Marty Blatt is chief of cultural resources and historian at Boston National Historical Park and is vice president of the National Council on Public History.
What is public history?
Public history is history that attempts to be accessible and is done outside the university. It is history that is done in high schools, elementary schools, museums, local historical societies, and National Park Service sites. It also includes documentaries or historical films.
What is your job at Boston National Historical Park and how do you work with park interpreters?
I am chief of cultural resources and historian. In that job, I interact very closely with the interpreters on a whole range of issues. We have a new Battle of Bunker Hill Museum, we have a new Charlestown Navy Yard visitor center, and we are in the process of developing a new visitor center at Faneuil Hall, which millions of people will go through, without exaggeration. In every one of those, I work closely with interpreters. There is a very close interface between me as the historian and the interpreters, and that is really critical for getting the best final result.
How are interpretive programs at historical sites influenced by contemporary political, economic, or social issues?
I can give a particular example. The National Park Service partnered with the Gulag Museum in Perm, Russia, and Amnesty International to develop an exhibit on the history of the Gulag. It opened at Ellis Island, a National Park Service site, and traveled to Boston and around the country. The exhibit dealt with the history of the Gulag, which is something that is not well known in the United States. The Holocaust is a phenomenon that has gotten more attention, and it deserves to get attention here in the U.S., but the Gulag is a very important part of human history, suffering, repression, and the struggle for freedom that is very little understood in the United States. In this exhibit, we talk about the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience, of which the Gulag Museum is a member. The National Park Service worked with this coalition—its interest is in historic site museums. This exhibit deals with the history of repression (and every culture has such a history), exploring the history, but also exploring the contemporary relevance of that history.
History is not static. The study of history is not static, which is a good thing. There is no one true history or historical interpretation. History is a series of interpretations, and interpretations change with different eras, with different values, and with different research and studies that come to light. For example, at the Battle of Bunker Hill Museum, we deal with African-American history in a way that I think is quite interesting. If we had done this exhibit in the 1950s, it would be absent. But there is such an interest in the National Park Service in what has been called untold stories, and in the last several decades in U.S. history scholarship, there has been a real interest in African-American history.
The Park Service commissioned a study called “Patriots of Color,” which looked at the role of African Americans and Native Americans in Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. And with respect to black participation at Bunker Hill, the numbers were much larger, much more significant than had previously been established by scholars. We tell the story in the Bunker Hill Museum of someone named Jude Hall, whom I am sure no one had ever heard of. He was a slave in the Revolutionary period who escapes from his master, enlists in the Continental Army, serves with distinction throughout, and is rewarded with his freedom at the end of the war. He goes to live in New Hampshire, but three of his sons are kidnapped into slavery. So on one level there is just the baseline piece of information that visitors find interesting— that African Americans served in the Continental Army. But beyond that, here is this story of this guy who is a slave, escapes to freedom, fights, earns his freedom through service, and then slavery and inequality obviously are not ended by the Revolutionary War. We just present the narrative of his story and then let people draw their own conclusions.
How has the field of public history changed throughout your career?
It has gotten professionalized and it is treated more seriously within, for example, the Organization of American Historians (OAH), the preeminent group of folks involved in U.S. history—a group largely composed of academics. For some time, I’d say most of the membership looked down at public history. It wasn’t seen as serious. It was seen as something extraneous, and now public historians are much more in the mainstream of the organization. Pete Daniel, who works as a curator at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, is the first public historian to be elected president of the OAH. I think there has been great progress.
Have you noticed a shift in how public history is perceived by the public itself?
The public really looks for and trusts history presented by museums and historic sites as much as any source—maybe more than any other source. The general public has embraced public history for some time. I think that “professional” historians had not but that is shifting, truly a positive development.
What are the important themes at Boston National Historical Park?
The key themes are the definition of freedom, of liberty in the Revolutionary period in U.S. history, and the founding of the nation. We feature the Freedom Trail, which is mainly historic sites related to the Revolutionary period in Boston. Our park also includes Charlestown Navy Yard, which addresses the defense of the nation in the early national period. The USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship in the nation, is berthed in the Charlestown Navy Yard, which is a National Park Service site.
We also have Boston African American National Historic Site, which is an independent park administered by Boston National Historical Park. And that site deals with the story of the free black community in antebellum Boston, which is a very interesting story—a story of runaway slaves, the underground railroad, abolitionists, and the creation of the 54th Mass. Regiment, the most notable black regiment in the Union Army in the Civil War. So we cover a lot of ground in Boston.
For more information on the National Council on Public History, visit www.ncph.org. Find Boston National Historical Park online at www.nps.gov/bost.
When Legacy first announced the theme for this issue, we heard some variation of the following question on more than one occasion: “What do you mean by public history?”
