory," as Lonnie Bunch, head curator at the Smithsonian Museum of American History, has described the process by which museum visitors see themselves reflected in the experiences of the people presented in exhibits.3

The Power of Human Presence

The antithesis of this style of exhibition is Back of the Big House: Cultural Landscape of the Plantation, an exhibition so controversial in its approach to the lives of slaves in the antebellum South that it could not be shown at its originally intended location, the Library of Congress, and instead wound up at the much less visible Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, in Washington, D.C. The move did not detract from the exhibit's power. After first viewing the exhibit, I was surprised to find that it had been a source of any controversy at all. It seemed a fairly straightforward depiction of the lives of slaves. What was all the fuss about? But an article in Washington's City Paper set the record straight.4 The exhibit's unique approach to plantation life—it stressed how demeaning conditions fostered a sense of autonomy, community, and group spirit among slaves—led some people to believe that the exhibition glorified slavery. This misunderstanding was exacerbated by racial tensions at the Library of Congress, tensions so severe that many staff members had taken to using "the big house" as a pet name for their place of work. The exhibit was initially set up outside an elevator that most staff used daily to access the lunch area. One of the images that appeared immediately outside this elevator was of a life-size white slave owner striking a slave from horseback. In light of the existing tensions at the library, staff members were not pleased to see such images every time they went to lunch. Even if there hadn't been such strong tensions at the library, I believe that the exhibit would still have been a source of contention. The absence of the museum effect was a spark again.

I saw the exhibition at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Library, without the backdrop of staff resentment at the Library of Congress. After first viewing the exhibit, I could not determine the source of the emotional reaction of the Library of Congress employees. The exhibit would have made the most die-hard "objectivist" historian beam with pleasure; it appeared to be a simple presentation of the facts, nothing more. A second and harder look at the exhibition helped me to locate the roots of the controversy. I once again experienced the phenomenon that had briefly taken possession of my suit of armor and brought it to life for one magnificent moment-human presence.

Back of the Big House echoes with people. An “objectless" exhibit, it speaks only through photographs and text. The photographs are mostly of people, and blocks of text convey their words. The faces of the slaves peer out at the visitor from a hundred angles. Bent to daily tasks or social rituals, pipe smoking or banjo playing, they are breathtakingly real in their commonality. Their humanity defies the stereotypes of history, bringing to their story all the complexity of the human condition without a word. It denies the visitor easy categories in which to place the slaves and, magically, history comes alive. "A basically public experience turns into an intensely private moment," to quote Bunch, as visitors relate to real people who breathed and bled as they do. The distant feeling conveyed by bland textbooks or dispirited objects shielded under glass' is bridged, and the facts come home with a bang. Slaves were real. Slavery was real; it's part of our legacy. Because visitors' emotions are touched, they find it impossible to disassociate themselves. We are Americans, and the exhibit is about us. The faces in those photographs seemed to speak to me as I left the exhibit, saying "remember us." They made an indelible impression. The experience set in and was internalized, something that would never have happened had I been looking at straw hats or plowshares behind a glass wall.

Another excellent example of an exhibition that connects present-day visitors with those who have gone before them is Field to Factory, at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. The exhibit tells the story of those African Americans who left the rural South for the urban North in search of a better life. It explores what they left behind, what they discovered along the way, and what they found at their final destination. Jim Simms, the designer of Field to Factory, spoke about his effort to bring to life those kinds of everyday scenes that we "catch out of the corner of our eye."5 A sleeping mannequin of an African American girl on a northbound train is displayed so that visitors literally catch it out of the corner of their eyes as they walk through the exhibition; the effect is startlingly real. Another display catches the brief moment when a woman (portrayed by another mannequin) pauses to mop sweat from her brow while hard at work on a hot summer day, an experience familiar to many of us.

The Enola Gay Exhibition

"The problem," said Tom Crouch, curator of the explosively controversial Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, "was that we told the whole story, we put it all together.'" In one of his lectures he compared the original script of the Enola Gay exhibit to John Hershey's book Hiroshima, which told a graphic story about the wounds suffered by the victims of the atom bomb. The Air Force Association led an organized campaign against the original script of the Enola Gay exhibition on the grounds that the exhibit de-emphasized the horror of the Pacific war for U.S. service people and portrayed the Japanese as victims of the atom bomb. Hershey's book inspired no such protest. But Hershey's book portrayed the bombing as a sort of natural disaster. Apart from a brief segment that describes the dropping of the bomb from the barely visible silhouette of a B-29, the nuclear devastation just seems to happen to the Japanese, as a hurricane or an earthquake would. The original script of the Enola Gay exhibition added a pivotal piece to the story: it connected the destruction wrought by the bomb to the American war effort. In other words, it laced the object to the event to the people. One point was clear in my mind as I listened to Crouch's lecture. If the Enola Gay had been subject to the museum effect and hung innocuously on a wall next to a yellowing white label reading "B-29" in small print, much as Alpers's crab or my suit of armor had been, there would have been no controversy at all.

Why did the original script cause such an uproar? Because linking the event with the living human beings that brought it about threatened the perspective of an entire generation of Americans who lived through the event and have it firmly etched in their memories. "Good exhibits convey the passion of the curator," said Bunch in a recent lecture. "They tell an important story, they have a point of view." Objects must "have a ring of authenticity, tell real stories about real things, real subjects, real people." Museum objects must be able to "bear witness" and have the power to transport the visitor. While Michael Belcher, author of Exhibitions in Museums, resignedly admits that there is no effective way to "accurately measure the 'oohs' and 'aahs' and gasps of wonder which emanate from the visitor," Bunch believes that good exhibitions allow visitors to tap their memories and to see themselves within exhibitions? When they do so, "they will remember for a long time." The success of Bunch's approach persuades students like me that good history exhibitions make direct connections to human experience; they discard the museum effect in favor of real people and are much the better for it.

Passion and Controversy

Focusing on human experience in history exhibits invites controversy. Crouch points out that the Enola Gay's run over Hiroshima was a rare moment in which "history crossed the lives of millions of people." Survivors have developed different viewpoints about the event. Human experience is irrevocably linked to human emotion. The presence of passion makes it impossible to approach history exhibits from the antiseptic objektivitat of Ranke or Bacon that- is so common in the museum effect style of exhibiting history. Varying emotions destroy the neutrality of history. An object alone is neutral; an object in context is not. With the same event meaning so many different things to so many different people, one cannot leave the facts to interpret themselves; exhibitions must attempt to tell stories.

With more and more exhibitions doing just that, it is not surprising to find so many controversies arising now. Goldberger talks about curators "responding to the changes they see around them as historical scholarship itself evolves." Historical scholarship is itself beginning to move away from the museum effect's equivalent in historical writing—the tendency to produce volumes of turgid prose intended only for the eyes of academics. Historians are increasingly presenting narrative histories centered on human experience.

As a student moving back and forth between two ways of learning and understanding history—one through text and the other through objects—I have concluded that good written history and a good exhibit have the same thing in common, the human connection. Paul Fussel's Wartime and Maurice Collis's Cortes and Montezuma are strong examples of what I view as good written history. Both books bring history to life by telling it story, emphasizing the humanity of the people they portray. Collis describes the physical appearance of Cortes and speculates on the emotions that spurred him to conquest. Fussel spends one chapter on the sexual habits of the soldiery of the Second World War; another chapter examines the pettiness of the military administration that soldiers were forced to endure. Such history is gripping and passionate; readers relate to the characters, and the work leaves an indelible mark. Museum exhibitions that present objects in context and written history that excites and engages readers have the same appeal. Both make history relevant to those who may be alienated by academic writing or isolated objects. By relating to history, visitors and readers can come to feel that they have a stake in it, that it is relevant, that it pertains to them.

What can we conclude from all of this? Historical exhibition is heading in an exciting new direction. By placing events, places, and objects in their historical and human context, curators craft exhibition that resonate with human experience and breathe life into the story being told. Curators must be prepared to deal with the strong emotional responses that such exhibits evoke in different generations and cultural groups. This new style of exhibition is closely linked to the changing face of written history, which is also beginning to re-examine how it can best reach more people. Like Goldberger, I believe curators are doing the right thing. The recent controversies are a sign that the public at large is beginning to see its own experience reflected in museum exhibits; history being made relevant to nonacademics. It is far better to evoke passion than to face the alternative—the empty silence the comes upon us when nobody talks about history at all.

Notes

1. Paul Goldberger, "Historical Shows on Trial Who Judges?" New York Times, 11 February 1996.

2.. Svetlana Alpers, "The Museum as a Way of Seeing," in I. Karp and S. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

3. All quotes from Lonnie Bunch are taken from lectures delivered in spring 1996 to his course, "Curatorial Research and Planning," at George Washington University.

4. Phillip Burnum, "Eating Jim Crow," City Paper, 2 February 1996.

5. Class lecture, "Exhibit Design Conceptualization," fall 1996.

6. All quotes from Tom Crouch are from a guest lecture delivered to the course, "Curatorial Research and Planning," at George Washington University, February 2, 1996.

7. Michael Belcher, Exhibitions in Museums (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).