The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg

by Richard Handler and Eric Gable

Book Overview

The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of "historical truth" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork-including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research-Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with pedagogical principle in Colonial Williamsburg to blur the lines between education and entertainment, patriotism and revisionism.
During much of its existence, the "living museum" at Williamsburg has been considered a patriotic shrine, celebrating the upscale lifestyles of Virginia's colonial-era elite. But in recent decades a new generation of social historians has injected a more populist and critical slant to the site's narrative of nationhood. For example, in interactions with museum visitors, employees now relate stories about the experiences of African Americans and women, stories that several years ago did not enter into descriptions of life in Colonial Williamsburg. Handler and Gable focus on the way this public history is managed, as historians and administrators define historiographical policy and middle-level managers train and direct front-line staff to deliver this "product" to the public. They explore how visitors consume or modify what they hear and see, and reveal how interpreters and craftspeople resist or acquiesce in being managed. By deploying the voices of these various actors in a richly textured narrative, The New History in an Old Museum highlights the elements of cultural consensus that emerge from this cacophony of conflict and negotiation.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0822319748
• ISBN13: 9780822319740
• Release Date: July 1997
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.06 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

The truth

As a current employee of The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, I have found this book to be very truthful. I have many passages highlighted. The official response of the museum was to ignore it. The front line employees of the Foundation were really hopeful that this book would be a lesson, and that they would make some needed changes. Now it is 2003, and the museum is facing some really bad times. For the past 8 years, millions and millions of dollars have been spent on back up facilities like libraries, stables, hotels, bridges, and now a fictious plantation. There has been very little done as far as the upkeep of the historic area itself, and quite honestly the place is falling apart. And now the most important element of all is in grave danger, the historic interpreters who pour their hearts and souls into CW could soon be a thing of the past. Layoffs are to be announced this September 2003. The recent purchase of recording devices, are also a giant threat to the interpreters. The interpreters make the town come alive. Colonial Williamsburg has become a place where the history really does not matter any more! For the past 2 years many of the middle management positions have been filled by former Disney employees!! Ever since the "Disney" people arrived, they no longer offer training about history at all, just customer service training. Please, if you donate money to this worthy cause, stipulate that the money be kept in the historic area, and or go into a fund to help keep the interpreters!!!

Fascinating and Informative...

This book was assigned in one of my classes and I was very impressed by it. It, despite the opinions of the above reviewer, clearly strove to be balanced and sympathetic in its discussion without losing sight of its academic aims. I found it extremely helpful in finding another way to look at the history I have been presented with at every museum or class I've been to, not just Williamsburg. I went to Williamsburg for the first time after I read this book and was much more interested in what I was seeing than I might otherwise have been -- actually thinking about what I was hearing and reading rather than simply swallowing it whole. The book itself is very well written and enjoyable as well as informative to read -- a rare thing among scholarly works. Handler and Gable did an excellent job.

A stunning discussion of the uses of history in America now

This is an invaluable study of the representation of the American past at Colonial Willimaburg. It shows us that as much as CW presents itself as a reproduction of the past, it nonetheless refelcts the social positions of its present-day curators, visitors, and financial backers.