Figure 1: Our class’s last stop during our field trip was “Rumors of War” as we contemplated the future of what sites of memory can represent for healing communities. Image courtesy of the author.
“Universities and university presses are not the only loci of production of the historical narrative.”[1]
Trouillot’s ideas about the power to construct history in Silencing the Past served as a guide for my “Post-1945 United States Memory and Human Rights” course. Through analyzing various sites of memory, including monuments, memorials, and museums, my class thought critically about how the public landscape has shaped particular tellings and understandings of the past. We delved deeply into the creation, consumption, and evolution of these sites over time, unpacking the forgotten narratives and voices that failed to appear in these constructions of the past. The general public constantly walks by, through, around, and across historic sites without thinking much about them. This class forced us to slow down, pause, and interpret how historic representations speak to intentional narratives of the past as well as what they could mean for our present and future. We took the time to look around and became interpreters of the world around us. As practitioners of public history, we considered the landscape around us our classroom as we challenged the different representations that spoke to narrow perspectives of institutional and American history.
Because of our proximity to Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, we embarked on a field trip during the semester to apply these lessons outside the classroom. Students experienced how the public interacts with the memories and legacies of slavery and its consequences. We visited two museums, the American Civil War Museum and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia, and explored various sites of memory, including the Emancipation and Freedom Monument and Rumors of War sculpture. The goal of these visits was to compare the desired production of history at these sites with how we consumed them as citizens and scholars, which challenged the class and visitors around us to reflect on all the intentional choices made during these events. While Richmond’s landscape had been dominated by the five Confederate statues on Monument Avenue for as long as one hundred and thirty years, the new sites monumentalizing Black Americans as historical agents resignified who is seen as extolled on a site of memory.
Figure 2: Students listen intently to Mary Lauderdale, Director of Collections at Black History Museum & Cultural Center of Virginia, as we explore Virginia’s history of racialized violence after the American Civil War. Image courtesy of author.
To culminate the lessons and experiences built upon during the semester, students were tasked with the opportunity to produce a representation of historical memory for their final assignment. The course engaged with artistic and abstract representations of the past in the public sphere, and thus, students utilized the critical thinking skills and resources they had acquired to create a monument, memorial, museum, digital map, album, etc. that rectified a shortsighted historical narrative from their upbringing. Focusing on the post-World War II era, students contextualized dialogue on human rights and historical memory with projects that were meant to be consumed and responded to by a broader audience.
For instance, one of my students utilized Minecraft—a widely popular computer-based video game—to create a virtual monument to thirteen influential Latina-American women. Another created a children’s coloring book for a restaurant that educated on the Wounded Knee Massacre through interactive activities. Another wrote and recorded an extended play, concentrating on Black women who rarely get space in public school textbooks. Yet another produced a memorial to the Native American children educated at William & Mary’s Brafferton Indian School on the eve of its 300th anniversary. Thirty-five students drew on their upbringings and experiences to educate others on the nuanced, complicated narratives of the past and how we should think about them in all their complexities.
Figure 3: At the Research Symposium, a visitor engages with a student’s project, “Memory Iceberg,” in which visitors better understood how knowledge surrounding sites of memory is often influenced by those in positions of power. Visitors were able to interact and evaluate how different sites of memory in Richmond are discussed in popular dialogue.
In an American society still dealing with the ramifications and consequences of the most recent epidemic of racialized police brutality; fears of Critical Race Theory permeating in school systems; threats toward individuals who do not identity as cisgender, straight, white men; political polarization seeping into every corridor of our lives; and more; it is important for our future informed global citizens to articulate their beliefs, thoughts, and interpretations. Thus, producing these projects represented the first step in creatively expressing what they wanted to see history education and the public sphere look like.
Figure 4: Various visitors engage with student projects discussing the silences of New Orleans’ complex racial history when solely engaging with films such as The Princess and the Frog and the ethical questions that appear when former plantation sites participate in the commodification and consumerism industry.
Then, we hosted a research symposium to allow students to be in dialogue with community members from different backgrounds to share their processes, answer questions, and develop their ideas further. Inviting an interdisciplinary array of students and faculty, we welcomed the larger William & Mary community to see the kinds of work and conversation happening within the classroom. In an open house style, my students interacted with each other and the audience to critique traditional narratives of the past and articulate how their work complicated the past in exciting and more realistic ways.
Figure 5: One student discusses her project rectifying information panels hanging at Virginia Commonwealth University’s medical school to further discuss the Black remains ruptured from burial grounds and transported to laboratories to be used as scientific specimen.
As public historians, we are always seeking ways to get our work out to a wider audience. These projects provided the unique opportunity for students to produce their own work and share it with their friends, family, and broader community. That process aimed to normalize discussions of gaps within historical education. We discussed the intentionality and labor that goes into rectifying simplistic narratives of the past, and students led the charge. They illustrated the organic fun and new knowledge that can come from learning when developing work surrounding a passion. And, perhaps most importantly, each student provided feedback that they felt pride in the work they completed. Empowering students to do their best work, inspiring conversations with the larger public in the process, serves as an important tenet in our role as public history educators.
[1] Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 2.
All images courtesy of Tyler J. Goldberger.
Clio and the Contemporary 
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