Politics and Religion ca1754

The news in today's papers that the Vatican "announced it would make it easier for Anglicans uncomfortable with the Church of England’s acceptance of women priests and openly gay bishops to join the Catholic Church" brought to mind the meeting of the Virginia Anglican clergy in Williamsburg on this date in 1754. With George Washington's surrender of Fort Necessity to the French at the top of transatlantic concerns, Commissary Thomas Dawson recommended that the clergy meet in a convention to make a declaration of fidelity to George II and express in it "a sincere detestation of popery." The address subsequently adopted by the convention labeled the French and Indians as "professed enemies of religious and civil liberties" and declared their advance as "the unjustifiable encroachments of popish and arbitrary power." Robert Dinwiddie, Virginia's lieutenant governor, responded to Dawson's call for the clergy to meet by admonishing them to inculcate people with "great dangers we are exposed to, both as to our lives, liberties [and estates]...".

The 1754 meeting of the clergy reminds one that the historical tensions between Anglicanism and Catholicism have always been as much about politics as about theology.

Buildings, Landscapes, and Historical Memory

A 2008 book by Seth Bruggeman, Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument (University of Georgia Press), focuses on the history of George Washington's birthplace at Wakefield on Virginia's Northern Neck (pictured above). In doing so, he raises some rather interesting questions about the relationship between historic sites, landscape, and the problematic nature of historical memory.

Here are some excerpts from a recent H-Net review by Kirk Savage of the University of Pittsburgh, who "has written extensively on public monuments within the larger theoretical context of collective memory and identity."

'While a major part of the book concerns the administrative history of the site under the direction of the NPS, Bruggeman frames that history within a set of larger contexts. He is particularly interested in the long history of “object fetishism,” especially in the Christian traditions of saints’ relics and pilgrimages to holy sites. Bruggeman sees the secular birthplace phenomenon as a residue of these medieval spiritual practices. The question of who has access to and control over these potent objects is thus an age-old question of power and representation. At the same time, the survival of these practices of worship into an increasingly professionalized and “scientific” discipline of history raises problems and paradoxes for the bureaucrats who are charged with managing “sacred” sites and relics.

Over the past century, Wakefield has been a collection of various kinds of objects competing with one another for authenticity. The women who furnished the faux “replica” filled it with high-style colonial era furniture bought on the antiques market, while the NPS superintendent of the site fought to exhibit--in the house’s damp basement--a ragtag collection of arrowheads and pottery shards found onsite in archaeological digs, which, in his view, had special significance because Washington might actually have seen or used them. Bruggeman usefully sorts these competing objects into semiotic categories--index, icon, and symbol--according to the system laid out by philosopher Charles Pierce.

But Bruggeman’s narrative makes clear that, off and on, the NPS tried to sidestep the nagging questions about authenticity by shifting attention from the memorial house and its objects to the site itself, the landscape in which Washington was supposedly born and raised (up to the age of three!). From an early date the managers of Wakefield set up a “living farm” along colonial lines, and even hired an elderly black man, apparently born a slave near the Wakefield property, to work eighteenth-century crops like tobacco. Later, the NPS installed a comprehensive program of living history on the farm, one of the first in the park system. Until the 1990s, this program did not openly deal with the issue of slavery. Instead the birthplace tried to create an idyllic plantation environment supposedly “untouched by time” that would somehow conjure the memory of Washington, primarily for the benefit of a white tourist audience that might also take in Robert E. Lee’s birthplace just a few miles down the road.

While Bruggeman throws light on the issues of race, class, and gender at stake in these regimes of preservation and interpretation, his analysis would have benefited from a somewhat stronger emphasis on the core issue of landscape. Although “object fetishism” certainly plays a crucial role at Wakefield, the significance of the birthplace--from the moment Custis installed the first memorial stone there--has depended even more on the authenticity of the landscape itself. Yet that landscape arguably is no more authentic than the faux “memorial house,” since subsequent generations of owners, most notably the NPS itself, have so dramatically altered it. The idea of a landscape “untouched by time” is transparently antihistorical. It would be interesting to hear more of Bruggeman’s thoughts on the persistence of this rhetoric in NPS interpretation, which has been a constant from 1940 to the present, despite all the changes in administration and bureaucratic philosophy.'

For the full review, go to http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24798

Rating history sites, as a general matter.

Having spent my spare time in the last few weeks finally hitting a number of the history museums and other historic sites in this neck of New England, it occurs to me that there is a real need for a forum to discuss the relationship of these sites to what it is that we, as historians, are at least trying to do. It has often occurred to me that the kind of information that one encounters at such sites as, say, the Gilbert Stuart museum outside of Wickford, might actually cause problems that we must fix when we get into the classroom, even as such as sites (especially when they have a working snuff mill from the 1730s!) are invaluable resources as teaching aids. And, frankly, I happen to almost always find them helpful in informing my own research. One can encounter things (like snuff manufacturing in Rhode Island) that just wouldn't cross one's mind sitting in the bowels of a library writing the latest chapter. But the counterintuitive lack of attention to history at such places (the introductory video at the Stuart house is laughable) is troubling when one considers that much of what we face in the classroom is a process of helping our students unlearn what they think they know about the past.