Browsing by Subject "Public history"
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Item I give you my word : the ethics of oral history and digital video interpretation at Texas historic sites(2012-05) Cherian, Antony, 1974-; Roy, Loriene; Norkunas, Martha K.; Galloway, Patricia; Doty, Philip; Seriff, SuzanneThis dissertation examines the process of using oral history and digital video to revise interpretation and represent more inclusive histories at three rural Texas historic sites—-Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, the Lyndon Baines Johnson State Park, and Varner-Hogg Plantation—-21st century sites that, to varying degrees, have persisted to interpret a Texas master narrative that is no longer socially tolerable in its silencing of marginalized Texas voices. In particular, the dissertation focuses on complicated and rarely discussed ethical issues that surfaced during my work from 2001 to 2006 shooting, editing, and situating interpretive documentary videos at the each of the three sites. Historic sites in Texas, like others across the United States and worldwide, have been receiving increasing pressure from scholars and community groups to represent women, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups more prominently in the narratives they interpret. Oral history and digital media have played key roles in this ongoing movement. Oral history has widely been touted as a tool to democratize history, and advocates of digital video interpretation cite its affordability, relative ease of use, and its ability to “say so much in so little time.” These factors are all the more compelling for local, regional, and state-wide historic sites that are chronically under-funded, under-staffed, and that must often interpret multiple, complicated narratives with very little time or space in which to present them. However, little has been done to explore the unique and complicated ethical issues that arise from using oral history and digital video at historic sites. This dissertation takes a case study approach and uses as its intellectual framework ideas of reflective practice, part of the contemporary discourse among public history practitioners. Each case study introduces the site through a critical analysis of the images and texts produced by the site; presents the central historical silence at each site; describes the solution that oral history and digital video interpretation was expected to provide; and then uses the project’s process-generated video footage and records to examine key situations that led me to raise ethical questions about the individual projects and the overall enterprise.Item Mandatory education : sharing the story of slavery at the Whitney Plantation Museum(2018-05) Sims, Gaila Christine; Thompson, Shirley ElizabethThe Whitney Plantation, recently opened as a museum in Wallace, Louisiana, represents a new attempt to educate the public about the history of American slavery. The site, marketed as a museum of slavery, consists of exhibitions, memorials, and both original and reconstructed buildings. I argue that the Whitney Plantation Museum engages in three distinct projects on its site—that of a museum of slavery, a memorial to slavery, and as a plantation museum. Using the museum’s website, tours, exhibitions, and marketing material, I explore these three projects, commenting on the efficacy of each in regard to the Whitney’s larger goals to educate the public on the history of slavery. I argue that the Whitney’s effectiveness as a site of slavery and public history lies in its role as a plantation museum, engaging in a very different project to other plantation sites located in the same area. While the three projects competing for focus at the Whitney serve to undermine some of its good intentions, it is in the museums’ role as a unique version of a plantation museum that the Whitney finds its place as a new and vital addition to a wider American conception of public history and slavery.