Souvenirs
I recently joined Twitter and have been
following the Smithsonian’s various twitter accounts; they post fun facts,
museum news, and parts of their object collection. One collection in particular
engaged me- the historical souvenirs. Now they were not the type of historical souvenirs
seen in museum stores or in Marling’s George
Washington Slept Here, but taken souvenirs.[1]
Pieces of landmarks and historical buildings, like a piece of the Bastille. My adviser just released a trade-press book on Ferry Farm,Where the Cherry Tree Grew,and he mentions
visitors to the site taking parts of the tree believed for a time to be the
tree young George Washington barked.[2]
I remembered going with my father to
Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in Chicago and doing rubbings. And as a child my 4th
grade teacher brought the whole class little rocks back from Ireland. This got me thinking about my own work and
readings looking at what communities’ ownership of select parts of the past do,
how they function for them. Books like
Rosezwieg and Thelen’s Presents of the Past
and Glassbergs’ Sense of History and American Historical Pageantry- all which
deal with American’s interaction and desire to connect themselves with history.[3]
Taking souvenirs from sites is defiantly apart of this, and it challenges ,in a
way, Steve Conn’s Do Museum’s Still Need
Objects.[4] It
challenges the idea that objects are no longer desired or needed, but it also
speaks to the idea that individual people are imbued with a self-righteous understanding
of themselves as collectors of their own museums- which certainly speaks to
museum’s loss of prestige Conn explores in
Museums in American Intellectual
Life.[5]
Another
thing it made me think of was Tim O’Brian’s The
Things They Carried- the way he describes the things the soldiers carried
with them, symbolically and physically, and the importance and weight that the
object held personally for them.[6]
Though I have not read this book in many years, I feel a like a second look
would reveal some interesting thoughts or discussion points on object study and
personal relationships with the past, personal and larger.
Once while
driving around my old home town with an old friend, I realized I had never touched
the stop sign that I passed by each time I left my parent’s house, and walked
past each day to and from high school. I was taken aback that I had never
touched, this recognizable symbol, this place marker I had interacted with for
years. After our little adventure I did go back and touch that sign-if you are
interested it felt like a metal sign, not a big surprise. This very well could
be a quirk of mine, but I like to think that there is something fundamentally important
about touching, and in a related way owning (being able to touch at will)
recognizable, or meaningful objects. Are we not tactile creatures? There is an
important part of many (probably not all people) that needs to touch things, to
examine them for authenticity. This leads me to think back to Jay Cook’s The Arts of Deception, which looks at
the Barnum Museums in New York and American’s desire to examine and understand
what was real and what was fake.[7]
Taking pieces of objects from historical places proves its authenticity and
provides evidence of the owner/finders relation to the site.
Next thought,
how does taking from a historical site or marker (grave stone ect.) effect or
counter act the desire to keep things historically “accurate”? There is
certainly a clear distinction between a selfish act and preservation for the
greater good. How closely related is the
want to preserve things and the loud objection to taking? Did preservation get
popular after people started making a fuss over taking souvenirs?
I don't really have a conclusion for this, as if I ever do, but I've got some thoughts swimming around.
Here is a photo the Smithsonian posted on Twitter- Its a bit of Plymouth Rock, a rather large bit.
[1] Karal Ann Marling, George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture,
1876-1986 ( Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988)
[2] Phil Levy, Where the Cherry Tree Grew: The Story of
Ferry Farm, George Washington’s Boyhood Home (New York: St. Martin’s Press,2013)
[3] Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). David Glassberg, American Historical Pageantry (London
and Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990),. David
Glassberg, Sense of History: The Place of
the Past in American Life , 2001
[4] Steve Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects(University
of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2010)
[5] Steven Conn. Museums
and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000)
[6] Tim O’Brian, The Things They Carried (New York: Houghton
Mifflin, 1990)
[7] Jay Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in
the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2001)
