Concise Contrast - My 2nd Précis

 

In this Critical Précis I will be looking at two items that are more or less of a scholarly flavor. I realized that writing a critical précis is in some respects not dissimilar to writing a movie review but one that involves two movies and a side-by-side comparison.  

The first item from the required reading would be chapter 9 in the textbook, Nearby history by David Kyvig. I found the chapter landscapes and buildings to be interesting, informative and sensible. At first, I was thinking landscapes as in natural ones and he does mention natural landscapes. He noted that natural landscapes and features of natural landscapes can have an influence on buildings and of course towns and cities. The fact that both Seoul and London are to a great degree on the banks of the Han and Thames rivers inescapably remind us that they to a great degree shaped the culture and history of these two cities. There are other natural causes also. In the city of London in 1667, the landscape was changed in part because of the London fire.  

 Kyvig starts out with a very sensible point. To see the cultural landscape more intelligently and to give, order (and formulate) questions about it, models for analysis and interpretation are helpful. The starting place is its whole and its parts. What would be the whole and what would be the parts? Again, models are helpful. You might for example have a city as the whole, but of course there are many parts that would exist in some ages and not in others, all tributary to the changing times. In one age you would have trains that would shape the landscape and in another, or the succeeding age cars, and in another, fast food...each a model in their own sense.  He also notes that, “Minor changes in technology or practice can have a significant effect on community life.” “Small and indirect influences should not be overlooked in seeking explanations for complicated changes such as the decline of the central business district.”  

 

Kyvig references Neil Harris’s hints in the capsule description of the development of the shopping centers as an example of the whole and its parts. The center, the stores therein and how they changed over time due to seemingly small and indirect influences is an example of how landscapes change. Further examples are given in connection with cars, fast food and how these reacted to each other in the changing landscape. “It is not the spirit of the age then, but it’s reality that initiates changes in style. Changes dictated by necessity are worth looking at.” 

The other item is an article on the tower of London. My final project will involve Castles and how they are a significant part of public history. I was fortunate enough to visit the tower of London in May and of course I had no idea at the time that I would be writing about it. But having spent hours in the building and my final project being Castles in relation to public history, it made sense to make this article one of the two items in my second Critical Précis.  In researching Castles, I found many articles which was partly why I chose Castles as the topic of my final project. However, in researching Castles and public history, I did not find much, and being somewhat familiar with the tower of London, I chose an article on it.  

The author, Owen Jarus from Live Science, gave a very good overview of it. He mentioned its history, its uses and a lot of other interesting details. He gives an overview of the tower of London as a fortress as well as details on its fortifications. He talks about some of its more famous prisoners in addition to how torture was used against inside the tower. He talked about how it was and is used as a repository of crown jewels. I remember this especially because I was not allowed to take any pictures of the crown jewels when I was there. He mentioned the beefeaters, the officials in official ceremonial dress who are now the tour guides there as well as their historical import. He includes humorous incidental details such as why the tower always had ravens there.  He covers more ground in talking about the tower as a fortress and how it is a tourist attraction that attracts more than 2 million visitors every year.  

I could easily say, hands down that the Tower of London is one of the best Museums I have ever seen, and it would be difficult to say if I like it more than what I have seen in Egypt. The tower of London is a jewel of public history and people who go there will usually remember it more clearly than if they read about it in a book. In this, public historians succeed in a way that Academic historians do not. Again, my final project will be on Castles in the realm of public history and my interest and curiosity regarding Castles in connection with public history has only increased.  

In the first item, chapter 9 (Landscapes and Buildings) of Nearby History, Kyvig details in models revolving around the whole and the parts, how change over time, due to small and indirect influences effected landscapes and buildings. Owen Jarus briefly touches on changes to the tower of London which are not without effect of other castles. Like other Castles, the purpose of the tower of London has changed over time. While it serves the official purpose of holding the crown jewels, change has dictated that it is no longer needed as a fortification. In Nearby History, Kyvig notes that buildings being the prominent artifacts on the cultural landscape deserve special attention as centers of human activity and the same could be said for the tower of London down through the ages. They are centers of human activity and while the activities in the tower of London include some aspects that are not in Kyvig’s description of human activity, such as torture, an armory and kings who rule, they are both under the umbrella of public history and both of the respective readings serve to inform, regarding buildings and landscape, in a manner that will interest and excite the curiosity of young and old for years to come.  

 

 

 

 

Sources: 

1. Kyvig, David E, Nearby History, Exploring the past around you, AltaMirra Press (2000) (https://archive.org/details/nearbyhistoryexp0000kyvi_b4g4/page/18/mode/2up?view=theater 

        2.    Jarus, Owen, Live Science, Tower of London: Facts & History - (2014)              

                https://www.livescience.com/42821-tower-of-london.html 

Concise Contrast - My 1st Précis

 

I had never heard of the word précis before this class. When I examined the etymology of the word and discovered that it was borrowed from the French language its former mystique made sense. According to the Merrium-Webster dictionary the word is defined as follows, “: a concise summary of essential points, statements, or facts.” The articles that I will be doing a précis on are as follows. There is an article from USC, University of Souther California entitled “How the Pandemic Changed Museums forever” and Thomas Wood’s “Museums and the Public”, which I consider to be one of the best articles I have ever read. I really felt that I could relate to the import of the latter article.  

The first item is the article “How the Pandemic Changed Museums forever”. I have a great love of history but little love for politics. It is a charged word that sometimes zaps those who use it in public if they are careful of who it is spoken around. I can’t help associating the word politics with the word disgrace, and there is some mention of politics in this article, but a specific and broad aspect of history is also mentioned. The article sort of dances around from art-to-art history to history and from history to politics. The over-arching subject is museums. There are art galleries and art museums. The difference between an art gallery and an art museum is that in an art museum, the art in question is not for sale. 

The article starts out detailing how the pandemic (depending on how the word is spelled) initially crippled museums all over the country, which was due to efforts to contain the virus, and though the article focuses more on art museums, everything detailed regarding their efforts to configure and learn from art exhibitions from a distance, despite the pandemic, is also true about historical exhibitions.  

Though it is not the same as being in an art museum, one method involved filming the exhibition as a whole and conveying a meeting via zoom or some other alternative, with the added function of a discussion on the items in question after watching the film. This was a popular addition that was a consolation for the fact that one was not in an actual museum. 

The questions asked in the article regarding art museums are also true of historical museums and the public historians that are the conductors thereof. And there were some good questions asked. “How can we take what we do at the museum outside of the four walls and deliver a relevant and resonate experience to people’s homes?” During the pandemic, this question would have been a relevant one. And it is still relevant even though people are now free to visit historical museums and the pandemic has become like the balloon zipping around the room right before it loses all its air and drops.   

The article talked about how art museums keep people in the community connected to art, and there is no way in which this is not also true of historical museums helping to keep history alive in the hearts and minds of people in the community. If this has been achieved for art museums, then why not for historical museums? The article makes some good points.  “Pandemic closures showed museums the potential of expanding access to a greater array of artists and art enthusiasts, even when COVID-19 becomes a memory.”  

Again, this could be applied to historical museums. While the article speaks a lot about social and political change in relation to efforts on the part of art museums regarding hot seat questions as well as controversial subjects, its ties into museums in general and thereby, historical museums create a good case for how, even in the face of pandemics, the public historian can come up with ways to maintain and even bring new elements of discovery to historical museums. 

The next item was Thomas Wood’s “Museums and the public: Doing History together. As it is sometimes said, you can’t have a teeter without a totter. Doing history together is as literal as can be because if it is just the public historians in museums without any action from the public, then whatever displays or exhibitions they have will be useless. If it is just the public that is interested in history, which is rare without an effort on the part of public historians, then without any public historians who put forth the effort to help bring about exhibitions, there would be no relay at all.  

And yet the manner of that relay is also important in the reactions between the public and museums. Thomas Woods is, one might say, masterful in presenting a unique and thought-provoking dichotomy between the public and museums.  

 

 

Sources 

1. Woods, Thomas A. “Museums and the Public: Doing History Together.” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1111–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/2945116. 

 

2. Levin, Rachel B. How the Pandemic Changed Museums Forever (or Did It?) USC University of Southern California (2021) https://news.usc.edu/trojan-family/virtual-art-museum-tours-exhibitions-after-covid-pandemic/ 

Museums and the public

 

When I was a child, my parents took my siblings and I to a lot of museums and even in Alaska where I grew up, there were many. I never imagined that museums would become a focus later in life when I decided to become a historian, though as a child, museums were not on the top of the list. The wonderful thing about museums is that they, for the most part, center much more on experience rather than theory. And that is not only a good thing for children, but a good thing for adults as well. Particularly since children are so visual. And some children grow up favoring and understanding the world through the visual aspect of their sensory learning.   

I am often amazed having known nothing about public history (aside from many museums) and having no previous familiarity with it, to learn how truly encompassing it is. It is the sort of informative yet tangible niche I resonate with. Like many people, I tend to think in pictures and often a picture will reach me on a cognitive level when hours of lectures fail to do so. And when people go to a museum, of course, everything they see is visual, and history can take on a new meaning. There might be a little theory, but it is mostly experiential.  

Theory is of course necessary for so many things, and yet in a lot of fields, in many respects, the experience does not begin until the person in question has started the job they went to school for, and the experience, while aided by the theory they learned, is often another ball of wax because it is often a dissimilar counterpart of the actual experience. My mother, unlike myself, has a real scholar’s mind.  She decided to become a nurse at 40 and I embarked on becoming a historian at 41. She said that her experience was that after completing her RN, the actual experience of being a nurse was the real challenge. The theory had prepared her in an informational sense, but much less in the experiential sense.  Theory, by itself, without the experience museums often provide (or good storytelling) can kill history.  

I cannot count the number of times I heard someone say that history was boring. The most common complaint was that the multitude of names and dates and places was a little boggling. I do not consider myself to be a professional when it comes to storytelling, but a good story is so often at the heart of learning and retention, or a tool whereby a concept or situation is understood and appreciated by people to whom the accompanying theory is, in some cases, like salt and pepper on old tv screens. And in my mind’s eye I can see myself as a museum curator helping to oversee the undertaking of an exhibition of some sort. And not to make an exhibition a clone of a child’s storybook, but in the manner and mode of writing, to engage and interest whomever the museum goers or stakeholders are.  

 I do not plan on being a teacher, but if I were, being a good storyteller while keeping the facts the facts would be my preferred and primary mode of learning and retention. Museums and the public represent a mode of preserving history that in some cases bypasses the academic historian. An academic historian in most cases cannot interface with the public since long words like historiography and familiar concepts like historical methods (which are interesting in their own way) might cause the public to begin wondering what is going to be on TV or netflix later in the day. I found the article by Thomas woods to be very interesting because in one specific quote he hit the nail on the head, and when he did so, I was saying to myself, “how right he is!”  

That quote has produced this paper. “The historian James Miller notes, “The mistake most of us academics make is starting with theory rather than experience...A better approach would be to get the people’s attention using a more experience-based approach and then building on that base to introduce analytical concepts.” At this point, if people lose interest in analytics, they have at least learned history, which is why the public and museums are a hand in glove fit.  

 

Sources 

1. Woods, Thomas A. “Museums and the Public: Doing History Together.” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1111–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/2945116.