 Hello, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Angie Grove and I'm the executive director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum. Welcome to our monthly lecture. This is a free community program where we cover a variety of topics, all for your entertainment and education and we're very happy to have CCTV, also record these and then share them with an even broader audience and we also post these lectures to our YouTube channel, so you can watch it again if today is not enough. So I am going to introduce you to one of our board of directors who is then going to introduce today's lecture. So I'm going to introduce you to our secretary, actually, Doug Slebaugh, professor, Doug Slebaugh, and he is going to introduce our lecturer today, so please help me welcome Doug to the stage. Thank you for coming out on this beautiful afternoon. As Angie said, my name is Doug Slebaugh and before I retired, I was a professor of history at St. Michael's College for 32 years where I taught a variety of courses on US history and joined the board after I retired and become kind of immersed in all of our activities. Our speaker today is Dan O'Neill. I'm going to tell you a bit about his talk and his background, but I just wanted to mention that I first knew Dan a number of years ago when he taught adjunct courses for us at St. Michael's, a very popular course on the Middle East, in fact, and then later I got to work with him a bit when he was still the executive director here at the homestead. So first, let me just give his title and say a little bit about his topic today. The title is History May Be Over, but it is not complete, examining narratives and injustices in public history. Authors and historians typically interpret evidence to construct a narrative of history. Public historians design and condense narratives in a manner that is easily understood in a public-facing setting. Both narratives are highly dependent on the perspectives and biases of those groups. It is inevitable, it is inevitable that different historians will weigh different facts according to different criteria, and that multiple versions of events will emerge that are all true. What forces determine which narratives come to the forefront and which do not? Now let me tell you a little bit more about Dan. Dan O'Neill is originally from New Hampshire. He holds a bachelor's degree in history from Plymouth State University, a master's degree from the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and has done postgraduate work at the University of Vermont. He served in the United States Marine Corps and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Dan was the director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum for 10 years, of which we are extremely grateful. And he has been involved in museum education for nearly 14 years altogether. He's worked on public history projects and designed exhibits in both New York and Vermont. And he's also published articles on public history, local history, and produced several short historical films for two historic sites in Vermont. Currently, Dan is working as an analyst for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. He lives in Essex Junction, Vermont, with his wife and two children. And he is a fan of Star Trek, music of all kinds, and is an avid historical reenactor. So please let us welcome Dan O'Neill. Hi, everybody. How are you doing? It's really great to be back here. This was kind of my home away from home. I started working here in 2009 and I only slept here twice, which I view as an accomplishment. But this place has definitely been a huge part of my life, and I'm just so glad to see it growing and flourishing. And glad that they asked me to come back every now and then. They didn't just say, hey, thank God he's gone. So, part of what I've learned over the past few years, what I've grown into is the power of stories. And stories, humans have evolved because of stories. Some of the earliest ways of transmitting our culture, our values, everything came through stories. When you think of, I'm going to ask for a show of hands, who's been camping here? Who's ever been camping? Or sat around a fire and heard someone telling a story? Or how many people, let me try one that's a little more apropos, how many people have watched television here? Okay, so if you've sat around a glowing object and been told a story, it's no secret that a television occupies an important part of our home, it's almost like the campfire, where we sit around and stories get told. Well, this, it's no secret, it's no surprise, because that's how humans have evolved. The earliest form of us for millions of years ago, we would sit around fires and tell stories about something that happened or everything. So, a lot of our culture is transmitted through stories, and a lot of our values are transmitted through stories. And so, I really feel that as an historian, our job is to tell stories and elevate stories and understand stories. So, to begin with, one of the things about history, when I was going through graduate school, a lot of things that people would say to me is, well, what are you going to do with that? Why is it so important? Why is it so important that we study history? Why is it so important that we understand history? And everybody loves to invoke Orwell. And so, I try to, and they invoke Orwell for a number of reasons. Yes, that's a screen cap of the 1984 movie, which came out in 1984. And, but, one of the things that Orwell commented was that whoever controls the past controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. So, in order to know where we're going, we have to know where we are. And in order to know where we are, we have to understand where we've been. We always look back to understand how we got to where we are now, and we try to think where we should go. And so, oftentimes, the stories about the past and who presents them to us are as much a function of power as they are of anything. And so, you're going to notice throughout this talk, I'm going to interweave certain stories that I've read or I've been exposed to that have had an impact on me on the way. So, to get to the next story, there's a book I read several years ago by one of my favorite authors. His name is Daniel Quinn. He passed away about two years ago. He wrote a book called Ishmael. And there is a, I do recommend people read it. It's a fascinating book. I'll get into it a little bit. But one of the things, one of the tools he used is a story is ultimately a journey. And when you go on a journey, you need to pack a bag. And you need to carry some things with you that you're going to need along the way. Since we're going to be talking about how historians construct narratives, how public historians work, I felt like we needed to pack a bag because there are certain terms I'm going to use that you may not have been exposed to before. And so I just wanted to make sure everybody had everything they needed for this journey. So, first thing we're going to throw into the bag is, what's history? And it's one of those things like, how many people have actually sat down and wondered, what is history? What does it do? And history is the study of the past. It's an umbrella term that relates to past events. But it's also a collective memory. It's our collective memory as a society, and it's contextualized through interpreting several sources. So we have several different ways of looking at and constructing our history, and it's often formed into a narrative or a story. Another term that I'll mention a lot that I know very few people outside of academic history have heard is called historiography. And historiography is, how is history written? How do you write it? You know, how are you, what methods, philosophies, subjects, critiques, analyses are used? Because the events don't really change, but the historians do. And that's one of the things to always keep in mind is, what happened, happened. How we look at it is what changes. So events don't change, historians do. And so historians bring a perspective to their practice, to the way that they construct their narratives. And that is built of their lived life experiences, their background, their cultural background. Any number of things can have an impact on how that historian, their agenda, can all of that can have an impact on how that historian constructs their narrative. And then we have academic history. Academic history is exactly what you think it is. It's historical narratives produced and published by historians. It's a bit misleading because a historian doesn't necessarily have to be working at a university or in the academy to conduct academic history. However, though a large proportion are, it doesn't always require that a narrative be an intense philosophical study on a narrow subject. There are a lot of academic histories out there. I think a lot of people get put off by that, but there are a lot of academic histories that are incredibly accessible to anybody. Next one is public history. Public history, it's a very broad term, but it describes people who were trained in academic history but are working outside the academy. They work in places like museums, historic sites. They can work in archives. It is an incredibly evolving field, but their job is to sometimes take some of these ideas that are being discussed in the academy and make them accessible to the public at large. At historic sites and museums, this practice of taking that academic history and making it accessible is often referred to as interpretation. Physicianality, this is one that I use a lot, and positionality is the notion that your personal values, views, and location in time and space influence how you understand the world. When you look at any event or any phenomenon, it has an impact on how you view the world. If you pick a historic event, the way you perceive that historic event is different for every single person on this planet based on whatever their background might be. Sometimes this is your biases, and sometimes it may just be you have life experience. Let me give you an example. When I was teaching at St. Michael's one time, we were talking about the Iran hostage crisis. I shared an excerpt from a narrative from one of the hostage takers who was really baffled by the behavior of some of the diplomats that the hostage takers were holding hostage. And she was commenting that some of them would make these very odd misleading comments, like, oh, I heard this was happening, and something like that. And she's like, and I felt like I needed to correct them. Well, having been through training when I was in the military, I was like, oh, they're using their POW training. There's certain training where they say, well, you try to get information by saying, well, I heard this was happening, trying to get them to correct you. And I noticed that because I recognized the tactic. Another historian would be like, I don't know, there was just weird behavior going on. So it's like there are certain things that my background told me that's what I see going on here that another historian may have missed. And that's kind of what all this happens. Finally, just because we're talking stories, I'll give a accessible version. A story is a narrative, either true or fictitious, and prose or inverse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader, a tale. And then a, I want last one, a narrative. It's a spoken or written account of connected events or a story. So that's all I'm putting in the backpack. Let's move forward. So let me introduce myself. On this one. So to go back to Daniel Quinn, Quinn identified in his book Ishmael that humans live by enacting a story. We're all living within a story. We're all living within the human story. We're living within large stories. We're living within small stories. Big plots, subplots. And once you learn the cultural story that you are living in, you cannot help but see it everywhere you go. So the minute you accept like, okay, the minute I said my background having served in the Marine Corps taught me this, I began looking at these narratives. I'm like, did this happen elsewhere? Because now I'm seeing it everywhere. So the minute you accept a certain phenomenon or accept like, hey, my perspective is unique because of this lived experience, you'll see it everywhere around you. And this is an important thing to carry with you because those stories help you shape culture. With that in mind, some of the things that shape the way I look at history, I've already mentioned having served, but I also look at my background. I didn't come, so I look at how my own biography impacts how I look at stories. I didn't come, I grew up in rural New Hampshire. I didn't come from wealth, not at all. My grandparents came from, my parents were the first in their families to attend any schooling beyond high school. Please come in. My parents were the first in their families to attend anything resembling higher education. My grandparents came from immigrant families that grew up in Scots and industrial cities in New England. And the popular myth of the American immigrant family applied to us. So the myth is my ancestors who came here were day laborers. They later, the next generation became artisans and tradesmen. The next generation become professionals, which that's the popular myth of the immigrant dream here. And that story was drilled into my head from a very young age. I was taught, work hard, play the game, follow the rules, sacrifice, you're going to move forward because the system will work for people who follow the rules. That was what was taught to me from a very young age. That was the story. And history, that history impacted how I made my choices, how I reacted to events. And then when I looked at events, I was like, I, when I looked at historic events, I saw the same thing. I'm like, well, hold on. Why did this person bucked the system? So that's why this event happened, or this person didn't follow the rules, or this person wasn't living that story right. And so that impacted how I viewed certain things. And this carries out at almost every societal level. It carries out in your age. It carries out in your socioeconomic background, your race, your gender, your ethnic identity, any kinds of different things will have an impact on how you view the world and how you view events. History works in the way I was taught that history is our collective property. So when I think of pivotal events in history, I, growing up, I thought those events are pivotal for everybody across the board. Everybody thinks of those events as pivotal. So July 4th, 1776, for me, as an American, it's a pivotal event. So of course, I grew up thinking, well, July 4th, 1776, I mean, that's important everywhere. You go to places like rural Afghanistan, they're like, why, what, why? Or you go to a certain place of the world, July 4th, 1776 was like, what, what happened? It never occurred to me that like, that's not important for that as well. And I grew up in a society that reinforced this belief, but reality would eventually appear because I needed, as an historian and as a speaker and as a thinker, I had to examine and say, why is that event so important to me and not important to someone else? Why does that event look different to me and someone else? And so one of the threads that I'm going to suggest from this with a lot of these discussions about injustice and things within history, a lot of times people are wondering, what is the next step? Now that I see this, what is the next step? And one of the things I'm going to suggest is being honest with yourself is the first step towards moving through these things. And so I've had to look at a lot of the narratives and accept that some of these were created with a specific purpose in mind. Some of these events had a purpose of either establishing or supporting power structures or subverting them and that those power structures benefit some and are oppressive to others. But I've also become interested in counter stories, stories that oppose those. And a really great example is that founded mathematics for the math, I know there's one math teacher in the room, but I don't know if there are any other mathematicians in the room, but this is lines of symmetry within a circle. If you think of the point right there, I'm loving this laser pointer, by the way, the point in the circle as a historic event, lines of symmetry within a circle describes the complexity because everybody looks at this event from a different point on the circle and it looks different to every single person based on where on the circle they are standing. So if you are a point on this looking at this event, you're going to have a different perspective, a different view based on your life experience, based on how you categorize yourself. And it's infinite because there are an infinite number of perspectives. Now is this dizzying in certain ways to think that there are an infinite number of ways to interpret a particular perspective? Yes, incredibly. But we also live on this planet and getting dizzy from time to time just is inevitable. So one of the first challenges to place out is this notion that history is property. So when we look at history as hours, and you say our history, I'll say, who's who is ours? How do you define our history? How do you define who owns this history? Is history property? Who does it pertain to? So historians typically start with a topic, then they go to or they ask a research question and they'll analyze how other historians have dealt with that question or similar questions. They'll then critique those approaches either by critiquing which sources were used, how they were used, how they were interpreted. They'll form a theoretical framework that informs their own approach, gather data. Data can take the form of things other historians have written, primary sources of people who are there, and they will construct a narrative. Now this process, it's not universal. Every historian has their method. And it does have its limits. In the past historians concerned themselves with trying to discover a grand universal narrative. That thing that we're finally going to find out what really happened. And I'd like to believe that at this point in our cultural evolution, we'll say, there is no one single story of what happened. There's no, we're never going to know what actually happened. The narrative is always changing and it's always dynamic. In the 20th century you had what they called the fractionalization of the subject where all of a sudden everyone's looking at how different subjects perceive history. And each one is equal and valid. So you have political history, you have military history, you have women's history, which is all part of it. And all of it adds to the collective understanding of these narratives. And in many ways, if you look at how a certain event has become primary, how did July 4th, 1776 become such a critical event here? Well, because the country we're currently living in, it was considered the founding event for the country we currently live in. And that's a reflection of power. That's a reflection of our current government is born from that event. So it has an impact on the present. And a lot of people within the country look at that event as pivotal. And that is how power is created. And a historian's bias plays a major role in deciding what events are important and how they're perceived. So let me jump into an example. How many people here have heard of reconstruction after the Civil War? Now, would somebody mind throwing out a few one-word blips as to, if I were to say, reconstruct post-Civil War reconstruction, what are some of the things that you come to mind for you? Ignored in traditional history classes. Ignored in traditional history classes. It's a messy time in history, yes. Anybody else have any other thoughts? Unfinished. Unfinished? Imposed by the winning north side on the losing south side. Imposed. That's a very popular narrative. Segregation. Segregation. So we look at a lot of results on certain things. And how many people thought corruption? How many people thought mismanagement? How many people thought disaster? And what's interesting about that is when were all of those narratives come out? When did reconstruction become a failure? When did it become known as that? Well, it was interesting. A historian by the name of Eric Foner, who I don't know if any of you have heard of him, but I took, he has a massive open online course on the Civil War and Reconstruction that's available for free on YouTube. It's basically his lectures and I took an entire summer. That was my COVID entertainment when I was mowing the lawn here, actually. But he actually studied reconstruction and he found that he actually put his own employer on blast for this. He said that there was a school of historians at Columbia that formed what was known as the Dunning School. And the Dunning School was highly supportive in the early 20th century of segregationist policies that were occurring throughout the country. And so they wrote, a lot of them wrote that the reconstruction period was characterized by governments run by carpetbaggers and scallowags who ruled the defeated south through corruption and mismanagement. Foner actually postulated that the Dunning School glorified the failure of reconstruction and the white elite who resisted it as an attempt to justify Jim Crow laws. If you take a different perspective, who's ever heard of W.E.B. Du Bois? One of the most famous historians of the 20th century, he wrote Black Reconstruction in 1935. It's, I think it just recently passed into the public domain so you can get it online. I do recommend reading it. It is amazing. I know sometimes books written in the 30s can be, the language is a little weird. This one is really incredible. He framed reconstruction as a period of increased Black agency where former slaves were able to work to improve their rights as workers, gain the vote, and improve social services within the community. And he set this against attempts by the planter class to regain power and property that they had enjoyed and monopolized before the war and that the planter class used the threats of violence which allowed a split along racial lines and an eventual overthrow of the reconstructionist government. So two different narratives of reconstruction. One that the reconstruction period was a time where working class whites and former enslaved people enjoyed unprecedented access to government, opportunity for equality, and then resistance by the planter class to basically push those groups against each other and hold them back down and regain power versus the Dunning School which supported the power infrastructure. So when you look at both of those perspectives, now are both of those perspectives necessarily incorrect? The answer is no. They are supported by facts. However, the agenda and the bias and the experience of those historians has created two different versions of the same narrative. Everything that happened happened. So it's one of those things when you look at a particular interpretation, you have to ask yourself who wrote it, what agenda did they have, and how did that impact what is going on here? So the ability to construct a narrative and how it is constructed is a sign of power and privilege within a society. If a narrative is constructed with certain values and structures as a guide, those values can become institutionalized. So if enough people within a society or within an institution all subscribe to the same values, the same perspective, all of a sudden you have a standard turning point that will always keep coming out the same way. And that's a sign of institutional power. Narrative authors become an agent of either reinforcing or subverting that power. So the author of a historic narrative actually has unprecedented ability to construct a reality based on their own experience, positionality, biases, and agendas. And museums and historic sites, this is where the public historians come into it, have the ability to enter this arena not only in the textual analysis of objects but also the optics in which they're displayed. So what does that mean? Well, a museum and a museum curator and having been in that position and having had to make those decisions myself, I'm painfully aware of it. Sometimes a museum administrator has to make choices. What objects am I going to put out to tell this story? What story does it tell? Why am I making this decision? Is it because this is all I have? Is it because these are the items that I think are the prettiest, the ones that I think people are most interested in? Why do I think this object tells this story better than others? And those are some of the decisions that historic sites have to make. In addition, this is the other part that museums and historic sites have to consider is how am I displaying these objects? I'll give you an interesting example. Has anybody ever been to Belgium? Okay. In Belgium, if you go to the Royal Museum of Central Africa, and they display a lot of the objects that Belgian colonists brought back after colonizing Africa. If you're interested in reading or colonizing Congo and other parts of Central Africa, if you there's a great book called King Leopold's Ghost and it's pretty horrifying when you read it, but they displayed artwork and objects representing the Belgian colonization of Congo. And what they actually do is they presented all of these objects in a sealed glass container that was locked up in the center of a museum in Belgium. Now, psychologically, how could that be problematic? Well, the fact that Belgium held Congo captive as a colonizer for quite a long time, the fact that their cultural objects were literally being held captive in a display case kind of reflected that. So it, now I'm not saying that museum, like there are probably a number of reasons why they decided they didn't want things being touched or anything like that, but it's still when you look at that and you consider that these were objects that were brought from Congo to Belgium and put on display there, and then locked in this a kind of, when you consider that, you're going to look at other objects and think the same thing. The methodology also has a key role in this. How museum educators and administrators construct one. So let me go to another example. Has anyone ever been to the Smithsonian, Air and Space Museum? I love it. Sorry, I'm a space nerd. I am a Trekkie, so I love that the first space shuttle was named Enterprise, and I'm still forever disappointed that it never got to fly in space, but I'll get through it. But the Air and Space Museum did a whole display on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States during the Second World War, and how it was presented caused a firestorm of debate amongst the staff. How do you present this? How do we do it? Some of the things, do they show the plane, the Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima as a centerpiece? Do they do a narrative that talks about why the U.S. decided that dropping the bomb was the only what was needed? And there's a number of different methods. Historians are still interpreting how that looked. The curatorial staff wanted to know, do they talk about the impact of dropping the bomb on the Japanese population? Do they talk about atrocities committed during the war? Do they talk about morality issues? Do they talk about the bomb's role and just how it ended the war? Debates among the curatorial staff went on for months because no matter what they decided to do, they were taking a stand. They were elevating one narrative and silencing another. Do you, because you can't tell every single narrative in a museum display. So you have to pick, make choices and make, you can have multiple stories, but you can't have all of them. And a lot of, in this case, the article that I read about this, the curators kind of decided to go a middle of the road option that would anger the least amount of people. Um, and, you know, and unfortunately there are several stories that get suppressed because of that. Um, an interesting example on this one, if we go to Arizona, so Holbrook, Navajo County, Arizona. A researcher was doing work on, um, on a small museum in this town in Arizona. It was tiny. It was in an old, it was actually, the museum building is in an old prison. And she was doing work on, it's, it, the town is very close to the Navajo Reservation. And this town was the center of the Pleasant Valley Wars. Um, if you actually get to studying the, the history of some of the rural areas of the West, you'll see a lot of these cattle wars between ranchers. If you've seen the movie Young Guns, the Lincoln County Wars, there's a lot of different things, but this was kind of, you had ranchers versus indigenous cattle. Livestock rights, water rights, and this particular research, researcher went to this museum to study a little bit more. And she noticed that in this museum, that native people were mostly found in the natural history section. All, a lot of the stories of the native, of native people seemed to disappear once you got into the history part. They talk, and it was almost this interesting erasure of it. She found that indigenous people or Latinx people were existed in a natural past, not as part of an evolving present. In fact, most of the modern history of people in the Latinx or indigenous community were found in art drawn on the walls of the prison cells that the museum was in, which is telling in and of itself. They actually, a lot of the displays put these, some of the art that indigenous or Latinx prisoners drew on the walls of their cells as the display, not realizing that they mostly then were portraying the indigenous and Latinx community as, from a criminal perspective, not from a cultural perspective. This researcher decided to go a little bit deeper, examine how the museum was founded. She found that mostly the descendants of Anglo ranchers founded this museum. They designed the governing structures. They declared which objects were significant. And the museum was clearly without deep pockets and a lack of funding led the staff to make decisions that would preserve current funding. And one particular interesting story that came from this, there was a sheriff who is well known in this community as being the quintessential frontier sheriff. He was a fighting man who protected horses and property from renegades. The museum contains story after story of the lawman skillfully shooting people who are attempting to steal cattle or horses. And that was part of this community's founding narrative. The researcher began reading account, other accounts though. This sheriff appears in a lot of different areas. In records found on the Navajo reservation, this sheriff appeared as somebody who frequently showed up on the reservation and murdered people. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, the US government agency, recorded him as an outlaw. And the BIA agent actually wrote in his notes, and these are preserved in the National Archives, that he feared being assassinated by the sheriff for trying to enforce or protect Navajo people's water and cattle rights. And honestly the BIA was ready to prepare charges and ultimate against the sheriff for this, for intimidation and murder, and decided not to because they feared that he and his posse would murder them. So all of a sudden a very interesting narrative, depending on the perspective comes out, where one person's hero becomes another person's outlaw and exists primarily. Are the facts wrong? No, neither narrative is wrong. It's not inaccurate, but when you consider perspective, all of a sudden you're like, well, it gets more and more complicated and the rabbit hole gets deeper and deeper. Let's go to another hot button topic and how museums have displayed it. A lot of, has anyone ever taken a tour of a former plantation? When you're touring a former plantation, oftentimes a lot of those tours would take you through the big house through the rooms, tell you about how the family who lived there lived. They might talk about the people who were enslaved there, but that's usually a separate tour that you do separately. It's not the main tour. And so a lot of places don't necessarily, they talk about, when they talk about the people that were enslaved on these plantations, they talk about them in relation to the family that owned the plantation. If you go to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, they do it very differently. In fact, the Whitney Plantation is, they don't even talk about the family that owned the plantation at all. They tell it exclusively from the perspective of the people that are enslaved there. Near the exit of the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana is a lagoon with it, actually a very gruesome exhibit. In 1811, there was a large uprising of enslaved people through Louisiana, which it grew as large as 500 people at one particular point, until it was crushed in a battle with the local militia. Many of the ringleaders disappeared, and dozens were executed, beheaded, and their heads mounted on poles. I'm not going to show a picture of it because it is gruesome and I didn't want to... And so the exhibit displays 63 ceramic heads mounted on steel poles, represented the people that were killed in the aftermath of the uprising. The exhibit caused locals to cringe and complain that it was too disturbing. The museum's founder has argued that that's the point. This is what happened, and it needs to be displayed. The Whitney Plantation focuses exclusively on the enslaved people, and when you go into the big house, you mostly learn about it from the perspective of the people who actually had to work to keep the house functioning. So you'll see the beautiful dining room, but they won't tell you about this is where the family sat to eat. They'll say this is where these people had to cook and prepare for them like this opulence was possible because of the extracted labor. And part of their goal is to force visitors to confront some of the reality of the brutality of the slavery system. Each visitor, when they arrive, is given a card with the face of a child on it. And visitors, while they're at the Whitney Plantation for the day, or however long they're there, they're actually encouraged to find the child on the card that they're handed when they get their admission, and read about that child's story and what happened to that child, how that child lived, how that life was lived, what happened. The names, the origins, and trades of the people are one of the key exhibits. If you actually look right down here, a lot of times they will actually, these are the names of all the people that were enslaved on the Whitney Plantation over the years. What their names were, as best can be known, what their trades were, where they came from, so that their lives and their stories can matter, and their lives and their stories are told. And it also has a genealogical component because it brings it to the present so that people are encouraged to see how this, despite slavery ending in this country 150 years ago, it is not necessarily a distant past but a present day reality. Now, the Whitney Plantation's approach is not without critique. A lot of the museum administrators used the WPA slave narratives that were recorded in the 1930s. They did not always account for the fact that there were some problematic concerns with how those narratives were put together because they mostly, when that was done, there's also a problem with labeling enslaved people as always being spatially subject to enslavers. However, Whitney has been examined as a neo-slave narrative site to promote certain counter narratives that make people confront ways in which slavery was part of the country's economic system, how it intersected with the country's economic system, and ways in which even states that didn't have slavery still benefited from the system. And in fact, if you study some of the early American economy, the cotton may have been grown in the south but it was woven into cloth in the north and then sold. And there may have been degrees of separation but cotton grown by enslaved people in the south was made into cloth in the north and then sold for a profit. The next museum that I'll cover is the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. It's in New York City. And they began a program called Share Journeys where they took a common experience of being a new immigrant. So one of the things that a lot of museums are done, so you'll have museums that say acknowledge the perspective from which they're looking at things. You have museums like the Whitney Plantation which tell people, examine the role for which you're viewing things. How do you view slavery in the United States? Confront that on your own. Now we come to the Tenement Museum. They have a unique thing where everybody is working together to construct a narrative. Almost every single American has a story of, with the exception of Indigenous people, all of us came from somewhere else. So all of us have an immigration story that has intersected with our own story. And so at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, they actually encourage visitors to the museum to share their own personal family stories with regards to immigration and how it impacts certain things. For example, museum guests do not just hear a story about how an Italian family struggled to survive the Great Depression. They hear this Italian family arrived and they were undocumented for a time. They had to work odd jobs. How, even after gaining legal residency, the wife had to get a job off the record so as not to lose government aid. How the husband and wife never learned to speak English despite living in the United States for decades. And then patrons are asked, how does this connect with anything you have in your own personal family history? And some of your ancestors that came here. And I looked at that and I said, wow, one of my ancestors was known as a Bridget, which was one of an Irish domestic worker. Or I've heard some of the stories of immigrants being drafted to fight in the Civil War as soon as they got off the boat. I found out one of my ancestors was very that, got off the boat and arrived in Providence, Rhode Island and immediately was put into a blue uniform and sent to Virginia. And so people are, and when they're looking at these historic narratives, they're encouraged, does any of this sound familiar to your own story? And when you have a locale such as New York City that is so diverse, you actually find that while the stories can be drastically different, they're incredibly common. You could have someone who is a descendant of the Mayflower arribies, and I know we have at least one in the room, to someone whose parents had recently come here. And you will find intersections and you will find ways in which those narratives are common. And it increases empathy, but it also forces people, if they're willing to do it, to see things from another perspective. And so when confronted with a narrative that was contrary, what this museum found is, sometimes when people were confronted with a narrative that was contrary to their own view, there were a lot of different reactions to it. Sometimes they went silent, they just didn't say anything. Sometimes they became openly argumentative. And so museum interpreters had to open a space where the subjective view of the guests could exist on equal footing with their own. So this was an exercise not only in the museum administrators elevating other stories, but they had to let go of power over their interpretive power a little bit and allow those visitors to contribute their own ideas and contribute to the narrative. Speaking of, and when I read this at the time, as a museum administrator, I was like, oh, God, no. I was like, I'm sorry, that's terrifying, especially leading tours of Ethan Allen Homestead. I was like, oh, gosh, no, I can't let, I can't let people construct their own tour. Who knows what will happen? But in a certain point, a lot of people arrive at a historic museum with a romanticized notion of the past as this insular thing that happened a long time ago that no longer matters to the present. And part of what public historians have to do through the stories is encourage people to make connections within that history to themselves and see how that history connects to their present. And so now the big question is, now we've pointed this out. Now I've got you all, every time you go to a historic site, you're going to ask yourself, okay, why are they doing this? What narrative are they elevating? What power structures are they supporting? What power structures are they subverting? You're going to ask yourself these questions. And the big question is, now what? I'll begin with this. History is complex, confusing, inspiring, depressing, heroic, and horrifying all at once. Why? Because humans are complex, confusing, inspiring, depressing, heroic, and horrifying all at once. And so when we're teaching history, it has to be equally complex and understand that you're not going to just get what happened from a single exhibit. And what is even more daunting is the concerns that presenting traumatic histories to the untraumatized can present. And what it can happen, what can happen when people are confronted with complicity. What I say to all of you is our next step is critical self-reflection is what you have to walk into history with and what you walk into a historic site is. Be honest with yourself. If you're hearing a historic narrative, and you're like, that narrative resonates with me. I like that narrative. I agree with it. Or you hear, I disagree with that narrative. Take a second and ask yourself, why do I agree or disagree with that? What is it that is leading me to agree and disagree with that? Because the minute you recognize that it's your own experience and your own bias that's coloring your interpretation, you understand more about your own perspective. And it allows you to recognize where your own perspective is influencing your interpretation of another person's. And it allows us to look at these events more fully in a more complex manner. And also keep in mind, no matter your race, your ethnicity, your identity, your gender identity, your socioeconomic background, all Americans especially, and I'm focusing this on Americans, carry historical baggage. We are all carrying the baggage of the legacies of colonialism, slavery, economic, depression, immigration in a lot of different ways. And this is a difficult knowledge for all of us to face. And so part of being honest with ourselves, as the way our own identities are intersecting with historic events and certain narratives, is a key way to understanding where other people are coming from and moving forward together in an equitable manner. For historic sites and museums, it's important for historic sites and museums to not just do what one of the previous mentioned examples do, which is try to pick the narrative that angers the least amount of people. And I'm not saying necessarily pick the narrative that angers the most amount of people. What I'm saying is historic sites and public history have to elevate stories and make sure that people have access to stories and that people are armed with the tools to look at stories and understand them. And people and the important thing I also feel is if you are seek out stories that make you uncomfortable, try to understand them. If you're reading a historic narrative and you're like, this kind of makes me feel uncomfortable, then try to understand it more instead of just snapping the book closed. Thank you. And I will take questions if people have them. I'm going to shut this off. Yes. I'm just going to speak for the Homeset Museum here, which I've been involved about 18 years or so. I think we try to do what you suggested into the show Alternative Interpretations. For example, Deacon Allen, one of the former board members, Willis Ferrand Randall, is the one person who's written the latest biographer, Ethan, which we have in our gift shop. But we also have books by Nicholas Mahler and John Duffy, who wrote a book called Inventing Ethan Allen, which presents a very different interpretation of Ethan. We also have what called The Fuel Law, The Spagabons, written by David Bennett, who is an Englishman living in Ottawa. And will be the source of our hook club tomorrow night at seven. And we would invite anybody who would like to come. You don't have to have read the book ahead of time because you all have some knowledge of Ethan. But we would encourage you to come and join us as we talk about various interpretations of Ethan Allen. The only thing I will say and my great, I'm definitely purchased the books. And I'd also say to do a challenge, don't always think of another narrative as an alternative. Because if you say it's an alternative, you assume that there's a mainstream. So try to see if you can put narratives where Bennett's narrative goes right alongside Randall's narrative. Look at each one and be like, wow, I'm getting a very rich perspective of these people. And that's one of the opportunities this organization is giving, which is wonderful. Yes, sir. I absolutely agree that it's important to incorporate divergent perspectives into our understanding of history. Now, I'm wondering what do you say to those who would argue that in the process of doing that over the last several decades, we've actually lost a kind of shared sense of the meaning of the country, why it was important. And it's obvious that maybe this older understanding was romanticized. It was false in certain respects. But it was a way for people to experience a sense of a common purpose and the idea that America was founded on the basis of these great ideals. And to the extent that we start, in a sense, airing our dirty laundry, we leave people feeling, well, why be a patriot? This country sucks. There's no point in trying to work together to make things as good as possible. It sort of makes it cynical about what America is and what it could be. Well, what I will say is ideals and values are things that we strive for, things that we live for. So a lot of that shared narrative was to, these are our values as a country. These are our ideals as a country, our collective ideals. We collectively mean to do better. We collectively, as a country, and one of the things I love about it, is as a society, we're constantly erasing and saying, okay, this didn't work, let's try again. And so I say values are one of those things that we strive for, we try to live up to, as much as we can. And when we look at and we're critical and we look at the different perspectives, what that actually does is, have we completely lived up to these ideals? No. This is an area where we have to recognize, be honest, and say, how can we do this better as a society? And I think that is one of the glues that holds our country together, is maybe we haven't always lived up to our ideals, but they're still our ideals, and we're going to keep working at it. And we're never going to give up. And I'm going to quote Star Trek because I never give a talk without quoting Star Trek. There's one where it says, we must always strive to be more than what we are, and it doesn't matter if we'll never actually reach the goal, the effort yields its own reward. And so that's what I would say to a lot of the people who say, are we losing that collective identity? I would say if we look at those and we say that collective narrative, if these are our values, if they were meant to bring the values and the ideals that we hope to live towards, I think being honest with ourselves in ways that we haven't lived up to it only support that value system, in my opinion. Yes, please. So throughout this, you talked a lot about equity and feelings and inclusion and diversity. And those things are all nice. But what place does objectivity and facts have in these stories? Because or as some people suggest, reason, objectivity, evidence are themselves the product of Western power structures which have been attacked throughout this presentation, which was very enjoyable. And then where does that then leave us? Because especially for historians, because I look at something like the 1619 project which as a historian of that period was very bad history. But was part of this celebration of we need to do this. And you know what I mean? In terms of like, I'm all about talking about those things but it's like we need to incorporate all stories all the time and that's better when we have to look at like, okay, looking at these facts, should we rank these stories? Or you understand what I'm trying to say? Bring this back on. It's a good question and I'm going to repeat it back just to make sure I understood what you were asking. You're asking like, is there a place for objective facts that is divorced from necessarily interpretive interpretation? I think a lot of this is about incorporating different perspectives, right? And the kind of question is, is that yeah, a lot of people have different perspectives, but some of them are not as valid, especially when trying to understand things about the past because they do not have, you know, facts or evidence necessarily on their own or something. Okay, I got it. I think there are going, I mean, ultimately, idea, we're going to have, there are going to be some people who are more informed than others and certain perspectives that are going to be more informed. And you brought up like the 1619 project. So you have a fact that 1619, the reason it's called that is because that's when the first enslaved African people were brought to Virginia and sold at market. And is the perspective of a Spaniard in Mexico who had no idea that was going on necessarily valid? Maybe not, but and so if you're reading the perspective of a Spaniard living in 1619 Mexico of that event, I'd look at that and say, okay, that's interesting. What did he know? I'd evaluate where that came from. Whereas I'd be very interested in the perspective of a working class person who saw this happening because who saw this happening on a plantation being like, what is this all about? So there are some perspectives that are more informed than others and absolutely those should be considered with different weight. As far as facts go, one of the things I say, what happened happened. So it always, so 1619, it will always be like, it always happened on this date that that ad was placed for the first enslaved Africans to be sold in Virginia or July 4th, 1776, that's always going to be when it was executed. Now, is every perspective of that event necessarily going to be informed to explain why it was pivotal to certain people? No. And actually the lack of that is just as telling as the presence of it. So the fact that there are people in the world who are like, what happened on that day is just as telling as other bits. I hope I've answered your question. It's one of those things like, I could probably write 20 pages just on that question. It was a great question. So any other questions, thoughts, comments, concerns? Well, please, if you have any more, please definitely come and ask me privately or tell me why you hate what I said or anything like that. I personally don't mind in the least, that's part of it. I need to acknowledge my own bias because I'm like, hey, I love this stuff, not everybody loves that. But part of just the whole purpose of what I'm saying is be honest with yourself and if something speaks to you, ask yourself why. And if you disagree with something, ask yourself why and start there. Thank you, folks. Thank you, Dan, for your presentation and thank you, everyone, for your amazing questions. One of the things that really stuck with me from the presentation, Dan, as the director of the Ethan Allen Homestead Museum, I heard you mention another museum, small, lacking major funding. And that highly influenced some decisions that they made in their interpretation of, to reinforce the funders that they had committed to them. So on that, that's something that as the director of this small, not highly funded museum, I personally, that resonated with me. So speaking of those funders who have helped this program develop, want to highlight a couple of them. So we have, wrong way. Homelight? John, I got a clicker, I can do it. You can stop pressing. Okay. Yeah. Thank you. So Homelight has been one of the sponsors of this program. So we want to thank them for their sponsorship, as well as Vermont Humanities and AARP Vermont. So those are the three sponsors for this program. And we're always looking for more, if anyone knows if anyone. Okay. I also want to highlight a couple of events coming up for our museum. Tomorrow night, we do have a book club. It's a casual discussion about a book, and we serve tea and cookies, which are complementary. It's a free event. It'll be held here in the Tavern. And we do this quarterly. It's a new program this year. And this quarter's book is A Few Lawless Vagabonds, which was mentioned earlier by David Bennett. And it's about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, and basically argues they were not American patriots. So if you want to come for that debate, tomorrow night here at 7 p.m. And the next big date to note is October 31st. Also known as Halloween is our last day open to the public for general admission before we close for the winter. And during the winter, we'll still host private groups or field trips if anybody still wants to come during that time. But if you want to come just to see the regular show, October 31st is your last chance. We're open daily from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. through that time. And then next month on the third Sunday in October at 2 p.m., right here again, we're going to have our last monthly lecture of the year. And that is called Feeding the Homestead, Fanny's Garden. And that presentation will be delivered by our head gardener, Tom Sharply, who is actually right behind these doors. So if you have any questions about that presentation, he is at the front desk right now, I believe, and you can ask him. So if you're a gardening enthusiast or just want to learn about how people fed themselves in the 18th century, and Fanny Allen, who's Vermont's first native known botanist, and whose garden we are replicating if you want to learn a little about her next month on the third Sunday in November, is the time to come for that. So I'm going to leave it at that, but thank you again everyone for coming and thank you, Dan, for presenting. And I hope everyone has a nice afternoon. Thanks.