Slavery and Public History

     “The Tough Stuff of American Memory” is the subtitle for James and Lois Horton’s edited volume Slavery and Public History.  A very simple and colloquial phrase, but it gets to the heart of the issue.  Slavery and American history developed side-by-side, but frequently public presentations of history ignore this tension-fraught subject in order to make the visitors’ experience more palatable.  This book explores how public historians have attempted to integrate black history, specifically about slavery, into their interpretations since the mid-1980s according to the larger New Social History trend.    

     The two chapters I found the most interesting were Lois Horton’s look at the inclusion of Sally Hemmings in Monticello’s history, and Dwight Pitcaithley’s chapter on the National Park Service’s interpretation of what caused the Civil War.  Both of these chapters deal with an idealized look at our past that filters out the less-than-savory incidents.  The problem with this white-washed view of history is a lack of context.  Referring to slaves as “servants” and discussing their contributions in a passive voice in order to avoid the truth of their presence also avoids the affect slaves had on life at Monticello.  The response to this “integration” of slave history in the Monticello tours and history was mostly positive, as guests acknowledged the importance of slavery to American history overall.

      The visceral response, however, from Southern groups to the NPS inclusion of slavery in battlefield interpretations differed greatly from the Monticello case.  They claimed that the federal park system was insulting the South both today and for their part in the Civil War due to the ‘supposed’ immorality of slavery.  Those who opposed this change in interpretation claimed that the federal parks were judging the South harshly and unfairly desecrating half the soldiers whom had fallen on those very battlefields.  This reminded me of the conversation in class on September 7^th when we read the news article on the gentleman separating the horrors of slavery from Southern heritage pride in his role as Frederick Douglass.  No, you cannot truly separate the history of the Civil War from the history of slavery, just as you cannot separate general American history from the history of slavery.  For accurate and inclusive representations of history, public historians, or any historians for that matter, cannot cherry-pick according to their own agenda while ignoring the larger cultural context.  That type of history is irresponsible.