My name is Mary Lord and I will be completing my last semester at Kutztown University this fall with a BA in history and a minor in Pennsylvania German studies. My time at Kutztown has exposed me to many areas and time periods of history but I am hoping to study colonial and revolutionary America in graduate school. I am primarily concerned with social and intellectual history, and am in the process of writing an honors thesis on Thomas Paine's Common Sense and the print culture of revolutionary Philadelphia. I hope to one day earn a PhD. so I can teach at the college level and publish. Understanding my background will be key to understanding my experience as I record it in this blog because I am an academic historian who is going to be working in the field of public history. This is not a new position for me to be in because, as you will soon see, my previous jobs have all been in the field of public history.
My work in the field of public history began in the winter of 2007 when I served an internship with the Pennsylvania German Society. This organization, founded in 1891, is the publishing arm of Pennsylvania German Studies, and its members have included such scholars as Don Yoder, Preston Barba, and Arthur Graeff. At the Pennsylvania German Society I cataloged the materials of former PGS preisdent Richard Druckenbrod, created an annotated listing for the Society's journal, and performed a myriad of other tasks. Overall, the experience was extremely rewarding and I still maintain good relations with the Society and its members. In fact, I will be presenting a paper at their annual meeting on June 7th (more about this later). Last summer I had another experience with public history, this time in a corporate archive. I took inventory of the map collection of the Reading Anthracite Company located in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Both of these experiences made me realize that I wanted to be more involved with the communication of history to the public rather than working rather solitarily in an archive, and that was what inspired me to apply for an internship with the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.
The PHMC is the institution the state of Pennsylvania uses to preserve and interpret its historic sites. It's the organization that is responsible for those blue historic marker plaques that you drive past every now and then, and it runs sites like Ephrata cloister and the Landis Valley Museum. In January of 2008, at the behest of Dr. Michael Gabriel, chair of the history department at Kutztown, I applied for a Keystone Internship with the PHMC. This internship is highly competitive, as only 13 are awarded each year. In late March I found out that I had been awarded the internship and had been assigned to a position at Daniel Boone Homestead, located in Birdsboro PA. If you want for information on Daniel Boone you can go to http://www.danielboonehomestead.org/.
What will I be doing at Daniel Boone? From the information I have gotten so far it looks like a little bit of everything. There is a required reading list that is supposed to prepare me to be a tour guide at the site. Jim Lewars, my boss and internship mentor as the PHMC terms it, told me that I will be helping out with events, historical demonstrations, and re-enactments. I will also be expected to do things like answer the phone, clean, run the register at the gift shop, and feed the animals. The PHMC also has a few expectations for my internship. They require that I keep a journal, (part of the reason I started this blog) and give a presentation at the end of the summer on everything that I learned while working at the homestead. I am also required to go to PHMC seminars, although I have been told that Daniel Boone interns usually tele-comute these.
What do I want to get out of my internship at Daniel Boone? Obviously I want to learn more about the history of the site and the area. The Daniel Boone Homestead interprets the history of the Boones, the other families who lived on the site, and the history of the people in the surrounding area (so basically Pennsylvania German history). I would like to fit the history I learn at Daniel Boone into the wider knowledge I have about the Pennsylvania Germans. But there is much more that I want to get out of this internship than just that. I have become fascinated with the many ways in which history is used and presented to the public. Anyone who has studied history at the college level knows that the history of academia is not the history people watch on the history channel. It's not that the history channel's approach is bad, I think it is highly entertaining and really helps to educate a lay audience, it's just different. Academic historians are concerned with larger trends in history and ideas. They ask questions like, "What was the impact of millenialism on the American Revolution?" Public history does not always ask such complex questions, and why should it? People who take their kids to historic sites when they go on weekend trips don't care about the impact of millenialism on the American Revolution. They care about other things, and it is these other things that I am most interested in.
In all of my past experiences working in the field of public history I have noticed one thing about what lay audiences are interested in when presented with a historical topic. They want to understand how people who lived "back then" got through the day. I will tell you a story to illustrate my point. It's a humid Tuesday in early September 2007. I'm gathering eggs in the chicken coop at the Pennsylvania German Cultural Heritage Center which is a preserved farm that you should really check out if you haven't been there yet. There's a group of about forty kindergartners getting a tour of the site. One of the kids' fathers walks up to me as I'm leaving the coop with two eggs and asks, "About how many eggs do you get out of those chickens?" I tell him that a chicken will lay about one egg per day. He then said something I was not at all expecting. "Well, how many chickens did they have? They must have needed a lot of chickens." He was referring to the people who lived on the farm back in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I was stumped. Stunned really. Never in my entire academic career had I been asked that question. Never in all of the time I spent pondering historical topics (and I ponder quite a bit as you will see) had I ever bothered to ask that question. I had never come across the answer in anything that I had read. And NEVER had we EVER asked that question in any of the history classes that I had taken at Kutztown. We were too busy discussing millenialism and the Revolution again.
That curious suburban dad gave me an epiphany. He made me realize that people who lack advance degrees in history don't care so much about big ideas and themes. They just want something they can relate to. They want to know that people living in the past had to budget with chickens the same way that they budget their salary. The purpose of me telling that story was to allow you to see exactly what I want to get out of Daniel Boone. I want to understand what lay people care about when it comes to history. And not only that, I want to see how I can apply all of that academic historical knowledge I've been steeping myself in for the past three years to this lay audience. I want to explore the different ways to communicate history to the public, to bring in the big themes while still satisfying that craving people have to know how in the world the people of the past ever got by.
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