Shared historical authority is a current trend in

museums A museum ( ; plural museums or, rarely, musea) is a building or institution that cares for and displays a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance. Many public museums make these ...

and historical institutions which aims to open the interpretation of

history History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...

to the public.

Definition

The concept of shared historical

authority In the fields of sociology and political science, authority is the legitimate power of a person or group over other people. In a civil state, ''authority'' is practiced in ways such a judicial branch or an executive branch of government.''The N ...

is defined by the premise that traditional institutions of historical authority, such as museums and

historical societies This is a partial List of historical and heritage societies from around the world. The sections provided are not mutually exclusive. Many historical societies websites are their museums' websites. List is organized by location and later by special ...

, are increasingly inviting non-professionals (the general public) to share their historical

viewpoints Viewpoints is a technique of dance composition that acts as a medium for thinking about and acting upon movement, gesture and creative space. Originally developed in the 1970s by master theater artist and educator Mary Overlie, the Six Viewpoint ...

and

experience Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these conscious processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involv ...

s with the public. It is argued that this trend toward sharing authority is changing the nature of public historical experience in significant ways. Shared authority removes the hierarchy commonly practiced within cultural institutions. Moving away from a top down approach, shared authority is geared towards collaboration that includes dialogue, and participatory engagement. Typical examples of shared historical authority include: * A museum inviting a community artist to create and install a work of historically inspired public art on their site. * A historical society providing gallery space for community groups to display their own exhibitions. * Web-based projects that invite and display user-generated components. * Using oral and written histories contributed by individuals outside the strictly academic community in conjunction with more traditional scholarly essays, text panels or exhibit labels. * A historic house tour where visitors are encouraged to explore on their own and draw their own conclusions. * Community curation - "crowdsourcing" related content from

subaltern Subaltern may refer to: *Subaltern (postcolonialism), colonial populations who are outside the hierarchy of power * Subaltern (military), a primarily British and Commonwealth military term for a junior officer * Subalternation, going from a univer ...

groups In each case the institution serves as a catalyst for non-traditional participants to contribute to a body of information presented to the public. The institution uses its resources - e.g. staff expertise, collections, public space - to help non-traditional participants share their contributions in publicly accessible and engaging ways. At its most basic, shared authority turns people who would otherwise be historical consumers (visitors and audiences) into participants and co-generators of historical content for public display. Museums who coordinate programs that share historical authority often wish to imbue a sense of democratization to the historical narrative, in contrast to the top-down historical narratives that sometimes emerge in museums. In addition, shared authority projects frequently try to involve communities who have traditionally been disenfranchised or underrepresented in historical narratives and institutions, providing a platform for alternative voices to engage in a public historical dialogue. The role of shared historical authority continues to be debated in the field of public history.

History of the idea

The need for museums and other historical institutions to "share authority" with their audiences and surrounding communities is rooted in the ideologies of

New Social History Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

and social constructivism. Both paradigms reject the concept of a "master narrative" for describing historical events, finding it an inadequate method for representing the multiple experiences and perspectives of individuals involved. Arising from the work of folklorists such as

John Lomax John Avery Lomax (September 23, 1867 – January 26, 1948) was an American teacher, a pioneering musicologist, and a folklorist who did much for the preservation of American folk music. He was the father of Alan Lomax, John Lomax Jr. and Bess Lo ...

and

Alan Lomax Alan Lomax (; January 31, 1915 – July 19, 2002) was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, sch ...

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...

-era

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...

(WPA) programs such as the

Federal Writers' Project The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It ...

and the work of Studs Terkel, the social history movement of the 1960s placed new academic emphasis on the experiences of people not represented in traditional or "official" historical narratives, and gave further impetus to projects focused on collecting and sharing those experiences. Michael Frisch, a professor at the

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York The State University of New York at Buffalo, commonly called the University at Buffalo (UB) and sometimes called SUNY Buffalo, is a public research university with campuses in Buffalo and Amherst, New York. The university was founded in 1846 ...

, popularized the term "shared authority" in his 1990 book ''A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History.'' In recent years, Frisch has distinguished between "sharing authority" and "''a'' shared authority." The former suggests that historians possess authority and have a responsibility to share it, reinforcing a traditional, top-down view of history. "A shared authority", by contrast, recognizes that traditional historical authorities and the public share in the interpretive and

meaning-making In psychology, meaning-making is the process of how people construe, understand, or make sense of life events, relationships, and the self. The term is widely used in constructivist approaches to counseling psychology and psychotherapy, especia ...

process "''by definition''." Beginning in the early 2000s, the proliferation of

Web 2.0 Web 2.0 (also known as participative (or participatory) web and social web) refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability (i.e., compatibility with other products, systems, and ...

technologies that allow users to easily create and share content on digital platforms offered historical institutions a variety of new tools to facilitate public participation.

Case studies

Other examples of shared historical authority include StoryCorps, the City of Memory, and Philaplace, an internet-based neighborhood history project produced by the Historical Society of Philadelphia that combines scholarly essays with stories from anyone who cares to submit one. Staff members then curate the submitted stories. Dennis Severs House is a historic townhouse in

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

(18 Folgate St.) that was restored by Dennis Severs. The house is filled with historic objects alongside modern touches, sound clips of carriages and crying babies, and plates of real food set out each day by the staff. Visitors are encouraged to roam the house on their own, sit down on the furniture, interact with other visitors, and draw their own conclusions. The experience is meant to blur the lines between art and history. The

Lower East Side Tenement Museum The Lower East Side Tenement Museum, located at 97 and 103 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, is a National Historic Site. The museum's two historical tenement buildings were home to an estimated 15, ...

is the first museum to focus on the lives of

urban Urban means "related to a city". In that sense, the term may refer to: * Urban area, geographical area distinct from rural areas * Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities Urban may also refer to: General * Urban (name), a list of people ...

immigrant Immigration is the international movement of people to a destination country of which they are not natives or where they do not possess citizenship in order to settle as permanent residents or naturalized citizens. Commuters, tourists, and ...

tenement A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, i ...

dwellers. It shares authority by inviting the families of former residents to contribute objects, photographs, documents, interviews, and oral histories to the museum tours. Part of the museum's mission is to address today's immigrant issues. This provides another avenue for sharing authority through public programs that connect speakers with varied backgrounds to public audiences. The museum invites sharing on one of its tours, ''Sweatshop Workers'', with the words: : "Spend extended time inside the Levine and Rogarshevsky apartments and join in a discussion about themes arising from the tour. Share your experiences, thoughts, and family histories with your educator and fellow visitors." Open House: If These Walls Could Talk is an exhibition that was produced by the Minnesota Historical Society in 2006. The exhibition traced the stories of families in a single house in St. Paul, Minnesota between 1888 and 2006. The curators did not want to show patterns or people as part of aggregate groups. Instead, they chose to emphasize singularity and individuality. To accomplish this, the Minnesota Historical Society built a house for visitors to walk through. Instead of reading large panels of wall texts, visitors had to interact with objects to hear, read, or see the information. Unlike projects in which the content is produced in conjunction with a group of community members, here authority was shared at the level of

narrative A narrative, story, or tale is any account of a series of related events or experiences, whether nonfictional (memoir, biography, news report, documentary, travel literature, travelogue, etc.) or fictional (fairy tale, fable, legend, thriller (ge ...

creation. Curators controlled the objects in the house, recordings of former residents, and the setup of the space. Without an overarching structure, visitors could wander through at random, co-creating their own narratives. There was no clear beginning and end beyond entering and exiting the house. The Black Bottom Performance Project is a partnership between the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

and residents of Black Bottom, a historically black neighborhood destroyed by

urban renewal Urban renewal (also called urban regeneration in the United Kingdom and urban redevelopment in the United States) is a program of land redevelopment often used to address urban decay in cities. Urban renewal involves the clearing out of blighte ...

policies and the University of Pennsylvania's expansion in the 1960s. Billy Yalowitz, a theater professor working at the university, invited Penn students as well as student and teacher partners from University City High School—a school built in the former Black Bottom neighborhood—and former residents of the neighborhood to work together on the telling of the neighborhood's history, ultimately creating "Black Bottom Sketches" in 1998. The

Wing Luke Museum The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience is a history museum in Seattle, Washington, United States, which focuses on the culture, art and history of Asian Pacific Americans. It is located in the city's Chinatown-Internationa ...

is an example of a museum in which shared authority is a core component of its programming policies. The Humanities Truck is an experimental mobile platform for collecting, exhibiting, preserving, and expanding the dialogue around the humanities in and around the Washington, D.C. area. The project, which is sponsored by

American University The American University (AU or American) is a private federally chartered research university in Washington, D.C. Its main campus spans 90 acres (36 ha) on Ward Circle, mostly in the Spring Valley neighborhood of Northwest D.C. AU was charte ...

and is initially funded through a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, enables partnerships with local organizations to collect people’s stories on critical issues, such as immigration and homelessness. The truck is fitted with a recording studio, mobile workshop space, and a gallery for pop-up exhibits that features built-in speakers, a flat-screen television, a roll-down screen and projector, and even an outside exhibit wall. Humanities Truck project fellows share historical authority with the communities with which they work.

Criticism

Despite the interest and affirmation that sharing authority is currently receiving in museum and public humanities circles, there are scholars and practitioners who criticise the practice. Generally, these criticisms are aimed at one of two levels. First, some scholars suggest that the phrase itself is wrong. "Sharing authority" implies that the process is something museums/archives do rather than something that just "is." In his essay for ''Letting Go?'', Michael Frisch suggests that a more appropriate formulation of the concept is "a shared authority." :"a shared authority"... suggests something that 'is'-- that in the nature of oral and public history, we are not the sole interpreters. Rather, the interpretive and meaning-making process is in fact shared by definition-- it is inherent in the dialogic nature of an interview, and in how audiences receive and respond to exhibitions and public history interchanges in general.Frisch in ''Letting Go?'', p. 127. Scholars and artists also worry that sharing authority devalues the hard-won expertise of professionals. The artist Fred Wilson, whose 1992-1993 exhibit "Mining the Museum" at the

Maryland Historical Society The Maryland Center for History and Culture (MCHC), formerly the Maryland Historical Society (MdHS), . founded on March 1, 1844, is the oldest cultural institution in the U.S. state of Maryland. The organization "collects, preserves, and inte ...

is considered a landmark moment in museums' assessments of their role as historical arbiters, has expressed, "I don't think people should share authority to the degree that you devalue your own scholarship, your own knowledge. That's not sharing anything. You're not giving what you have. That is highly problematic. You have to be realistic about your years of experience, what you can give, and what others can give."

References

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External links

City of Memory

Dennis Severs' House

Lower East Side Tenement Museum

Open House: If These Walls Could Talk

Philaplace
Museology