President Garfield's front porch

I am not a political historian. I’m proof that it is quite possible to get an advanced degree in American history and know very little about presidents.

James A. Garfield is famous for having been assassinated—and in the history of medicine, he’s famous for having been killed by his doctors rather than his assassin. But I didn’t know what kind of person he was, or what he stood for. Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic went very far toward convincing me that Garfield was the most admirable, honest, intelligent person to ever go into politics. I was so impressed by this portrait (despite suspecting it to be hagiographic) that when I was in Cleveland last week I drove out of my way to visit the James A. Garfield National Historic Site in Mentor, Ohio.

Millard’s strongly narrative history combines the stories of Garfield’s life and political career with the stories of Charles Guiteau, his eventual assassin, and of Alexander Graham Bell, who basically invented a metal detector while trying to find the bullets in the president’s body. But Garfield’s life story is enormously compelling in itself. The last president raised in a log cabin, he was able to attend school because his widowed mother farmed to support the family. (The ranger at the Garfield Historic Site dismissively referred to this formidable woman, Liza Garfield, as “Grandma” throughout the whole tour.) He was a natural scholar; the school at which he took a janitor position in exchange for tuition hired him as a teacher just a few years later. He served as a college president, farmed, read books aloud with his family, fought in Congress for freedmens’ rights. When he was nominated for president against his will after a contentious balloting at the 1880 Republican convention, he didn’t campaign in the modern sense but went back to Mentor. He would give speeches to the gathered politicians and journalists from his front porch. An opponent of the spoils system, civil service reform was high on his political agenda.

When the disturbed Guiteau shot Garfield just a few months into his presidency, Garfield’s body was placed at the center of the debates over the germ theory and Listerian practices in contemporary surgery. His doctors poked around in the wound in his side, looking for the bullets; he died of sepsis eventually, excruciatingly. I was surprised to learn that even in 1881, after the autopsy, it was widely believed that his doctors had killed him. (I had thought that this was a case of historians looking back with contempt on ineffective medical practice.) Guiteau even offered this widely held opinion in the courtroom as an argument in his defense.

Garfield was mourned extravangantly. His widow, Lucretia, devoted the rest of her life to promoting his legacy, collecting his papers and founding a memorial library at the house in Mentor, a progenitor of the presidential library movement. Though Garfield’s papers are now at the Library of Congress, his books are still in Mentor. What a missed opportunity–the historic site could use his books to help visitors understand his views on modern farming, statecraft, religion (he was a Disciples minister), and science, rather than putting them behind glass and saying how silly the titles of those old books were. I learned so much about Garfield’s life and death from Millard’s compelling book that I wished that the interpretation of his historic house would demonstrate that same sense of the continued importance and power of Garfield’s story.

*Book source: review copy from the publisher.

Prolific inventor Beulah Louise Henry (1887-1973), a self-taught synesthete engineer from North Carolina, received 49 patents but is credited with over 100 inventions.  Her inventions were at first improvements on household technologies–her first patent was for a vacuum-sealed ice cream freezer, in 1912–but she soon became an entrepreneur and consultant.

By the mid-1920s she was living in New York and running a company to manufacture umbrellas and parasols of her own design, including an umbrella with swappable snap-on covers.  She invented business machine improvements for typewriters (aligning feeds for automatic typewriters, for instance) and cash registers, consulting for companies such as Mergenthaler Linotype.  Henry was also involved in sewing machine innovations.  She also consulted and made unique products for doll and toy companies.

Henry was a savvy inventor and businesswoman; the press dubbed her “Lady Edison.” Like Edison, she surrounded herself with a handpicked team to do research and development on her products, and help translate her designs into manufactured products.  It seems like she had an unusually excellent sense of spatial reasoning and became skilled in directing how her products should be machined.  She is one of only a few women in the early 20th C to become a professional inventor who was both recognized for her work and was able to profit from it.

Autumn Stanley quotes Henry as saying that all one needs for inventing “is time, space and freedom.” (Mothers and Daughters of Invention, 422.)  Here’s wishing those to the women inventors of the future.

I posted last year on Nora Stanton Blatch, and in 2009 about women telegraphers.

Another historian was among the winners–Jacob Soll, who does early modern book and political history.

Previous coverage of museum and history MacArthur winners: 2007, 2008.

I’ve spent most of the past two years working on a very large automotive history exhibit. 80,000 sq ft, to be exact–bigger than most museums and probably the biggest exhibit I will ever have the opportunity to help develop. Besides vehicles, the exhibit includes 65 exhibit cases, which are thematic and put automotive history into a broader cultural context. I curated 21 of them.

To avoid museum fatigue and to try to ensure that visitors would read some of the text, we had very severe word limits. I found myself explaining the importance of the Erie Canal in 20 words in a caption to a commorative medal, the entire career of Andrew Riker in 40, the immense importance of kerosene in the 19th century in 20-some, and how a Stirling engine works in a frequently-rewritten 25. And while I was writing, I turned to my experiences—and community—on Twitter.

I’m often asked (and often asked on Twitter) if Twitter has changed my exhibit writing. It has. I live on Twitter and have become very comfortable talking about my own experiences—work, food, bike rides, friendships, religion—140 characters at a time. When I was stumped in label-writing–for instance on that kerosene paragraph, in an exhibit case about American experiences with petroleum–I started breaking my labels up into tweets. When I fatalistically believed I could never fit the content I thought vital for visitors into 45 words, I had to reframe my thinking: this label is three tweets long. I know instinctually how much content can fit in three tweets. These are constraints I understand, constraints that work. And it worked. The words and concepts fell into place in my newly-conceptualized mental space.

Besides reframing my writing into tweets, I benefited from my community on twitter. This includes stalwart historians who tend to use the #twitterstorians hashtag, as well as museum professional colleagues, but it also includes the scientists, writers, journalists and miscellaneous friends who found my process interesting and worth cheering on. Whenever I needed encouragement, syntactical help, or just to complain a little, someone from my extended Twitter community was available. This ambient support and critique helped make my writing possible. Thank you, Twitter, and thank you, #twitterstorians.

Various reports, updates and roundups on the document thieves who targeted historical societies, archives and presidential libraries.

A costumed first-person interpreter at Plimoth Plantation has a piece in The Hairpin entitled The Ladies of the 17th Century Were Way More Hardcore than You.  The comments alone are priceless, ex:  ”Old Sturbridge Village or gtfo.”

Just released by Left Coast:  Letting Go?: Sharing Historical Authority in a User-Generated World, edited by Bill Adair, Ben Filene and Laura Koloski.  It’s full of pieces by fabulous museum, history, tech and education people. I will certainly pick up a copy.

The UMass Amherst public history program is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a two-day conference about the future.  Public History 2036 (pdf) will take place on campus Sept 23-24 and features lots of great folks.

Rebekah Higgitt, intrepid historian of science, has branched out from Whewell’s Ghost with a new blog, Teleskopos.  Highly recommended.

Historian of geology Naomi Oreskes has been using history for good to intervene in climate change debates.

Citizen History at the Holocaust Museum.

Forecasting the future of museum ethics, a project of AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums and the Institute of Museum Ethics at Seton Hall.

Have a wildfire?  Call a historian.

A new exhibit space for Harvey Cushing’s collection of brains.

The “Three Societies”–the History of Science Society, the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science and the British Society for the History of Science–meet together every 4 years.  Next July, they’ll be meeting in Philadelphia.

This great event about the Public History of Science and Technology will be happening September 11-14 at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, SC.  The program is up and registration will soon follow. I’ll be talking about cabinets of curiosity and contemporary museum practice on the 13th, and the program is filled with great colleagues.  Hope to see you there.

For the first, many institutions are unprepared for sudden disasters.  We often have disaster plans, but they may not be well-distributed or well-publicized, and staff may not know what to do.  Or the scale of the disaster is beyond staff ability to remediate.  May 1 is a time where we’re supposed to raise awareness about these issues, so here’s your obligatory MayDay for Collections link, with connections to resources. 

Disasters also remind us of our stewardship responsibilities.  At collecting institutions, part of our job is to ensure that the stuff outlives us, so that future visitors can encounter and learn from and wonder at it.  Artifacts like huge pieces of machinery dwarf us and by their sheer bulk may convince us that they are not vulnerable.  But of course they are.  And if/when we let them fall apart, we become part of a story about hubris, and ruins, and the dustiness and incommensurability of the past with the present.  Is this the story we want to embody? 

For the place of LAMs in disaster recovery, I always wonder what I can do as a historian and museum person–as opposed to an EMT–in the face of disaster.  And I’m drawn to the idea of cultural heritage institutions as places of hospitality.  The library in Joplin is open and took no damage, though some staff had their homes destroyed. It’s both service and hospitality to provide a free warm place with electricity and internet access, as well as access to other resources. That’s not nothing in a disaster situation.  Museums are not so good as this, though some have been imagining them as places for community, food, resources, learning and wonder in response to both current challenges and post-apocalyptic scenarios.

I think I cover these disasters, then, in that they affect cultural heritage institutions, because they are opportunities to help both people and collections.  To help people by providing them with space and resources and an assurance that their stories are important; and to help collections by an increasing attention to their physical vulnerability.  And because it’s worthwhile to publicize opportunities to help.

A few standout sessions and moments:  To start off the morning, I went to a session addressing the tensions around crowds, experts and shared authority.  We had a great discussion about setting up frameworks for participation in UGC and crowdsourcing projects, as well as training.  Mark Tebeau (a colleague I was delighted to meet IRL) talked about how a user in his 70s became a prolific blogger for a local history project.  Anne Whisnant was insightful about crowd/expert issues in her project as well.  I also found myself invoking Nina’s ideas about participatory projects many times over the course of the day.

After attending sessions on maps, building public history community online and oral history, we ended the day with a discussion on “Digital Public History–what is it?”  This is the kind of definitional discussion I usually have limited patience for, but we had an interesting, wide-ranging discussion on DH, public history, and where we fit as a field.  Serge Noiret made a case for why definitions could be useful, especially in European public history contexts: