The Battles of Germantown

When David W. Young declares that doing public history effectively is hard work, he knows whereof he speaks. Long engaged both professionally and personally in the Germantown neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia, Young counts as one of the people doing that hard work. Though his book only rarely moves out of the 3.3 square miles of Germantown, his experiences there and the insights he develops from them bear on public history practice far more widely.Young's study captures the profession's nearly universal struggles to overcome parochialism at historic sites and narrowness of vision about history overall. A very strong chapter, titled “Authority,” about the arrival of 1950s/60s urban renewal in Germantown opens out these issues. Local white leadership, fully committed to a single narrative of colonial heroism for Germantown, embraced a redevelopment project for Market Square strongly supported by the city and local businesses. In pursuit of the lucrative tourist traffic turning up at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, the proposed development would have wiped out a Black neighborhood to disrupt, falsify, and thoroughly commercialize a central community space. The community, through many, many small organizations, rose up and, miraculously, fought it off.In his presentation of the fight against Market Square and the highway needed to give tourists access to it, Young offers a strikingly original analysis. The proposed redevelopment galvanized historical awareness among Germantown's people, setting the stage for much of the change that would come within Young's own, much later, tenure as a cultural leader there. By reconceiving urban renewal as ultimately strengthening rather than weakening the community fabric, Young's analysis highlights the crucial fact that the divisive project failed. Though hard feelings lingered for decades between Whites and Blacks, the advent, tenacity, and ultimate failure of this “colonializing” fantasy actually left a helpful legacy ... the Square physically intact and the community energized about history and ready to work.Young's analysis of Cliveden Conversations, a project he initiated after becoming Cliveden's director in 2005, points to another problem well known to public historians—the fear among cultural stewards of talking openly about slavery, race, poverty, gender, or any other subject that could unleash emotional reactions in the audience. As Young theorizes public history, effective work absolutely requires getting past that reticence. As he experienced the process directly, the strong emotions released were, in the end, highly constructive for the community, the site(s), and the integrity of historical interpretation that he sought. The Conversations project stimulated a broad-based sense of community ownership of Cliveden's stories.The two incidents together brought Young to offer the profession the unusual precept that enabling and embracing controversy significantly raises the value of historic sites. To be effective, Young argues, public historians have to emerge from the sequestration with which they are familiar and ask their communities how the history they hold can be of service. Young defines public history principally as “relationships, not buildings or narratives” (37). It always was a relationship, but Young wants those old top-down affairs to become instead links among equals. Public history, in Germantown and elsewhere, once served by holding up WASP norms of behavior and standards of importance as universals, encouraging all “others” to identify with them, blending in by losing their own histories and identities. That old approach, in fact, now fuels popular scorn for public history and historic sites. Finding the principles that serve the present necessarily involves confronting the race, class, and gender assumptions built into the old ways. For donors, boards, and local leaders who thought they were helpfully promoting “universals,” demotion to “just another voice” and worse, a harmful one infused with oppression, can be harrowing.But Young empowers public historians to face the challenge by narrating the process in a way that nurtures confidence. Young's narratives (though very occasionally a bit tedious) can steel us to the way the work develops, so that, at the very least, we don't panic and immediately retreat. He demonstrates repeatedly how much richer and more captivating interpretation becomes by serving real community needs. Giving voice to forgotten peoples, creating context for issues in the present, letting history be complex, ugly, inconclusive, and multivocal all add up to a history that matters. And history that matters is history that will be saved. In short, allowing controversy into interpretation, however radical it may seem and difficult it may be, actually meets even the most conservative, building-based preservation goals.Young also foregrounds the irreducible importance of “memory infrastructure” (166) in helping public history sustain community cohesion. Picking up a phrase that emerged from the New York Public Library's vast digitization project, Young gives the term a potent analog twist. In an eye-opening chapter on Germantown's Negro Achievement Week in 1928, a star-studded celebration of African American creativity and leadership, Young explores the many neighborhood institutions that contributed and then asks why the event was almost immediately and all but entirely lost to memory. The answers, which emerge over several chapters, point to the lack of any physical space, signage, or institutional legacy on the ground to keep the memory of the celebration alive. “Negro Achievement Week” was too far from Germantown's fixed white colonial narrative to have won a permanent place in the memory infrastructure. Decades later, successful efforts to reinterpret the Johnson House as an Underground Railroad station and to save and mark a former African American burial ground emphasize the importance of creating material sites of memory in sustaining multivocal community history.Young's ideas raise many issues relevant to the training and practice of public historians. How could sociological knowledge, skilled negotiation and conflict management, and serious study of racism in American history all be incorporated into public historians' professional education? Public history should not continue to expect practitioners to learn these vital skills by trial and error. If Young is correct that such skills, effectively applied, can both create healthy American communities and secure American historic treasures, we fail to foster them at great peril indeed

Art · Colonialism · Narrative · Parochialism · Political science · Politics · Redevelopment · Sociology · Square (algebra) · Law · Race, History, and American Society