CHAPTER 4
Collecting History
KEY TERMS
collections
preservation
archives
built environment
National Register of Historic Places
vernacular
Gans-Huxtable debate
wonder rooms/cabinets of curiosity
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
material culture
Antiquities Act of 1906
Native American Graves Protection and
Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)
repatriation
accession and deaccession
P:
ROFESSIONALS WORKING IN museums, historic sites, libraries, archives, and his-
toric preservation have to think about what to collect, preserve, or archive. While these
terms can have multiple meanings, collections often refers to three-dimensional
objects like those in museums, preservation refers to buildings, structures, and landscapes
and archives refers to two-dimensional paper records. While at times we will reference
these distinctions in this chapter, we will also talk about "collections' as a term that encom-
passes all three kinds of items as we explore a common set of questions that public historians
face as they seek to build and maintain a wide variety of collections. In this broader sense,
collections can include textual documents, artifacts, and even landscapes, such as groves of
trees or battlefields.
As an example of how diverse collections can be consider the historic Reeder Citrus
Ranch in Montclair, California. This site is most visible as a preserved historic house, but it
is also an excellent representation of the small family-owned citrus ranches that dominated
the inland regions of Southern California throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
The collections that accompany the historic house include the outbuildings, farm equip
ment, furniture, and extensive paper collection of business records and documents, as well
as the family's personal effects, photographs, and period appliances. The grounds, historic
trees, and orchard round out the collection. Collections management challenges include
A57
BROS
QEEDER
BERSERIES
Photograph 4.1. Historic Reeder Citrus Ranch, Montclair, California. Courtesy of the George C
and Hazel H. Reeder Heritage Foundation
preservation of the house, the furniture, the paper records, as well as historically correct and
industry-standard care for the citrus trees in the orchard. The diversity of the collections at
Reeder Citrus Ranch is not unusual for small historic homes that also struggle with meager
operating budgets, small staff, and a heavy reliance on volunteers. Even though most of this
chapter deals with large collections and major institutions, it is important to keep in mind
that the majority of places where public historians work share much more in common with
the historic Reeder Citrus Ranch than with large national museums.
One of the fundamental realities of collecting is that it is impossible to hold on to every
thing. Knowing that we cannot save every document, material object, structure, or landscape
requires that we must make choices about what we keep and what we do not. Before an
item is collected, preserved, or archived someone has to believe the item is worth saving.
Someone has to determine that the item or the lives it represents is of historical importance
Personal collections are a good place to start thinking about the decision-making process
that goes into professional collecting. We all make decisions every day about what we will
save, what we will toss, what we will collect, and what we no longer need. People who canno
make these choices may be classified as having a mental disorder and are featured on the
Learning Channel's reality television program Hoarding: Buried Alive
How do we decide what photos to erase from our phones? Do we create a physical
archive of letters, cards, and images, or is everything safe in a digital format? Do we keep
evidence of our daily lives, or only the extraordinary moments? What would historians be
able to discern about our lives based solely on the scraps and artifacts we have collected and
saved over our lives? How accurately would it reflect our lives? Who will be able to access
58 A CHAPTER 4
that material a century from now? Where could interviews with family members, friends,
neighbors, coworkers, or with ourselves fill in the gaps left by the material or digital record
of ourselves? Carl Becker's 1931 American Historical Association Address, "Everyman
His Own Historian," shows us that these questions are not new. Becker suggested that the
skills that people use in their lives are the same skills as those of the historian. We all have
imperfect memories. Becker asked his audience how they would ever remember how much
coal they had delivered in the past to determine how much they would need in the future.
Referencing scraps of paper, receipts, ledger books, and other forms of primary evidence, we
can reconstruct a history of our own lives in ways that help us make meaning of the past in
ways that are useful in the present.
Certain assumptions drive what we save personally and what professionals and society
in general deem historically valuable. Should institutions keep objects that represent the
ordinary daily lives of individuals, or only the extraordinary achievements of our society as a
whole? Are the lives of illiterate workers, children, or prisoners worthy of historical inquiry
or do museums care more about the accomplishments of the rich and famous, the powerful
and clite? If public historians have to choose what to collect and what will be lost to the
dustbin of history, how are we to determine which is which?
Debating What to Keep from the Past
Debates about what deserves to be saved consume the field of historic preservation. Quite
clearly it would be impossible, impractical, and even undesirable to preserve every old
building or every aspect of the built environment (the man-made surroundings that serve
human needs, including things like buildings, bridges, parks, cemeteries, and transportation
infrastructure) just because it might be old. City planners and historic preservationists have
to agree on clear criteria for what should be saved and what can be demolished to make
room for new construction. But what is worth saving? The US federal government and many
state governments have established criteria for having a property listed on the National
Register of Historic Places. The property must be more than fifty years old and fit one or
more of the following criteria: 1) associated with events that have made a significant con-
tribution to the broad patterns of our history, or 2) associated with the lives of significant
persons in our past; or 3) embody the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method
of construction, or that represent the work of a master, or that possess high artistic values,
or that represent a significant and distinguishable entity whose components may lack in-
dividual distinction; or 4) have yielded, or may be likely to yield, information important in
history or prehistory.
Trends in historic preservation follow other trends in history. The National Register's
criteria for listing properties gives preference to the work of a master architect or a build
ing with high artistic value, and narrow interpretations of the definition of "significant
in their two criteria have limited preservation efforts for vernacular, or ordinary, archi-
tecture and landscapes in the past. Mansions associated with the rich and powerful stand
for centuries, while sweatshops and tenements associated with the laboring classes are
demolished for new development.
COLLECTING HISTORY A 59
mission of New York of bias in their decisions to preserve only the homes of the rich and
In 1975, urban sociologist Herbert J. Gans accused the Landmarks Preservation Com
the creations of famous architects. Preserving only the structures that represent the elitin
society, according to Gans, distorts the real past, exaggerates affluence and grandeur, and
denigrates the present." Ada Louise Huxtable responded both as an architectural critic and
as a member of the editorial board of the New York Times. She wrote that it was not fair to
accuse the commission of elitism for preserving examples of great architecture and that the
further that it was fine for private individuals to preserve whatever they liked, but as a public
commission also preserved examples of what she called vernacular structures. Gans pushed
effort funded by tax dollars, the New York Preservation Commission should deliberately
represent all boroughs of New York equally and should not allow preservation decisions
be made solely on the basis of experts who focus more on aesthetics than on representing
Dolores Hayden, a scholar of public history, called this exchange the Gans-Hustable
debate. In it Hayden identified even more significant questions neither Gans nor Hutable
had recognized: "He did not explore the problems of preserving and interpreting ghemo
locations or bitter memories, and she did not ask how to justify spending taxpayers' money
without giving public access or interpretation." Do we only want to preserve parts of the
past that we can celebrate as a community or as a nation? Or do we want to preserve and
be forced to reconcile evidence of slavery, of racially restrictive laws or segregation, and of
the misery of sweatshop labor? If resources are limited, should those making preservation
decisions make choices to represent the most exemplary samples of great architecture, or
preserve structures that represent a broad spectrum of the city's history? Should pieces of
history be available to the public and interpreted for public knowledge, or is it acceptable to
spend public money to preserve spaces that will never be accessible to the public? Whose
interests should be served as we work to preserve evidence of the past? While there at
no definitive answers to these questions, looking back on past practices can help us better
understand how these questions have been answered over time, and how these questions
might be answered in the future.
From Private Collections to Public Display
Public acces to historic structures preserved with public funds is a modern question, as bar
torically there was no assumption that great examples of architecture, art, or material object
should be accessible. The world's greatest collections, for example, now housed at finde
museums and accesible to the public for free or for a relatively reasonable fee were ae there
private collections. Before the fifteenth century, the word museum was used to describe group
of objects more so than the buildings that housed and exhibited the collections as we know
them today. Collections that started as private enterprises were housed in rooms called
nets, which displayed "curiosities of the natural world, science, or sometimes relics of his
Known in German as Wunderkammer, meaning wonder rooms or cabinets of curiosity,
carly examples of display are considered the precursors to the modern museum. Rulers,
tocrats, and members of the merchant class delighted their friends and demonstrated the
mastery over the natural world through the display of their own private collections.
60 CHAPTER 4
Private collections, over time, have become absorbed into modern museums. In some
cases, they provided the original basis for major institutions that now conserve and exhibit
samples of their collections for public audiences. The British Museum in London, for example,
started as the collection of Sir Hans Sloane and other notable collectors; the Chamber of Art
and Curiosities in Austria at Ambras Castle was the collection of Ferdinand the II, archduke
of Austria; and the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, Netherlands, was started by Pieter Teyler's
private collection. Some current-day collections preserve the feel of these earlier collecting
and display practices. The Museum Studies program at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, for
example, as a part of their Mayborn Museum Complex, has an exhibit called Streckers Cabinets
of Curiosities. John K. Strecker was a self-educated librarian and naturalist who developed his
own collection and museum between 1903 and 1933. The collection became the property of
Baylor University, where museum staff keeps the association and feel of the original collector
by maintaining it in the style of early natural history museums where the purpose was for
visual entertainment and amazement rather than for public education.
Around the turn of the nineteenth century, private collections increasingly made way
for more accessible collections of national treasures." Public access to collections and the
development of modern museums to serve and educate the populace also coincided with de-
liberate efforts to create self-consciously modern national identities. In some cases political
leaders consolidated private collections of elite benefactors to create national museums. In
other cases, new collections were developed, sometimes through archaeological excavations.
It might be surprising how relatively recently we developed modern concepts of collect-
ing, preserving, and exhibiting fragments of the past for public audiences, particularly con-
sidering how common and widespread the practice is today. The remainder of this chapter
considers three specific aspects of this modern trend toward public access by focusing on
how collecting has become more systematic, representative, and ethical over time.
Systematic Collecting
The systematic retention and preservation of records is a very modern practice. The federal
records of the United States came under the central control of the National Archives and
Records Administration (NARA) only when this government entity was created through
a congressional act in 1934. Before the creation of NARA, federal records were stored in
nooks and crannies of government buildings with scanty indexing and no climate control
or fire prevention. In the absence of a centralized system, decisions regarding which fed-
eral records were worthy of preservation and which were trash were left to individuals who
certainly had different opinions on the matter. In 1934, employees of the newly created
NARA began surveying federal records across the country and transferring them to a cen-
tral archive in Washington, DC. With new records being added continuously, the collec-
tions have become so extensive that many items are now kept in more than forty regional
facilities nationwide, depending on the nature of the records. Even though NARA has a
comprehensive and systematic plan for preserving federal records, there are limits in terms
of storage capacity, staffing to process new collections, and priorities in terms of the lasting
historical value of records, as well as privacy issues that regulate what is preserved long term
and what is accessible to researchers and to the public.
COLLECTING HISTORY A 61
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