Thread by @waitmanb

🧵 This is such a great entry point for a discussion of public history and uses/abuses.

#PublicHistory
#AcademicTwitter

https://twitter.com/militaryhistori/status/1564148471854137354

The issue of HOW to present historical events is ALWAYS touchy.

It is exacerbated further when sites or events are elevated to almost religious status.

(The @guardian article even talks about people making "pilgrimages" to Normandy.)

Issues such as those discussed in this article surround a huge number of diverse historical sites from plantations to concentration camps to the 9/11 site and museum in NYC. (I, for example, think it's nuts that you have to pay $26 to visit the 9/11 museum).

The more contemporary the site, the more likely it is that people will have strong (sometimes irrationally emotional responses) to how the subject matter is presented.

Fewer people have such strong thoughts about Waterloo or Williamsburg or the pyramids.

In this instance, I suspect one of the issues is the absolute veneration of all things WWII and especially D-DAY that, for some, will make ANY treatment of the event sacreligious and inappropriate.

It seems probably premature to rush to any judgment based on a few concept images anyway. The project website only mentions a "living tableaux" but it's unclear what this might actually look like. hommageauxheros.fr/en/#le-projet

If it's the "immersive experience" that people are outraged about, I'll just point out that the @WWIImuseum has long had just such a thing as the entry presentation, complete with vibrating seats and fake snow.

nationalww2museum.org/visit/museum-c…

Would I support some live-action, stage-play performance, nope. For all kinds of reasons, not least that war is nasty, senseless, and deeply unheroic and there is no way to convey that in living history.

However, if people are upset about the commercialization of DDAY, they would do well to remember that Saving Private Ryan, a very commercial film did an awful lot to bring attention (and money) to the event along with conservation efforts etc.

As near as I can tell, this proposed museum is not occupying/destroying protected battlefield terrain (any more than anything that isn't directly on the beaches would be.)

As an historian, yes, I would probably find this museum to be not suitably academic or nuanced and maybe, indeed, too Disney-fied. But, I am increasingly of the opinion that we need to be careful about not throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I am certain that places like Colonial Williamsburg (as problematic as they may be) fostered a love of history in me. We can't always have it both ways.

Finally, one needs to remember that memorials (and to a certain extent museums as well) exist in three timelines simultaneously:

1) the historical period/subject matter they are representing, explaining

2) the period in which they are constructed (along with all the vagaries, peculiarities, politics of that period)

3) the contemporary period with (perhaps) its own ways of looking at the material and the pasts in 1 and 2.

Further, most museums (even those funded by governments) are held captive to varying degrees to economics. They need visitors and income, donations and partnerships. It would be naive to think that these real-world factors don't influence content and treatment of events.

There is a reason that museums tend to favor images, audio-visual displays, etc. There is a reason you don't go into a museum and discover a wall of nuanced and highly informative text.

For some institutions, this commercial side also supports the more scholarly research and archival work that often remains more hidden behind the scenes (along with educational and outreach work).

TL;DR- Public history is complex and influenced by lots of factors that can't easily be reduced to "this is disrespectful to my idealized and consecrated version of the history."