This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as the height of two tall adults. They also have posters, photographs, exhibition panels, and other wonderful memorabilia of the Quilt’s many displays and journeys over the years, since 1987.

The collection of fire-proof filing cabinets forms the archives of the NAMES Project, as these contain the paperwork, letters, and any other items that family members, friends, and lovers have sent in along with their quilt panels over the years. I would love to work on the collection. Love.

You can also see the collection of vintage sewing machines that have been given to the woman who designs, compiles, and sews all of the panels into larger squares (I can’t remember her name at the moment). She has been with the Quilt since its inception–25 years now. Those tables are the exact size of the panel measurements, for ease in combining and working on them.

This one is blurry, unfortunately, but there is the main hall back into the shelves where the Quilt is stored. Squares are stacked and folded (by the way, not the best preservation technique) so that all 50,000+ can fit in this fairly limited warehouse space. A log is kept indicating when a square has been “checked out” of its place on the shelves, or when it is sent off as part of a display or exhibition. I can’t believe that what stretches for acres and acres when it is unfurled is all being stored down these modest aisles.

That’s us. I am also regularly floored when I think my image and our family’s words to Craig and his mom and sister have been in this collection for more than a decade already.  Our small, meaningful contribution to this important memorial is stored and shared along with the countless–millions–of other stories, memories, prayers, and words shared over the years.

The statement below our pictures reads:

Thank you Craig, Sharon, and Kim for your real-life lessons in courage, strength and family love. Our kids witnessed understanding and deep compassion through our friendship – a valuable lesson for life, for all.

]]> http://betheink.com/2012/01/where-the-quilt-is-kept/feed/ 0 http://betheink.com/2011/12/in-small-things-forgotten/ http://betheink.com/2011/12/in-small-things-forgotten/#comments Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:06:56 +0000 Jcedens http://betheink.com/?p=1645

It is a marvelous fact about human history that, in fact, most of what we leave behind for others to study us by are the things we don’t think much about–the simplest, everyday items. It’s no haphazard thing that much of pre-history is studied through those ubiquitous pottery shards archeologists seem always to be brandishing around (figuratively, and in their arguments; they would never actually brandish them around, old and historically valuable as they surely are). I find archeology to be exceedingly not interesting. However, I can appreciate–and I do–the value of tracing the lifestyles, customs, patterns, and culture through what little remains of earlier humankind, and give great credit to the patient practitioner who can see small and sweeping patterns in the study of layers of dirt, types of pottery, locations of the trash receptacles on the sites of previous civilizations.

Those are valuable patterns to see. It’s like in high school when the teacher asks you to analyze this piece of a Shakespeare play for homework, and you go home and toil and come in the next day to find not only did you not get out of it what the teacher did, but all your classmates seem to be the same page as well (and not your same page). This is how I felt throughout the whole year of British lit, which meant so many Shakespearean plays to analyze, and this is how I felt when reading James Deetz and Henry Glassie, scholars of early material culture, in my own material culture class this year. The professor had us drawing conclusions, and there were patterns I simply did not see, while others in the class were far better at drawing them out of the readings.

(I am OK with being unable to do these types of analyses. I have always felt that I work hard, which makes up for a natural lack of inherent understanding of things, or a natural skill for learning. I don’t hear something once and always remember it [in fact I rarely do remember it]. I am particularly bad at naturally knowing how words are pronounced. I can use them in writing, understand perfectly what they mean, and God help me, hope that I don’t have to say them out loud. But, I digress.)

Illustrations of headstones by James Deetz, from his book

The thing about reading Deetz’s book, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archeology of Early American Life, is that you come to realize that the strongest arguments for drawing historical conclusions, and for seeing patterns, lies in the very things we do not think matter in this life. Including, yes, the very things we deem the least important: the things we throw away. Early Americans are largely judged–centuries later–on those things they hoped would go away, the very things they chose not to keep. Writes Deetz:

The disposal of refuse is one of our most unconscious acts: while we might expect some hidden motive in the way a court clerk recorded the disposition of a case or a diarist described his neighbors, it is most unlikely that in removing food remains, broken dishes, and other debris from a household, people were making any conscious statement about themselves or others. Yet, in the changing nature of trash disposal since the seventeenth century, our ancestors have once again informed us of the way in which their view of the world was changing. (171-172)

He goes on to explain that from the seventeenth century until around 1750, refuse appears in irregular, shallow pits sprinkled in a circle around the basic structure that would have been the homestead itself. After 1750, in place of these shallow pits, would appear one deep pit. Two things can be concluded from this change; one, that this shift correlates with changing population increase and concentration–meaning trash all around would be more of a nuisance. And two, that “such precise and neat handling of one of life’s less useful and valuable things suggests almost a compulsion to order.” After all, the eighteenth was the era of order and reform in many areas of life.

I love these mussel "drags," in the Shaping Traditions folk culture exhibit at the Atlanta History Center, that show how those tiny little buttons, important pieces of our lives that float around often without our notice, are made.

This exhibit is so exciting, because those items are being featured exactly where they belong, among innovations that hav made our lives easier, given us vast improvements and allowed for the conveniences we live with each day. This would have been an incredible exhibit to help curate, and I wonder how each thing made the final list over other things. Each object appears alongside original sketches and drawings by their inventors, patent specifications, and original advertisements for the items. The full list of items in the exhibit is worth pondering. Think about how each of these things affects your life, some more than others:

I love picturing each of these things, one at a time, and their places in my life. The little things have a far greater impact on the study of material culture, on the makeup of civilizations, than the big-ticket items we covet, keep, and cherish.

The full story–audio and transcript–including some background of the items chosen, is on NPR/PRI’s The World site. Also check out a video and more information on the Hidden Heroes exhibit from the London Science Museum.

I want to remember this class forever. It was inspirational to listen to my classmates over the semester, to hear their tales from the field as we each figured out what the heck our projects would be about and how we were going to master (as much as possible) the art of the interview that yields vivid and meaningful stories out of narrators–those we interview–and then compose those somehow into an appropriate historical synthesis.

Not every college class is composed of such a diverse, engaged, and interesting crowd–not even in grad school. We had some of the best discussions in that class that I’ve had in my entire college career (of six years…). Today my friend Seth (an undergrad–the class is cross-listed) remarked that this was his favorite class in all of college.

I am under no illusions that anyone else will care to read about what each of my classmates did for their projects, but I need to write them down so that in a few years I won’t have forgotten this extraordinary body of work that we produced this fall, in a matter of weeks and months, in this year 2011. Listening to the clips in class, of the people we’d been hearing about all semester made for a remarkable week of class presentations. Also stellar to hear about the dirty details of trying to get people (sometimes relatives, sometimes strangers, some in between these) to talk to us, college kids out seeking a good story to contribute to historical narrative.

Jessie: I interviewed two women who are the mothers of girls adopted from China. I explored the notions of family, roots, identity, cross-cultural families, siblings, and the trials of the adoptions process–including public and private perception from family members, friends, and outsiders. I had wonderful experiences and learned so much. I will chronicle some of my own stories and lessons here soon. I will also share some of the most remarkable clips, details, and stories in audio form, so you can hear these women tell their own stories.

Chris: He interviewed three immigrant rights activists (one of them his wife) who had some live-defining experiences during the immigration drama that occurred in Arizona in 2009 and 2010, with SB 1070. Young people, a recent event, and powerful, emotional stories.

Aaron: Interviewed a WWII veteran who hadn’t planned on joining the military, but was drafted in the last month of the war. He wound up being a career soldier, the war truly changing the course of his entire life. He found this guy through another girl in the class, actually, after expressing his interest in doing something relating to WWII. This was an unexpectedly interesting story, because really, what new stories can you tell these days on the second world war?

Joleen: She focused on one elementary school in a county south of Atlanta, and sought the perspectives of teachers at the school who have seen the demographics of the school diversify enormously over the past ten years.

Liz: She delved into some perspectives of residents of her home county on what is considered the last lynching ever to occur in the South, in the 1950s, which happened in that county.

Denise: She interviewed four women who were leaders in the Georgia quilt documentation project that took place from 1989 to 1993 across the state. Her larger goal was to use these interviews to help her design her own documentation project to be expanded for her capstone project for the heritage preservation program (the same program I’m in). She wound up finding some heartfelt stories beyond the cut-and-dry facts of the documentation process itself.

Brooks: He interviewed his grandfather–from Savannah–about his career as a Georgia state legislator during the 1960s. He was elected in 1966, precisely because of the ending of the County Unit System, a unique and stunning old Georgia political structure that ensured that real political power remained with the rural parts of the state, even as larger and larger portions of the population resided in cities.

James: Interviewed three people who know or used to know the author Alice Walker, who is from Eatonton, Georgia–two classmates and her niece. He sought to define the person that is Alice Walker from a number of angles.

Michelle: She focused on her grandmother, a retired educator of more than 35 years, who was a black teacher at risk of losing her job when integration meant fewer teachers were needed.

Classmate X (Can you believe there is one girl whose name I don’t know?): Another school integration story, this time focused on people who went through the Marietta City school system during desegregation and who now teach in the same system. This was my least favorite of them all, just really oft-heard stuff, and I swear it is not because I have somehow predisposed to not like it just because I also cannot recall her name.

Danny: Interviewed three generations of his wife’s family, who own a farm in Yatesville, Georgia (population under 400), on the trials, memories, and questionable and perceived dark future of the farm and farming at large in the state and the United States.

Seth: He interviewed a personal hero and former boss, Anita Beatty, controversial advocate for the homeless and leader of the Atlanta Task Force–on which Seth spent four or five years working towards improving the lives of homeless in the city. He battled with the process, seeking the complicated private view of Anita, rather than the oft-seen and politicized public version she has so perfectly mastered.

Rosemary: Interviewed members of two families that have connection to the land that is now Arabia Mountain Heritage Area, people who were coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s, when the outskirts of the city were becoming part of the burgeoning metropolitan area.

Rebecca: Interviewed her grandmother, matriarch to her enormous North Carolina family, and strong woman head of household who ran a farm and raised dozens of children of the family over the years. Her grandmother is a pistol, for sure.

Laura: Took a journey into the histories of Commercial High School, Girls’ High, and the numerous incarnations the buildings have been since the early twentieth century. Her aunt was a student in Commercial High School, which sparked her interest, among other things–including her decades of work herself in education and as a school principal.

Last and most amazing:

Brenda: Since Brenda is a stage actor and filmmaker by training and profession as well, she used the oral history class for her own skilled perspective, and her final project reflected a creative and talented woman and a powerful story. She used clips of two women, her mother and another old friend, who are both–in different ways–part of a group of Hawaiian immigrants in the Augusta, Georgia and Aiken, South Carolina areas (through their husbands). Her own mother married a Japanese Hawaiian man, and the other woman, Millie, is Hawaiian and married a white man. Their quite distinct perspectives, when played side by side like conversation, brought out the similarities and the “Hawaiian Spirit” and tides of life that both have experienced, with Hawaiian cultural influences and as women in interracial marriages who moved to the South at a time when there were barely any people other than black and white. She made these into a film using footage of herself playing ukulele and photos of the people being mentioned and speaking. It was an apt use of her audio, fitting her own quirky style; and the story came across so powerful in this medium. Her 4-minute piece was inspiring. I was crying at her skills, at the power of these voices, at the potential we each have in us to tell a great story.

Laura also had some excellent summative comments on oral history, when she presented her process and conclusion. One is that humility, and in this, not always knowing what your goal is, can sometimes make for the most effective oral history interviews, because you are truly allowing the narrator to guide the meaning, and where it goes. You, the interviewer, are not trying to make them fit in some construct to fit your own assumptions or research goals.

Indeed, we all learned from our projects that we cannot assume to find anything, and we cannot expect to be able to form the project, the stories, into something we either anticipate or desire. We cannot possibly know the stories in store for us when that recorder starts rolling. I did other oral histories this semester for another class’s research, and so I was doing quite a few of these meetings, every one of them with someone I had either just met or had never met at all. Driving to each one, I felt that jolt, the excitement of not knowing what in the world I would learn in the next ninety minutes.

Who knows, anyone, until we ask to hear?

“There’s always been a tendency to see a place like China in very political terms. I think this is partly because it’s a communist country, it’s run by the Communist Party. And from my perspective, living in China, starting especially the way that I started, as a Peace Corps volunteer, in a small community, teaching in a small college, it gave me a very different starting point. And I really wanted to write about ordinary people in China. I didn’t want to start with an issue, or start with a political idea, I wanted to start with an individual, start with a community.”

Peter Hessler on the job as a journalist in China

Hessler is a journalist, that is an important distinction; but he writes based in a historical context, referencing the past at each step, and this is also valuable. (I will fight with people who dismiss great books written by journalists.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the titular "last emperor," in a complicated era in Indian and British history

I am always reminded of British writer and historian William Dalrymple’s  fantastic skill for emphasizing the individual’s experience of history, as he does in The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857,  which keeps the reader vividly engaged by showing us the Indian Rebellion of 1857 through the eyes of several key player on the ground. I have never read a book of history in which I felt so deeply connected to the characters of the era, and when they all begin falling at the hands of their enemies, I had a true emotional reaction to the destruction of this city and these lives. I’ve heard he does the same thing in one of his other works, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth Century India.  An inspiring example–though not without his critiques–of this kind of engaging historical writing.

I’ve begun the process of cold-calling a list of strangers, to me, nothing more than a series of names and phone numbers that I found on a national organization’s Atlanta chapter site. And to them, I am a stranger asking to be let into their lives, who is asking to hear their stories, often quite personal and emotional. I am asking, after all, about the process of adopting their own children. This is a very strange thing to explain in a message on an answering machine to a person you’ve never spoken to.

And in several cases, I’ve had kids answer the phone, and take the message. This is even stranger, having to summarize in a brief sentence or series of key words to a child or teenager why this random graduate student wants to talk to their mother. (Note: It’s about them. Talk about awkward to explain.) “My name is Jessie, I’m a graduated student at Georgia State, and I want to talk to your mom about an oral history project I am starting, on families who’ve adopted children from China.” Hmm, random, indeed.

The first time I dialed a number, I was so thankful it was no longer in service, because I slammed the phone down and felt my heart rate come back down from through-the-roof heights. A few deep breaths, and onto name #2 on the list. Many calls later, I am slowly but surely reaching out to some families. All in its own time, I am in no hurry, and want these families to feel they can respond to my request in time. We’re all busy people.

At the risk of seeming creepy, I do take pictures of adorable children when visiting foreign countries. China is no exception. (Luoyuang, China, May 2007)

This is, by the way, preliminary work for what will be my master’s capstone project: an oral history series and podcast series, compiled and stored on a website that also allows for interaction and visitor submissions, on the stories and histories of Metro Atlanta families who have adopted daughters from China. This enormous diaspora of Chinese girls has spread far across the world, and Atlanta is just one corner of that vast space. This community, the girls and their adoptive (and biological) families, are part of an important historical event, beginning largely in the early 1990s and reaching a peak around 1999 – 2005, and waning in recent years as the process has become extremely cumbersome and slow for adoptive families. This twenty-odd-year period marks an important occurrence in China-U.S. relations that reaches directly into the homes of American families whose families have changed forever because of it; and I want to study this in that historical context, by compiling the oral histories of those living it.

To do this, I’ve had to muster up some courage I haven’t used since my days in student journalism–when it was nothing to phone a stranger and ask them some questions.

Hula-hoop skills at Best International, a bilingual elementary school

But oral histories are by nature very intense, quite distinct from a journalistic effort. And it has been thrilling so far, to find what’s at the other end of the line, when you call someone out of the blue–a total stranger–and ask them about something like the experience of adopting their own child.

Exhilaration even more enormous than calling as a journalist. No, I’m not a reporter, I’m a historian, and I want to record your oral history. Just as we have talked about in class, people immediately begin to question you (“How did you get my number?”), and question themselves, retrospect on their own life–”I haven’t done anything important.” But they have and that’s the point of oral histories. They are a part of history.

I am awestruck all over again, every time I think of the phone call I received last night, in return to one of my messages left with a woman’s daughter. She was rightfully questioning of me, but I clearly passed the test, because she became so open and willing and engaging, by the time I hung up with her my jaw was literally hanging open. I sat in shock in the driver’s seat of my car.

This family has an extraordinary part in the history of Chinese adoptions, from a very early point in the larger narrative timeline. Each of their three daughters is from China, adopted in the 1990s. I have researched this process and read books and articles, and I have never heard of a family like this, ever. And they are part of the exact Metro Atlanta community that I so want to document. I absolutely cannot wait to speak with her further, and collect her story (stories, for sure).

There is a huge difference between theorizing and structuring and dreaming up a plan, a project, and executing it–and making the final product effective, interesting, helpful to participants and the larger public. Without knowing who is out there to talk to, I had no idea if this would even work. I now feel that it is not only possible, but it has the potential of being extremely fruitful. The families who have adopted from China are an extraordinarily connected and close-knit community, across the nation. I hope this small project can somehow contribute to those within that cross-national community, and inspire other initiatives. It’s an important international event that deserves to be contemplated in its proper historical context. I’m so excited to bring us a step closer to doing this.

In public history classes, though, it is a simple truth that the regular person goes to museums not to read lots of label text and long passages that, though their stories may be astonishing, do involve more words. No, they most often go to see the things that make history come to life for them. Artifacts, small and large, can often be so powerful, say so much with no words. And this is where my classes are taking me. The emphasis in Material Culture is obvious: the objects, created or altered somehow by man, that offer insight into customs, social patterns, lifestyles, foodways, and larger culture of the people of our past.

So too do I find this in Oral History, the other aforementioned class, where our discussions, readings, and projects revolve around the spoken word, in a historical context, and using a proper methodology that puts it far beyond casual conversation. In conducting oral histories, we are formally and methodically documenting the past, in ways that effect immensely both the narrator (the subject) and the interviewer (me).

On a class tour, we looked at some of the other art exhibits that they have at the airport, to get a feel for their whole program, Airport Art.

I find both of these mediums so powerful. I conducted two oral histories earlier this year, after a one-class-period crash course in one of my other classes, and while they were on two very different topics, I discovered the many nuances that oral historians have been raving about since the 1960s; one of the most significant to me was the unexpected paths the interview can take, and also the candidness of my narrators. By asking very simple questions and then shutting my damn mouth, it was astonishing what stories they would tell me, without my ever having to ask them something provocative or controversial. Not that the primary goal is provocative information, not at all. But, for example, I was interviewing a couple in the late forties who have a young daughter they adopted from Guatemala, and there were a lot of delicate and sensitive subjects I wanted to broach with them, like whether or not they would someday tell her about her half-siblings that they knew she had back in Guatemala, or whether they would help her in finding her biological roots, if she ever wanted to know more about them. These were things I didn’t think I would have the guts to ask. But I never needed to: the family was so welcoming and so willing to explore their complicated emotions on those subjects, via other more basic questions I had asked within the larger subject of their family and their relationship to Guatemala right now. I know this won’t always be the case, and this is a topic I am continuing to work with, but it was an extraordinary first dive into the process, and into the revelations of what oral histories are, and what they do for larger historical projects you are producing.

The exhibit currently on display is a series of dresses and women's fashion, all made with recycled materials--trash, essentially.

Museum staffs, and so, museum exhibits, have as their goal the interpretation of the past, in a way that makes people look at their own lives and relate the past to them, to where they live, to those around them. This can be done very well with historical documents, presented in a cohesive manner, that tell a wonderful story. But, as soon as you add the human voice, and the objects created by men and women in that same story, you have brought the exhibit to life. You have succeeded in a more successful, effective way, in relating the story to your audience, and they will leave remembering it more clearly, and hopefully in a way that connects them to the past, to its utter humanity and enormity.

Henry Glassie, in his book Material Culture, describes our relationship to things in our everyday life, and inspires us to think about them in more significant ways, as pieces that connect us to the larger humanity of the world. After all, if it as not us personally, someone created every single thing in our lives. That is a powerful thought. I leave you with the passion of his words, so inspiring and clearly telling, as he has spent his life studying the Things of People.

Among the new things, the most important, I believe, is the collection: the assembly of gifts, souvenirs, and commodities into a home–the domestic environment in contradistinction to the house. The collection represents a victory over disorder in industrial times, when the flood of goods threatens to sweep us to madness in a rising tide of irrelevant trash, just as the house of stone represented a victory over disorder in the days when people lived close to nature, when the lean wolves came down from the heath and the night winds wailed. But we should not be confused. Today, while we create things out of things made by other people, all across the globe, people in no way less real or alive are going up into the woods and down to the riverside. They are chopping out chunks of nature and fashioning artifacts that display their spirit and serve the serious needs of their neighbors.

Art commissioned by UGA on animals, big and small. I'm very excited about the exhibit we are doing for them.

Material culture historian Henry Glassie reflects on the value of the world as an inspiration for art, and how artistry, at its core, comes from age-old trades. He takes us through the lifespan of a traditionally-made Turkish rug to illustrate this, and brings us back around to the very fact that he is writing about it, to ensure we understand that all manner of artistry, big and small, is a product of the creative soul of humankind.

The chapter I read today was a joyous revelation, a celebration, of the material as historical, as everything we can and hope to be, in what we create on this earth, with our hands, our patience, our inspiration, our minds.

My current quilt project, which has been such a creative thrill thus far.

Sometimes (OK, oftentimes), it is because I am thinking about something else that is not related to the topic of my paper or the project at hand, and I am overcome with the need to write down my thoughts on something. I can easily pump out a big essay during this larger weekly routine of writing, and it somehow feels much easier than it does now, in my current state, where I have been asked to write very little (and read even less) for my summer coursework and in my duties at work.

What I have been doing is writing a few papers about Cuba and Caribbean tourism, museums on an international perspective, and a few other strains of similar topics, and learning more than I ever cared to know about the kinds and styles of chairs in American and European interior design. The History of Interior Design class was my first foray into the other half of my graduate program–the half that I am not in–historic preservation. With the basis of this class being on preservation, we studied much of the architectural styles that impart themselves on the interior fashions and furnishings we have used throughout history–and we also covered exciting things like wall plaster (hint the sarcasm).

For a lot of people in my field (many of those being fellow members of this class), that actually is exciting stuff. Me, I’m always more interested in the people. The material culture aspects of interior design fascinate me, because I care most what people were doing with their things and why they used what they did. My professor did a fantastic job bringing this element of the field into our class, too. But there was a whole heck of a lot of architecture involved along the way, and a lot of design terms I did not know (and many which still elude me).

For six weeks, I trudged through Classical, Greek, Federal, Victorian, Rococo, Queen Anne, all the various Revivals, and plenty others that I have forgotten, and then Craftsman, cottage, and various other late nineteenth century styles to arrive at the twentieth. Ah, the twentieth century. I love many aspects of early twentieth century design, and more of midcentury design. And it all comes together in my love–my adoration–of that which I once loathed: the midcentury ranch home. 

Mantel-less fireplaces with rock as its container, sectionals, wood-and-glass coffee tables, and an open-space floor plan: all things that make me swoon over midcentury interiors.

 Ranch homes evoke in me visions of my childhood, visiting friends’ houses, ranch-styles, that sat on streets with dozens of other ranch homes, and inside, layers of brown, and thick carpeting, and wall-size windows that take over rooms. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, there was an added element of water outside, the windows offering a view of the lake that was nearby, or just in the backyard. I remember thinking about those homes, in my young mind, about how frumpy they seemed, very unpleasing and cottage-y.

I imagine this is because the few that I do recall specifically–most are fuzzy in my memory, with me left searching my brain for who even lived in the house I picture in my mind’s eye–are poor examples of ranch home style, with the innards of the structure not at all reflecting the midcentury flooring, furniture pieces, lighting, window decor, and built-in bookcases that appear in photos of the ranch homes that now make it into modern design books and are featured in large, glossy spreads of home decorating magazines. And rightly so; I can’t imagine those friends’ homes had much worth plastering in a magazine or book in the states they were in–after all, those published materials are to serve as “what-to-do” guides more than “what-not-to-do.”

There are so many things I love about this room, not least of which is the way it connects to the room above it. Can I just say: I am enamored with cement, tile, and ceramic floors. I also admire greatly admire the ironing board and iron in the front there, because we are all human. This image is published in The Elements of Style, edited by Stephen Calloway.

I know that when I present my project this week, many people will meet my passion with crinkled noses; the ranch home, they will think, that hangover from the post-war era when we first became addicted to consumption. Yes, I will also think, but before we had to build McMansions with dozens of closets to store it all. This was the era when function and clean lines, minimal clutter, a few strong furniture pieces, and built-ins everywhere, was the height of home fashion. Maybe not for everyone, there will always be those who want their homes filled with Rococo Revival–some of those people are in my class–and to each, his own. I was self conscious about classmates thinking my ranch home project is unsightly for about half a second, until I remembered how many Victorian and Federal-style homes I spent the summer looking at for hours in each class, and how I crinkled my nose numerous times at those.

The Ranch: ugly, to some, yes, and in my childhood, I vividly recall thinking I would never want to live in a ranch home, just as I was positive I would never wear loafers or high-waisted pants or voluntarily tuck in my shirt. Wouldn’t you know it, taste grows up, and things you once thought so grandmotherly and out of fashion rise again into the aesthetic, and you realize just how fashionable your grandmother really was.

I’m interested because I am starting the groundwork on my own podcast project, a history podcast. The topic or range of themes, I don’t know yet, but I have a few ideas I am working on. I want to take the notions of community and of roots, and really challenge notions of identity and nationality through the stories I seek (or happen to find) and the questions I ask. Anyone who has read this blog knows that I am fascinated with the fluidity of nationality and its meaning in lives and across national boundaries. So when I sit down to think about communities, I inevitably return to this thought, to this theme in the multicultural lives we live today. There are more specifics that I can expound on later when I have solidified my project further.

Sarah Littman and her son Joshua managed to impact a lot of people through a simple recorded conversation at the StoryCorps booth.

But one of the first places I began looking for inspiration, of course, was the StoryCorps project, which is an initiative of NPR, and both are funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The StoryCorps project records regular people (with often far beyon regular stories to tell) who are interviewed by a friend or family member in booths located at various spots throughout the country (and in the traveling booth). Interviews are housed in the Folk Life Collection at the Library Of Congress, where they stand as historical record that the lives of everyday people matter in our past and in the present.

Beside the fact that NPR is absolutely my primary source of news, and I am admittedly an NPR-podcast junkie, the goal of StoryCorps is valuable and significant in ensuring that people feel both connected to the past, and feel that they matter themselves. This project cannot disappear now, just when technologies are allowing us to share stories in more ways than we ever could. It is a brilliant way of collecting oral histories, focusing on whatever the interviewer wants to know about their loved friend or family member. I am thinking I will take my dad sometime very soon.

I was reminded the other day of one of the most memorable stories ever to air on Morning Edition, the morning program that regularly airs a brief interview from the StoryCorps booth: that of mother Sarah Littman and her then-12-year-old son Joshua, who  has Asperger’s. Their poignant conversation (which you can read more about and hear, here) received an incredible response, and is still considered a milestone event in their lives. Littman wrote about it recently, in an effort to illustrate how important StoryCorps’s mission is, and to remind everyone how much it meant to her, her son, and everyone who heard and was moved by their story.

She had this to say:

I’ve tried to analyze why our interview had such an impact on so many lives. I’ve wondered: Is it because it helped raise awareness about Asperger’s syndrome? Is it because the interview helped people understand that seeing the world “differently” isn’t necessarily a bad thing? Is it because—and this is the gift of StoryCorps—it showed how much we learn from “ordinary” people (whom, it turns out, are really anything but) if we take the time to sit down and listen?

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all of these things, but at the core of it all is that last question from my son. This question is at the root of what all of us, no matter who we are or what our age, gender, race, religion, or social status, wonder. Deep down, we all have the desire to know—Do you love me the way that I am? Am I who you expected me to be?

Josh is now 17 and a senior in high school. When applying to colleges for the fall, he chose to write his application essay about our StoryCorps experience. I plan to take him back to the StoryCorps Booth after his first semester for another interview to talk about this next chapter in his life.

StoryCorps’ single largest funder is CPB. The elimination of federal funding for public broadcasting would essentially be a death knell for StoryCorps, which not only has brought so much joy to so many, but in our celebrity-obsessed culture is an incredibly important reminder that every individual matters, and that there is so much to be learned from our stories if we’d only take the time to stop and really listen. This isn’t a partisan issue. It’s about what really matters.

Her sentiment and thoughts on the matter really got to the heart of how I had been feeling about the issue, and about how NPR and the programming I love could take a huge hit in the very near future. She just expressed those thoughts much better than I. So I ask you to also stand up for the value of all of our lives, big and small. Let Congress know everyday stories and lives matter in our collective past. I got a response from Sonny Perdue’s people last week.

Do it for me! Where else will I get my daily 2+ hours of news and entertainment?

Historian Alison Isenberg’s 2004 book Downtown America: A history of the place and the people who made it is in fact a testament to the people, more than anything, who are responsible for the good and bad and the complicated personality of U.S. cities today. Oftentimes the city holds a nostalgic identity for people, a loss of something bygone, a sort of deflated self that holds some sort of hard-to-define sadness. Isenberg reminds us however, that in considering our efforts today at defining our downtown economic areas and “Main Streets,” we must recognize that “the democratic, melting-pot downtown has been an evolving ideal, not a past accomplished reality from which Americans have strayed.” Certainly there was never a democratic reality in the segregated shopping districts of the early and mid twentieth century, yet it is oftentimes portrayed or revered in memoriam as having been a free-wheeling, glorious environment. That may have been so, but for a very selective group of individuals; for everyone else, it has a much more complex definition, a much less rosy spot in memory.

A view of Peachtree Street in a much older Atlanta. Things were often removed in these artists' renditions of a city downtown, in order to project an image of the place it could be, an ideal. Isenberg's book is full of amazing images and comparison shots on this and other subjects regarding the American city.

This is not a criticism of either the 1920s-50s, nor of the most recent efforts, either by Isenberg or myself. Rather it is part of her argument that it has been and will continue to be the people who construct the cityscape, both literally in physical development, and ideally in how they invision their city and its image.

It got me thinking of another study on the American city, or one in particular–the public history project that has resulted Lowell, Massachusetts as the subject of an entire National Park, and the recent book on its history. One of the questions at the core of Cathy Stanton’s whole study of the city is whether or not economic development and interest is compatible with public historians’ goals of preserving and interpreting a city’s past and its meaning in American history. Both sides can be argued, I am not here to answer this, but this same thought came back many times while I read about the larger developments of the economy of “downtown America” over the years, and the many vested interests that laid at the heart of each decision within a city’s planning. Most often, it was businessmen, investors, retailers, and real estate appraisers who were making the biggest decisions, but in the wake of urban renewal projects and other controversial methods of “cleaning up the downtown,” historians and preservationists had their say as well, spanning much of the city’s recent past (1980s to the present).

Most compelling to me is the way in which every vested party uses the past to their own ends, and how many of the symbols of the past appear very differently depending on who is looking at them. This was most explicit in Isenberg’s description of the 1997-98 exhibit “Main Street Five-and-Dimes,” which was on display in Washington, D.C. at the National Building Museum. The exhibit’s interpretation says nothing about the enormous effects of integration of the downtown, and how many of the department stores had not been serving African American urban citizens. She uses the comment book to show just how much people really did want to talk about the effects of a separated society on the downtown, even if the curators only wanted to show nostalgic “thingamabobs” and enlist positive images of the way things used to be.

Some of those are truly thought-provoking, so much so that I will post the entire excerpt a little later on. But it reminded me again of how much specific images and symbols from the past are used to many different ends. To investors and retailers, symbols of the past utilize memories, or perceived memories, to add significance to their project. To some white citizens, like this guestbook commentators, it was a vision of a “happier, kinder world,” while to other less-than-subtle commentators, it was a positive memory of “‘whites only’ drinking fountains–the way it should be.” To black visitors, it was that “some change is good,” and that these old department store must be considered in the wider context of the times they were in, including the fact that while they no longer exist, life itself has in fact gotten better for many people who live around the same places the stores were located. One guest book writer agreed that yes, it was a look back on a simpler time. “Simpler perhaps but was it better?” Indeed, a more complex interpretation that gives us more to consider.

Surely I have gone past making a concise point. But my intention was just to unite the discussion in the Lowell Experiment about what history means to certain people while having wholly different definitions to others, and trying to reconcile every group and perspective when your goal is to consider the larger narrative of an entire community, or city, or even a larger metro area. In Lowell as well, part of the complicated story was often the notion of history on an upward ride, that we have surely improved our lives from those of our grandparents, that we no longer suffer in factories. And in the case of Lowell, residents could tout its more recent past as having also given this same improvement to new immigrant groups. One of the corkscrews thrown into its cohesive interpretive plan has been that complicated truth that this reality has really only moved to another part of the world, and that there are people in other countries who would like this to someday be their story too. That is something that Lowell has recently included in their story, making it altogether more complicated and global, but also reflecting much more accurately the world we live in, as one that is connected to the past, rather than separate and removed from it.

This trajectory is indeed a labyrinth of complicated stories, controversies, diverse groups with specific vested interests both in their past and present lives or portrayals, and when it comes down to it, questionable whether it truly is an upward climb of improvement at all points in time. Almost certainly it is not.

But that doesn’t get Isenberg down. “It remains to be seen which constellation of values and participants will chart the course of downtown real estate and urban commerce in the twenty-first century,” she says, bringing it back around to her book’s economic focus. But, during the twentieth century, “Main Street [was] a place to teach, debate, exclude, fantasize, argue,  include, make new dreams, and visit old ones.” Maybe we start there to find the best way to write inclusive, thoughtful histories of our city spaces, and of the communities that live in them. Lowell is certainly one prickly example of this, are there will surely be more.

(The colorful quotation that is the title of this post is by Isenberg, found on page 313 of her book.)