Mind the Gap

A Self-Reflective Essay

Angela Smith
November 28, 2007
Introduction to Public History
Rebecca Conard
 Mind the Gap: A Self-Reflective Essay

Communication technology is rapidly changing, and as a historian, designer, and media

specialist, I am interested in how this change will affect the history profession. It is

important for both academic and public historians to examine the issues that come with this

media transformation: How do we know what we know about history? How do we

understand the past? How do we engage the public in “historical thinking”?1 The answers

are important in the academy and in the public sphere where, for well over a century,

historians in both have relied on the written word to communicate their craft. Today,

however, the written word is less dominant in the wider culture, and advancing technology

has created alternative pathways to communicate history. There is often a vast distance

between these arenas, a distance that suggests watchfulness – in Britain, there are ever-

present admonishments to “mind the gap,” and they could well be used as historians make

the leap into technology. These changes do not signal the death of written history; on the

contrary, they open new doors for historians to teach their subject in different and creative

ways, but they require scholars to make a leap of faith. Professional historians cannot

ignore new media without neglecting the students of a new generation who have grown up

with technology and relate to the world in a much more visual way than their predecessors.

In the next twenty to thirty years, I hope to create a career that bridges history, design, and

media technology, as I communicate history to the public and train other historians and

students of history to do the same. As I forge ahead to incorporate media technology into

the practice of history, I am also mastering the traditional tools of the historian: analysis,

1 Sam Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future
of Teaching the Past (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 110.

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research, and writing. These fundamental tools are the ones I utilized most often in the

Stones River class project, although I was able to convert some of our group’s research

into useful visual material to share in our final report.

Applying new technologies to history is my passion, though it has taken two decades to

discover it. In 1984, before the advent of the personal computer, I graduated from Belmont

University with a degree in English and communication arts. Two years later, I found

myself learning to use the first “desktop publishing” computer, a Mac Plus with an

accompanying laser printer, while working for a small printing company. I rode a quickly

evolving technological wave as I worked for graphic design firms, prepress shops, and

printers. Although most of my experience has been in design and print production, I was

introduced to web technologies while working in San Francisco in the mid-1990s. A few

years later, I began to experiment with digital video at a Nashville design firm. At that

time, I was unaware that the experimentation was preparing me for a new career that would

allow me to merge history and technology.

When I learned about the MTSU public history program in 2003, I expected it might be

an entirely new field for me – I had always enjoyed research and learning, but those things

had not been part of my livelihood. After talking to Dr. Susan Myers-Shirk, the graduate

director at the time, it seemed public history might be a good direction. After taking twelve

hours of undergraduate history to qualify for the masters program, I was admitted in fall

2004. None of the four tracks in MTSU’s public history program seemed to fit my personal

goal of merging history and new media technology, so I decided to focus instead on a

master’s degree in traditional history. I knew enough about media technology, but I needed

more academic history to add to the mix. It was during this time that I realized there were

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few history programs addressing the changing world of communications and history.

George Mason University implemented the Center for History and New Media in the mid-

1990s to use digital media and computer technology to democratize history; the

Department of History at the State University of New York (SUNY) Albany, at about the

same time, began adding to and changing its curriculum to blend historical scholarship and

teaching with digital technologies. Others have followed, most to a lesser extent, but still

testing the waters that will take both the teaching and practice of history into the twenty-

first century.

It was at the dawn of that century that I began and completed a master’s degree, and I

found many opportunities to blend new media and history in my professional life. When I

spoke out about my interest, I was pleased to find several professors of traditional and

public history who were willing to listen, to take a chance. During my first semester at

MTSU, I had an opportunity to work with Dr. Rebecca Conard on a brochure and poster

for the Teaching American History Project, a series of summer workshops for teachers. In

spring 2005, I designed the brochure for the department’s newest offering, a PhD in public

history, and again I had an opening to blend my sensibilities about history with graphic

design. These projects gave me a chance to merge visual and historic elements in

interesting ways. Simultaneously, I began working part-time for Belmont University as a

web and graphics adviser for the student newspaper. New opportunities emerged as a few

Belmont students indicated an interest in history and documentary studies. Since then I

have taught four Belmont independent studies in which each student produced a 20- to 30-

minute documentary film during a semester and one summer intensive with a group of four

students who produced two films. These documentaries that undergraduate students

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produced are outstanding, and I became a proponent of a teaching model I call process

learning. I describe this style of learning as an opportunity for students to learn narrative

from the inside out, rather than a lecture style, which necessarily takes place from the

outside in. The effectiveness of this style is exciting and presents history teachers with new

tools to reach students. Following the success of these independent studies, Dr. Lorne

McWatters, a public history professor at MTSU, decided to use his historic preservation

class in fall 2006 as a vehicle to introduce a similar process in a graduate class. The

resulting film on historic preservation in Murfreesboro has been shown at the NCPH

conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and to several other groups; positive feedback has

come from traditional and public historians and many other viewers. In addition to

documentary work, there have been several other opportunities to blend web design and

history. One was my class project for the fall 2006 African American History Seminar, for

which I designed and implemented a website for the 1946 Columbia, Tenn., race riot. As a

GTA in Dr. McWatters’ spring 2007 spring Historic Preservation class, I worked one-on-

one with the students to create a website for the Heritage Partnership of Rutherford

County. The quality and the range of the work I have done blending history, technology,

and design illustrates the value of incorporating these crafts into history education, a

scholarly enterprise undertaken with a contemporary cultural application.

Presenting a past people can relate to is one of my goals as a historian. In fact,

historians have a responsibility to bring the past to life. “Material restoration and

commemoration of relics, both painful and inspiring, allow people to ‘touch’ the past

viscerally, much as they do through their powerful material presence,”2 Edward Linenthal

2 Edward T. Linenthal, “Epilogue: Reflections,” chapter to Slavery and Public History:

The Tough Stuff of American Memory (New York: The New Press, 2006), 217.

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explains in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory. To

effectively bring the past to life, as public historians Katherine Corbett and Dick Miller

have noted, teams consisting of a historian, designer, educator, and curator often work

together on exhibits in museums. Corbett and Miller warn that the historian’s intellectual

authority is diminished in these situations.3 In contrast to their concern, I argue that the

public historian should have the opportunity to train not only in the historical craft, but also

in technology-related fields, thus expanding the historian’s authority. Technology is an

incredibly powerful tool that gives us the ability to “touch the past” in an infinite number

of ways. We are limited only by education, time, and our imaginations. Additionally,

university history departments and many professional history associations are concerned

with graduate education, and they frequently ask the question, “What kind of jobs can

graduates get?”4 Blending media and history in graduate education can make history

professionals significantly more attractive to a range of employers, from historic houses to

museums to public archives and even television and film, as technology continues to

evolve.

This fall, I began coursework in the Public History PhD program at MTSU, and the

Stones River project is my introduction to cultural landscape work. Through the class

readings I was exposed to the roots of the public history profession and the issues that

every public historian must be aware of as we began our research. I realized quickly that

the story of the black and white residents of the Stones River area before it was a national

park was not simple. As we continued our research, I saw that its complexity holds deep

3Katherine T. Corbett and Howard S. Miller, “A Shared Inquiry into Shared Inquiry,”
The Public Historian 28 (Winter 2006), 21.
4 Thomas Bender, Phillip M. Katz, and Colin Palmer, The Education of Historians for
the Twenty-first Century (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 65.

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layers that may never be uncovered. We were assigned the task of exploring land

ownership on Van Cleve Lane between the end of the Civil War and the War Department’s

purchase of the park property between 1929 and 1932. Additionally, we were to evaluate

the archaeological prospects in the same area, known as the Cemetery community.

As our group set out to research the ownership of the land, I began to think we could

really benefit from some kind of system to share information; I began to put together a

project database. The idea is built around all groups sharing information by entering what

they find in a searchable database. After talking to Albert Whittenberg, we decided to bring

this project to life by working with a database programmer at MTSU. I passed my database

design to Dave Munson to implement on one of MTSU’s servers. Though it is not

complete, the concept shows promise for future classes to easily pick up where the current

class ended. I have limited skills in database implementation, and I hope to be able to take

a class at MTSU or at another local school to learn more. Understanding database

programming both for sharing information and data analysis would be an extraordinarily

useful skill for my work in history and new media.

Our group work focused primarily on research in deeds and tax records. Learning to do

the tedious research in the deeds office and at the county archive exposed me to research

methods I had not used before. I enjoy a search for information that brings the subjects to

life. There was little time, however, to dig for that kind of information, yet through trial

records, wills, and census studies, I was able to find some human connections in the

research. The Center for Historic Preservation files also contained fragments of

information that helped illuminate the social and economic situation of the residents of the

Cemetery community, a place surely full of anticipation as its residents absorbed their very

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new freedom. Readily accessible history of that time, however, does not address the

establishment of Cemetery. Michel-Rolph Trouillot in his book, Silencing the Past: Power

and the Production of History, writes about the “silences” of history, and the Cemetery

community was silent until recently.5 It became our job to give voice to the silence of the

community founded between the bloody battle that occurred in 1863-64 and the effort of

white southerners to shape a new Civil War narrative. The historic context of the Stones

River project came into focus through the assigned readings. For example, D. W. Meinig,

in The Shaping of America, described the situation of African Americans in the South after

the war: “Freedmen were generally regarded as wards of the whites – whether of the

Whites in the localities they shared or of the nation that had rescued them from bondage

was deeply in dispute.”6 He explained that a negotiation occurred between ex-slaves and

white landowners that ultimately produced the sharecropping system. As a result, African

Americans created “loose clusters commonly known as ‘settlements’ (usually named after

a leading family and often unrecorded on the map), and a group of such settlements was

usually referred to as a ‘community’ (often named after some natural feature, such as a

creek, a cover, a hill).”7 This is exactly what happened as African Americans moved into

the Cemetery community after the war.

The fact that African Americans owned property near the battlefield is important for

many reasons. “Memory has geography,” Stuart McConnell wrote in The Memory of the

Civil War in American Culture, as he explained the importance of physical places in

5 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 26.
6 D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America, A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of
History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 196.
7 Ibid., 201.

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history. 8 “Monuments demonstrate forcefully in physical space the same sorts of tensions

that less obviously characterize cultural and political space.”9 It is not surprising that after

the Civil War African Americans would be drawn to battlefields. Though they did not yet

have political power, the fact that Union soldiers were buried and commemorated near

their community was a powerful reminder of their hard-won freedom. It was still a

precarious freedom because, as Meinig explained in Color in the Plantings: The Afro-

American Presence, both Southerners and Northerners made many attempts to solve the

racial problem by exporting the “problem” (African Americans) to Africa or sending them

to other regions such as Haiti to eliminate the social conflicts caused by integration. Black

land ownership was thus a bold act announcing to the world a right to own land in the

United States.10 While the black experience was obviously different from the white

experience after the Civil War, even black experiences varied dramatically. “The varieties

of black memory of emancipation and the war are as diverse as region, education,

generation, experience, and political and social outlook would, of course, shape them,”11

David Blight noted in Beyond the Battlefield: Race Memory, and the American Civil War.

Both Linenthal and Blight addressed the battlefield as a cultural symbol that changes

over time with memory and commemoration. Linenthal described slavery and the Civil

8 Stuart McConnell, “Epilogue: The Geography of Memory,” chapter to The Memory

of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004), 258.
9 Ibid., 260.

D. W. Meinig, “Color in the Plantings: The Afro-American Presence,” in The

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Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2,

Continental America, 1800-1867 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 296-311.

David W. Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race Memory, and the American Civil War
11

(Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 200.

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War as one of America’s “indigestible stories.” He illustrated the difficulty of the subject

by comparing it to a “fishbone stuck in the throat.” 12 The treatment of African Americans

in this country both before and after the Civil War is difficult to grasp. Yet, as Linenthal

noted, “We are not responsible for events long past, but we are responsible for the

preservation and presentation of them to coming generations.”13 Though Civil War

battlefields originally were scenes of death and violence, Blight wrote, “Over time, in a

variety of ways, [they] have become sites of healing and reconciliation in our nation’s

culture.”14 Memory and culture, he explained, have clear roles in creating a narrative that

changes over time. These two historians impart wisdom public historians can store away.

As we move forward into the “real” world and interpret history to a public not always

receptive to difficult histories, it is helpful to understand there is a way to honor the facts

and value the evolving story.

Interestingly, the Stones River project sheds light on a social history that has not been

fully told; we are uncovering information that will help create a narrative about African

American activities near the cemetery after the war. Dwight Pitcaithley, in “A Cosmic

Threat: the National Park Service Addresses the Causes of the American Civil War,”

contended that it is time for the National Park Service to move beyond its military

interpretation of the Civil War and begin to “illuminate the social, economic, and cultural

issues that caused or were affected by the war…”15 Our project is helping to do just that.

12 Linenthal, “Epilogue,” 213.

13 Ibid., 224.
14 Blight, Beyond the Battlefield, 174.

Dwight T. Pitcaithley, ““A Cosmic Threat”: The National Park Service Addresses
15

the Causes of the American Civil War,” in Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of
American Memory (New York: The New Press, 2006), 173.

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 Though this project has given me only small opportunities to blend media and history,

it has significantly stretched my research skills. That said, I feel creatively challenged to

communicate the vast amount of information in visual ways, such as using map overlays to

show changing land ownership through time or creating charts to illustrate white and black

land ownership. The exacting work of data collection and synthesis has made me faster and

more confident researching local history, plus working with interesting and interested

students like Kristen Deathridge and Richard White has been great. We divided the

responsibilities, and they supplied data for me to synthesize in many different ways. The

project was time consuming and tedious, but I have grown and stretched as a historian by

participating.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bender, Thomas, Phillip M. Katz, and Colin Palmer. The Education of Historians for the Twenty-first
Century. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Blight, David W. Beyond the Battlefield: Race Memory, and the American Civil War. Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.

The Public Historian, A Journal of Public History. Santa Barbara: University of California, 1980-present.

Fahs, Alice, and Joan Waugh, eds. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Horton, James Oliver, and Louise E. Horton, eds. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American
Memory. New York: New Press, 2006.

Meinig, D. W. The Shaping of America, A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press,
1995.

Wineburg, Sam. Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

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