The Seven “H’s” of Heritage Interpretation
I am a storyteller, focusing mainly on events from the history of the American West from the
Territorial period to the latter twentieth century. I tell many of these stories in the vernacular of
cowboy poetry requiring me to use vocabularies specific to ranching, mining, and railroading; to
adopt an exaggerated persona; and to employ a variety of accents and vocal mannerisms.
Diligent research and respect can make the difference in the audience’s perception: am I
conveying an essential truth, or am I ridiculing others? Humility is mandatory. I’m not
infallible, and I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.
Authenticity and integrity are indispensable if one is to speak for, or to speak the actual words of,
people who lived in times and circumstances often very different from one’s own. Heritage
interpreters and historical re-enactors must develop an empathetic rather than a sympathetic
world view relative to their subjects. Interpreters must become informed about the various
conflicting points of view that influenced the events they interpret or the characters they portray.
Historic personages and “ordinary people” are products of the choices they made or make in
their lives. The strongest of these choices result in their championing or rejecting conventional
and/or controversial ideas of their day. No matter which side of an issue your character was or is
on, it is necessary to be familiar with arguments for other points of view. Sympathy is the role of
the audience. Human beings are naturally sympathetic to their own individual feelings and
predicaments, but they are more consciously engaged in self-justification or propagandizing, and
are capable of being motivated by shame and even self-loathing. The principles of good drama
apply here: sympathy is bland; struggle and conflict are exciting and engaging. Laughing with is
simpatico; laughing at is alienating. Interpretive integrity demands we strive for understanding,
leaving judgment to the audience.
Another problem confronting heritage interpreters is “gatekeeping”. That is, some people are
reluctant to provide information to “outsiders” or to accept them as qualified to interpret “their”
history. They may mistrust the motives or question the competency or legitimacy of the
researcher. They are emotionally invested in the events in question, perhaps even defining their
own identity by their ethnic, familial, or regional association to a particular time, place, or
historical event. They may seem defensive, and be suspicious of versions of the story that do not
accord with their feelings. Author Zane Grey encountered this while writing his novel To the
Last Man, about Arizona’s Pleasant Valley range war of the latter 1880’s. His initial attempts at
interviewing local residents met with silence or hostility. Only after spending several seasons
living in the region and interacting with the resident families did he gradually induce some
individuals to speak to him. Their recollections were often conflicting, and as is to be expected,
reflected the biases of the two major factions that had engaged in the hostilities. I have
encountered similar instances of such gatekeeping. On one occasion, as I was preparing to
perform my program, I was confronted by a member of one of the local ranching families who
demanded, “What gives you the right to call yourself the voice of the Verde Valley?” I
explained to him that he had misunderstood the title of my program, Voices of the Verde, and
that I was in fact giving voice to the written words of some of the valley’s early settlers.
Following another program, I was told that an elderly lady had taken offense at what she
considered to be my slanderous treatment of her father’s reputation. I contacted her to apologize
for any unintended offense I may have given. She angrily told me I had gotten my facts wrong,
and that I had no business doing such a program since I “didn’t know what I was talking about.”
When I asked her to name the specific facts, it turned out I had not gotten them wrong. She had
misheard and conflated them. I told her that I had taken my facts from an interview given by her
own uncle, quoting them from a transcript of the interview which lay open before me as we
spoke. “My uncle had Alzheimer’s when he gave that interview,” she said. “I know because I
was his caretaker at the time!” Both of these offended parties forgave my “transgressions” and
invited me to contact them if I had any future questions regarding my researches into local
history. What seemed to matter most to them was my acknowledgement that they were more
directly connected to these events in local history than am I.
Listeners often conflate facts and stories. They combine or hybridize elements from different
stories, resulting in inaccurate associations and misperceptions. I perform several stories in the
course of a single program, so I’m not surprised by this (see George Miller’s “magic number” 7
+ or – 2) and try to prevent it by making myself available for questions at the end of every
performance. However, most such conflations tend to come after a period of time has passed and
I receive these mainly in the form of email queries. An adult education coordinator colleague
once contacted me after one of his students gave a confused opinion and cited my program as the
source for his scrambled information. As interpreters, personal integrity obliges us to address
such inquiries in the interest of promoting correct information and clear communication. I have
changed the way in which I deliver certain pieces of information after being informed of these
kinds of misunderstandings.
In dealing with humorous stories which are based on historic records or anecdotes I allow
myself more artistic license in adding color and atmosphere to the details (poetic rhyme schemes
provide additional challenges) but I always remain true to the facts as best as they are known.
When history and heritage are my topics, I focus on seven “H’s”: humanity, humility, heroism,
hubris, hardship, humor, and above all I strive to honor those whose stories I tell.
Michael Peach, MFA, CIT, CIG
Interpreter of Cultural and Natural Resources
Pink Jeep Tours
40 Camino Del Sol
Sedona, Arizona 86336
(928) 282-5000
coyotepeach@gmail.com
Sources
Beck, Larry and Ted Cable. Interpretation for the 21st Century. Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore
Publishing. 2002
Fowler, Loretta. Whose Past is it Anyway? in Anthropology Explored, The Best of Smithsonian
AnthroNotes. Ruth Osterweis Selig and Marilyn R. London, editors. Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press. 1998
Grey, Zane. To the Last Man. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1921
Schrift, Melissa. Melungeons and the Politics of Heritage in Explorations in Cultural
Anthropology. Colleen E. Boyd and Luke Eric Lassiter, editors. Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira
Press. 2011
I am a storyteller, focusing mainly on events from the history of the American West from the
Territorial period to the latter twentieth century. I tell many of these stories in the vernacular of
cowboy poetry requiring me to use vocabularies specific to ranching, mining, and railroading; to
adopt an exaggerated persona; and to employ a variety of accents and vocal mannerisms.
Diligent research and respect can make the difference in the audience’s perception: am I
conveying an essential truth, or am I ridiculing others? Humility is mandatory. I’m not
infallible, and I’m standing on the shoulders of giants.
Authenticity and integrity are indispensable if one is to speak for, or to speak the actual words of,
people who lived in times and circumstances often very different from one’s own. Heritage
interpreters and historical re-enactors must develop an empathetic rather than a sympathetic
world view relative to their subjects. Interpreters must become informed about the various
conflicting points of view that influenced the events they interpret or the characters they portray.
Historic personages and “ordinary people” are products of the choices they made or make in
their lives. The strongest of these choices result in their championing or rejecting conventional
and/or controversial ideas of their day. No matter which side of an issue your character was or is
on, it is necessary to be familiar with arguments for other points of view. Sympathy is the role of
the audience. Human beings are naturally sympathetic to their own individual feelings and
predicaments, but they are more consciously engaged in self-justification or propagandizing, and
are capable of being motivated by shame and even self-loathing. The principles of good drama
apply here: sympathy is bland; struggle and conflict are exciting and engaging. Laughing with is
simpatico; laughing at is alienating. Interpretive integrity demands we strive for understanding,
leaving judgment to the audience.
Another problem confronting heritage interpreters is “gatekeeping”. That is, some people are
reluctant to provide information to “outsiders” or to accept them as qualified to interpret “their”
history. They may mistrust the motives or question the competency or legitimacy of the
researcher. They are emotionally invested in the events in question, perhaps even defining their
own identity by their ethnic, familial, or regional association to a particular time, place, or
historical event. They may seem defensive, and be suspicious of versions of the story that do not
accord with their feelings. Author Zane Grey encountered this while writing his novel To the
Last Man, about Arizona’s Pleasant Valley range war of the latter 1880’s. His initial attempts at
interviewing local residents met with silence or hostility. Only after spending several seasons
living in the region and interacting with the resident families did he gradually induce some
individuals to speak to him. Their recollections were often conflicting, and as is to be expected,
reflected the biases of the two major factions that had engaged in the hostilities. I have
encountered similar instances of such gatekeeping. On one occasion, as I was preparing to
perform my program, I was confronted by a member of one of the local ranching families who
demanded, “What gives you the right to call yourself the voice of the Verde Valley?” I
explained to him that he had misunderstood the title of my program, Voices of the Verde, and
that I was in fact giving voice to the written words of some of the valley’s early settlers.
Following another program, I was told that an elderly lady had taken offense at what she
considered to be my slanderous treatment of her father’s reputation. I contacted her to apologize
for any unintended offense I may have given. She angrily told me I had gotten my facts wrong,
and that I had no business doing such a program since I “didn’t know what I was talking about.”
When I asked her to name the specific facts, it turned out I had not gotten them wrong. She had
misheard and conflated them. I told her that I had taken my facts from an interview given by her
own uncle, quoting them from a transcript of the interview which lay open before me as we
spoke. “My uncle had Alzheimer’s when he gave that interview,” she said. “I know because I
was his caretaker at the time!” Both of these offended parties forgave my “transgressions” and
invited me to contact them if I had any future questions regarding my researches into local
history. What seemed to matter most to them was my acknowledgement that they were more
directly connected to these events in local history than am I.
Listeners often conflate facts and stories. They combine or hybridize elements from different
stories, resulting in inaccurate associations and misperceptions. I perform several stories in the
course of a single program, so I’m not surprised by this (see George Miller’s “magic number” 7
+ or – 2) and try to prevent it by making myself available for questions at the end of every
performance. However, most such conflations tend to come after a period of time has passed and
I receive these mainly in the form of email queries. An adult education coordinator colleague
once contacted me after one of his students gave a confused opinion and cited my program as the
source for his scrambled information. As interpreters, personal integrity obliges us to address
such inquiries in the interest of promoting correct information and clear communication. I have
changed the way in which I deliver certain pieces of information after being informed of these
kinds of misunderstandings.
In dealing with humorous stories which are based on historic records or anecdotes I allow
myself more artistic license in adding color and atmosphere to the details (poetic rhyme schemes
provide additional challenges) but I always remain true to the facts as best as they are known.
When history and heritage are my topics, I focus on seven “H’s”: humanity, humility, heroism,
hubris, hardship, humor, and above all I strive to honor those whose stories I tell.
…I was aware that being Melungeon involved varied and contested interpretations of history.
The group was not as homogenous as I first thought – in appearance or agenda. The several
hundred participants [attending a Melungeion Union gathering] included small pockets of people
from varied multiethnic communities similar (and possibly related to) Melungeons… Other
participants included those with Melungeon surnames who sought missing links in fragmented
genealogies, many of whom were unable to establish a geographical connection with any of the
original Melungeon settlements. Still others participating had no readily identifiable
genealogical or geographical connection to Melungeons but identified as Melungeon.
[Melungeon author] Brent Kennedy contends that Melungeonness is boundless, and identity that
serves as a metaphoric platform for multicultural harmony. [Melungeon Union] organizers and
participants alike tend to elasticize Melungeon identity to the point of anonimity, repeatedly
communicating the inclusiveness of the Melungeon movement. The public dismissal of any
gatekeeping mechanisms posits Melungeonness as a catchall identity…
from Melungeons and the Politics of Heritage, Melissa Schrift
Thinking about the past or about a distant world through things is always about poetic recreation. We acknowledge the limits of what we can know with certainty, and must then try to
find a different kind of knowing, aware that objects must have been made by people essentially
like us – so we should be able to puzzle out why they might have made them and what they were
made for. It may sometimes be the best way to grasp what much of the world is about, not just
in the past but in our own time. Can we ever really understand others? Perhaps, but only
through feats of poetic imagination, combined with knowledge rigorously acquired and ordered.
A history of the world told through objects should therefore, with sufficient imagination, be more
equitable than one based solely on texts. It allows many different peoples to speak, especially
our ancestors in the very distant past. The early part of human history – more than 95 percent of
humanity’s story as a whole – can indeed be told only in stone, for besides human and animal
remains, stone objects are all that survive. A history through objects, however, can never itself
be fully balanced because it depends on what happens to survive.
…How different history looks depending on who you are and where you are looking from.
[Artifacts housed in the British Museum are interpreted by persons] from the communities or
countries where the objects were made. This is, I believe, indispensable. Only they can explain
what meanings these things now carry in that context: only a Hawaiian can say what significance
the feather helmet given to Captain Cook and his colleagues has for islanders today, after two
hundred and fifty years of European and American intrusion. Nobody can explain better than (a
contemporary Nigerian) what it means to a Nigerian now to see the Benin bronzes in the British
Museum. These are crucial questions in any consideration of objects in history. All around the
world national and communal identities are increasingly being defined through new readings of
their history, and that history is frequently anchored in things. The British Museum is not just a
collection of objects: it is an arena where meaning and identity are being debated and contested
on a global scale, at times with acrimony. These debates are an essential part of what the objects
now mean, as are the arguments about where they should properly be exhibited or housed. These
views should be articulated by those most intimately concerned.
from the introduction to A History of the World in 100 Objects, Neil MacGregor
The following selections come from essays in The West, by Geoffrey C. Ward, 1996, Little,
Brown & Company, Boston (companion volume to the film series by Ken Burns)
The story of the American West, we believe, is at once the story of a unique part of the country
and a metaphor for the country as a whole. With all its heroism and inequity, exploitation and
adventure, sober realities and bright myths, it is the story of all of us, no matter where on the
continent we happen to live, no matter how recently our ancestors arrived on its shores.
Stephen Ives and Ken Burns
Writing history in terms of the present has its virtues, but it can be an odd procedure. Presentism
can yield what might be called the horseshoe crab theory of history, where signs of the present in
the past come to define the past. The horseshoe crab is an arthropod related to the spider. It is
very old, first appearing in the Upper Silurian period of the Paleozoic Era, about 425 million
years ago. Trilobites and much of the other life that once shared the seas with horseshoe crabs
appear now only as fossils. The horseshoe crab is still around. As evolutionary winner, it has
survived while the vast majority of what once surrounded it has vanished. But to think that we
can understand that Silurian past as if its true significance resides in producing the horseshoe
crab for posterity is slightly mad. In the past the horseshoe crab mattered no more than the rest
of the teeming life of the ancient seas. Its survival into the present doesn’t alter its role in the
past. The past existed on its own terms.
from Other Wests, Richard White
While many present-day Americans think of the Mission Revival and the plethora of community
celebrations built around romanticized Spanish themes as innocuous examples of “local color”
(or more cynically, as harmless cases of good old-fashioned American hucksterism), few stop to
consider the effects the Spanish fantasy heritage may have had on the living representatives of
that authentic tradition. Over the years, however, Americans of Hispanic Mexican descent have
understandably developed a different point of view about such ostensible “celebrations” of their
cultural heritage. Although a few members of the surviving Mexican American elite participated
in the first of these observances – believing that such distorted recognition was better than no
recognition at all – others realized early that the most insidious aspect of the Spanish fantasy
heritage was that rather than rehabilitate the image of Mexican Americans who still lived around
them, the fantasy helped to obscure them even more. Just as vague notions that Indians and
Mexicans were providentially destined to disappear had helped free an earlier generation of
Americans from suffering guilt for having expanded into their homelands, the creation of a
mythical history between the 1880s and 1920s helped their inheritors to perform the even more
remarkable feat of rendering invisible the ethnic Mexicans who actually still lived in the West.
from Myth and Myopia: Hispanic Peoples and Western History, David G. Gutierrez
Trained in movie theaters in Senegal or Thailand, New York City or Denver, the human spirit
has developed the conditioned response of soaring when it confronts certain images: horses
galloping across open spaces; wagon trains moving through a landscape of mesas and mountains;
cruel enemies and agents of disorder defeated by handsome white men with nerves of steel and
tremendous – and justified – self-esteem. And when the human spirit undertakes to soar, it is not
necessarily the obligation of the historian to act as air traffic controller and force the spirit down
for a landing. Improbable as it may seem to the prosaic historian, an imagined and factually
unsubstantiated version of western American history has become, for many believers, a sacred
story. For those believers, a challenge to that story can count as sacrilege.
Everyone wants faith-affirming history: the disagreement is just a question of which faith any
particular individual wants to see affirmed. Each group wants history to provide guidance,
legitimacy, justification, and direction for its particular chosen people.
These contests over history, often focused on the West, resemble and echo more familiar contests
over religious faith. Different versions of history have become creation stories or origin stories
for the people who treasure them, and, with so much feeling at stake, the clash between these
sacred tales grows increasingly bitter. And yet, while these separate and contesting claims on
history proliferate, more and more evidence emerges from the historical record to counter these
assertions of exclusivity. Explorations of western American history reveal many examples of
unexpected kinship, mixed heritage, cultural trading, syncretism, and borrowing. It is not simply
a matter of the blending of the West’s people through intermarriage, though this is certainly an
enormous part of the region’s story. It is also a matter of reciprocal influence and mutual
assimilation. The various peoples of the American West have been bumping into each other for
an awfully long time, and it cannot be a surprise to discover that their habits and beliefs have
rubbed off on each other.
Sustainability in a hero means, very concretely, providing inspiration that sustains the spirit and
the soul. While inconsistency can disqualify a conventional hero, a degree of inconsistency is
one of the essential qualifications of a sustainable hero. Models of sustainable heroism are
drawn from the record of people doing the right thing some of the time – people practicing
heroism at a level that we can actually aspire to match. The fact that these people fell,
periodically, off the high ground of heroism then determinedly climbed back, even if only in
order to fall again, is exactly what makes their heroism sustainable. Because it is uneven and
broken, this kind of heroism is resilient, credible, possible, reachable. Sustainable heroism
comes only in moments and glimpses, but they are moments and glimpses in which the universe
lights up.
from Believing in the American West, Patricia Nelson Limerick
By marrying locally and building family alliances, these generation of “stickers”, as the western
historian Wallace Stegner called them, strengthened their influence within the local community.
Seven in ten children and better than half the grandchildren of those original families found
spouses among others who had lived in the community for ten years or more. Although in part
these were the choices forced upon people by life in a small and relatively isolated community,
the practice of what some have called “sibling –exchange marriage” suggests that there was
considerable deliberation at work here. A significant minority of marriages among the
descendants of original families took place among sibling sets, the brothers and sisters of one
family marrying the brothers and sisters of another. Such marriage patterns seem strange today,
but were commonplace in the nineteenth-century countryside, and are still a fact of life in some
regions.
from Great Migrations: The Pioneer in the American West, John Mack Faragher
It was the stickers who gave the region the best that was in it, after all: resiliency, community,
humor, and hope, all of it forged in that difficult arena where human character is tested.
from Wilderness and the West, T.H. Watkins
…We must first understand something about the nature of words, about the way we live our
daily lives in the element of language. For in a profound sense our language determines us; it
shapes our most fundamental selves; it establishes our identity and confirms our existence, our
human being. Without language we are lost, “thrown away.” Without names – language is
essentially a system of naming – we cannot truly claim to be.
To think is to talk to oneself. That is to say, language and thought are practically indivisible.
But there is complexity in language, and there are many languages. Indeed, there are hundreds
of Native American languages on the North American alone, many of them in the American
West. As there are different languages, there are different ways of thinking. In terms of what we
call “worldview”, there are common denominators of experience that unify language
communities to some extent. Although the Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande valley speak
different languages, their experience of the land in which they live, and have lived for thousands
of years, is by and large the same. And their worldview is the same. There are common
denominators that unify all Native Americans in certain ways. This much may be said of other
peoples, Europeans, for example. But the difference between Native American and European
worldviews is vast. And that difference is crucial to the story of the American West. We are
talking about different ways of thinking, deeply different ways of looking at the world.
The oral tradition of the American Indian is a highly developed realization of language. In
certain ways it is superior to the written tradition. In the oral tradition words are sacred; they are
intrinsically powerful and beautiful. By means of words, by the exertion of language upon the
unknown, the best of the possible – and indeed the seemingly impossible – is accomplished.
Nothing exists beyond the influence of words. Words are the names of Creation. To give one’s
word is to give oneself, wholly, to place a name, than which nothing more is sacred, in the
balance. One stands for his word; his word stands for him. The oral tradition demands the
greatest clarity of speech and hearing, the whole strength of memory, and an absolute faith in the
efficacy of language. Every word spoken, every word heard, is the utterance of prayer. Thus, in
the oral tradition, language bears the burden of the sacred, the burden of belief. In a written
tradition, the place of language is not so certain.
Those European immigrants who ventured into the Wild West were of a written tradition, even
the many who were illiterate. Their way of seeing and thinking was determined by the invention
of the alphabet, the advent of the printed word, and the manufacture of books. These were great
landmarks of civilization, to be sure, but they were also a radical departure from the oral tradition
and an understanding of language that was inestimably older and closer to the origin of words.
Although the first Europeans venturing into the continent took with them and held dear the Bible,
Bunyan, and Shakespeare, their children ultimately could take words for granted, throw them
away. Words, multiplied and diluted to inflation, would be preserved on shelves forever. But in
this departure was also the dilution of the sacred, and the loss of a crucial connection with the
real, that plane of possibility that is always larger than our comprehension. What follows such
loss is overlay, imposition, the distorted view of the West of which we have been speaking.
from The American West and the Burden of Belief, N. Scott Momaday
Stories have a definite beginning and an end; history doesn’t. And yet the way we most vividly
remember and tell history – from gathering around campfires in the oldest times to reading a
book or watching televisions in the present – is through stories. Stories are usually linear. But
history can be circular, unending, returning to essentially the same place again and again like a
song with many verses but the same refrain. Some Native Americans have always contended
that history revolves in this way, referring to a Sacred Hoop or large Medicine Wheel.
[Its unique landscape is one of the most important factors in why the West has held a unique grip
on our nation’s and the world’s imagination.] It is the screen onto which so many dreams have
been projected, the stage on which so many human dramas have been enacted. Those dreams
and dramas, in themselves, are not unique. Greed, folly, inquisitiveness, love, courage, ambition,
and hope – these have always been elemental to the human story. They are timeless. Each
generation reenacts them anew. The Sacred Hoop whirls, the Wheel of Fortune spins, the
stagecoach rolls out – and they all eventually return to where they began and start all over again.
from Monument Valley, Dayton Duncan
National Public Radio Racecard Project: Six Word Essays
Aired on Morning Edition, Oct. 21, 2014
JESSE DUKES: My name is Jesse Dukes. I'm from Charlottesville, Virginia, and my six words
are, must we forget our Confederate ancestors.
INSKEEP: Must we forget our Confederate ancestors. Those six words came to radio reporter
Jesse Dukes after a trip to Gettysburg in Pennsylvania. He was talking with Civil War reenactors for the Virginia Quarterly Review. Dukes does not have Confederate ancestors, so far as
he knows, but most of the re-enactors he met say they do. NPR's Michele Norris spoke with
Jesse Dukes.
DUKES: I wanted to sort of understand what they got out of it, and I also wanted to do that in an
environment where I thought people would be comfortable talking about things like the legacy of
slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow and the legacy of racism.
NORRIS: And were they? Did they talk about those things?
DUKES: Not much (laughter), you know.
NORRIS: But you made them talk about that...
DUKES: Only when I...
NORRIS: ...Because you asked a lot of questions.
DUKES: Only when I brought it up, and people were not super comfortable to talk about it, I
don't think. But they did, and I should say everybody was very kind and everybody was very
welcoming. And invariably people would say, you know, racism was so terrible. It was an
abomination, and it's so terrible that the Confederate flag was used by the segregationist
movement and used by the Klan and that it's associated with lynchings and all these things are
awful. But that's not what I'm here to connect with, you know, and...
NORRIS: What were they there to connect with then?
DUKES: Well, for one thing, they were there to connect with their ancestors, you know, and just,
maybe not run up that exact same hill, but a simulacrum of that hill, with the same sounds and
the same shouts and the same visual stimulus, minus the blood and dying. And it still seemed to
define who - their identity.
NORRIS: You had a chance to talk to people who suited up not as you did, one time, but do it,
you know, often, every weekend and many times a year. What did they tell you?
DUKES: I think people tried to distance their ancestors from the guilt associated with slavery,
and I also think they tried to implicate everybody else in - so pointing out very accurately that
slavery, the economic system, relied on the markets and the textile factories and places like that
in the North. So they pointed things out like that.
NORRIS: There's one woman that you spent time with, Sara Smith.
SARA SMITH: I'm Sara Smith, and I'm from Dayton, Virginia. I'm with the Sixth Virginia
Company C.
NORRIS: She is in medicine, and she had an interesting story. She said that her family did not
own slaves. You described her as someone who every time someone, quote, "took a hit in the
reenactment," that she wanted to sort of take on her nurse's role. It's what she does in real life
(laughter)...
DUKES: Which is not what she's supposed to do (laughter). She's supposed to stand there, and
she actually was holding the flag. And she's supposed to stay there and hold the flag, but she kept
wanting to put it down and go make sure they were OK.
NORRIS: Sara Smith's great-great-grandfather, Henry N. Smith, fought in the original battle as a
sergeant major for the 25th Virginia. He would've been about 20 at the time and was wounded
during the three-day engagement.
SMITH: He was wounded Gettysburg, 763, served later as captain, Second Company A, 67th
Virginia Mountain Infantry.
DUKES: She sees it as the flag her great-great-grandfather carried up a hill in a desperate
attempt to maintain his state's freedom from government interference, but she doesn't think that
he was fighting to preserve slavery. And so for her to put that flag on her truck...
SMITH: They're on the back of my truck, you know. I think people need to realize - and I know
it's probably overused, but it's a history, not hate issue.
DUKES: Well, if her great-great-grandfather was a good, noble, brave person who was wounded
and then came home and still lived to be something like 80 and shows so much bravery on the
field, and he could carry that flag, why would it be wrong for her, you know, to put it on her
vehicle?
SMITH: I think too many people get, you know, caught up in the symbol. You know, for us it
doesn't mean the same thing it means to other people, and I think it's an education piece. The flag
that they get so upset over was actually not a flag. It was just - you know, it was a battle flag, you
knows. It was what you formed off of to know you were on the right side.
NORRIS: Jesse, you talk about something a few times through this piece. It's quite a long piece,
and you mentioned something a couple times, this notion of a willful innocence on the part of the
re-enactors. Could you explain that?
DUKES: This kind of logic that says, OK, I have the right to love my great-great-grandfather and
to admire those things in his life that are admirable, like bravery, like loyalty, like
accomplishments, like survival. And because he must've been a good person, then the cause he
fought for and the flag that he held must not have been a bad cause. And therefore the symbol of
that cause, a symbol of that cause, the Confederate flag can't be offensive to people. And so
people who are offended by it just don't understand what the Confederate flag really means.
That's what I'm referring to as willful innocence.
NORRIS: You note that for some people, the Confederate flag is an expression of distrust in big
government, regulations and gun control. It's a part of the state's rights argument. For others, it
signifies awareness that rural Southerners are too often seen as backward and a defiant assertion
of pride in a certain kind of whiteness that is dismissed or diminished. As you write, I'm a
redneck, and I'm proud of it.
DUKES: Right.
NORRIS: And you said that there are also some Southerners who are perfectly aware of the
racist meanings applied to the flag, and they fly that flag proudly anyway.
DUKES: Yeah, and I think if you're not from the South, you tend to assume the last of those.
You tend to assume that it's a conscious expression of racism and defiance and maybe a little bit
of the second, too. And it's interesting, I remember I used to live in Maine for a few years, and I
would see the Confederate flag, like, in rural Maine. And I think it's transcended Southern
identity to become kind of rural impoverished identity, too. And I think there are poor people in
the rural South and North and all over the country who do feel like they're stereotyped, and they
don't have everything that's due to them. And I think that's a legitimate complaint.
NORRIS: Including respect.
DUKES: Including respect. I'm not sure that waving a Confederate flag is a great way to get that
respect back, and often it is enacting the stereotype that they are trying to escape. But I do think I do think it's a legitimate complaint nonetheless.
“The reverence for the deeds of our ancestors is a treacherous sentiment.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Works and Days
Excepts from David Lowenthal’s The Past is a Foreign Country (1985)
Introduction
“Long uprooted and newly unsure of the future, Americans en masse find comfort in looking
back; historic villages and districts become ‘surrogate home towns that contain a familiar and
reassuring landscape for people whose points of reference elsewhere have been altered beyond
recognition’.” (John Fortier)
“Only in the late eighteenth century did Europeans begin to conceive the past as a different
realm, not just another country but a congeries of foreign lands endowed with unique histories
and personalities. This new past gradually ceased to provide comparative lessons, but came to
be cherished as a heritage that validated and exalted the present. And the new role heightened
concern to save relics and restore monuments as emblems of communal identity, continuity, and
aspiration. …Only in the twentieth [century] has every country sought to secure its own
heritage against despoliation and decay.”
“There can be no certainty that the past ever existed, let alone in the form we now conceive it,
but sanity and security require us to believe that it did.”
“Patriotic zeal or private pique persuade us to conform [the past’s] remnants, like our
recollections, to our needs and expectations. Most alterations accentuate past virtues to enhance
our self-esteem or promote our interests. Thus we extend antiquity, contrive missing
continuities, emphasize or invent ancestral prerogative and achievements, minimize or forget
defeat and ignominy.”
Chapter 2: Benefits and Burdens of the Past
“Those who drafted the National Heritage Act confess they ‘could no more define the national
heritage than they define, say, beauty or art… So we decided to let the national heritage define
itself’.” (Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright/Lord Charteris of Amisfield)
“’Only in a country where newness and brevity of tenure are the common substance of life’,
Henry James wrote of nineteenth century New Englanders, would ‘the fact of one’s ancestors
having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single spot…become an element of one’s
morality’.”
“Preservation is one popular use of the past… Others, like revival architecture and reproduction
furniture, adopt the forms and styles of yesteryear… Still others ennoble ancient times by
reanimating old myths, as the Victorians did with King Arthur. Yet another is to find or create
enclaves of the past where anachronistic remnants and traditions can be cherished. All these
actions imply general consensus about past-related benefits that are seldom articulated, however.
I subsume them here within half a dozen categories: familiarity and recognition; reaffirmation
and validation; individual and group identity; guidance; enrichment; and escape. No sharp
boundaries delimit these benefits: a sense of identity is enrichment; familiarity provides
guidance. Yet some benefits conflict with others: using the past to enrich present-day life is at
odds with wanting to escape from the present. But these categories are neither exhaustive nor
logically coherent, they are simply heuristic, a means of surveying the whole spectrum of what
the past can do for us.”
“Awareness of history…enhances communal and national identity, legitimating a people in their
own eyes.”
“…The past offers alternatives to an unacceptable present. In yesterday we find what we miss
today. And yesterday is a time for which we have no responsibility and when no one can answer
back.”
“Nations and individuals habitually trace their ancestry, institutions, culture, [and] ideals to
validate claims to power, prestige, and property. Ancestral possession makes things ours; it is
from forebears that we inherit.”
“Precedence evinces the concern to demonstrate a heritage, a lineage, a claim that antedates
others…”
Chapter 3: Ancients vs. Moderns
“Three interrelated ideas helped [eighteenth century New Englanders] justify dismissal of the
past: a belief that autonomy was the birthright of each successive generation; an organic analogy
that assigned America a place of youth in history; and a faith that the new nation was divinely
exempt from decay and decline.”
“Faith that they had banished the past and owed nothing to forebears, to tradition, [or] to
example, animated Americans up to the Civil War.”
“Massive industrialization and mass immigration likewise led disillusioned Americans to seek
refuge in the past. Noisome and odious industrial cities seemed more and more remote from the
old agrarian ideal, and late nineteenth-century immigration accentuated urban evils. The millions
of newcomers from southern and eastern Europe, manifestly alien in religion, language, family
patterns, and temperament, seemed unassimilable and dangerously un-American. Many older
Americans retreated defensively into history.”
“The ugliness of urban life, the savagery of industrial disputes, the subversive evils of
immigration and other signs of decline were not their fault. Far from feeling burdened by the
heritage they admired, they saw in the past a haven for traditional values that might, in time,
restore their idealized America, and would, in the meantime, safeguard them from the sordid
present.”
Chapter 5: How We Know the Past
“Indeed, the enterprise of history is crucial to social preservation. Since all societies are
organized…to insure their own continuity, collective statements about the past help to conserve
existing arrangements, and the diffusion of all manner of history, whether fact or fable, fosters
the feeling of belonging to coherent, stable, and durable institutions.”
“Unless history displays conviction, interest, and involvement, it will not be understood or
attended to. That is why subjective interpretation, while limiting knowledge, is also essential to
its communication. Indeed, the better a narrative exemplifies an historian’s point of view the
more credible his account. History is persuasive because it is organized by and filtered through
individual minds, not in spite of that fact; subjective interpretation give it life and meaning.”
Chapter 6: Changing the Past
“Those who magnify their past are especially prone to amplify its age. Relics and records count
for more if they antedate rival claims to power, prestige, or property; envy of antecedence plays a
prime role in lengthening the past.”
“Altering the past also conflates it, making all its variegated segments seem somehow alike. We
reduce the diversity of previous experience either to a few themes within a narrow time span or
to generalized uniformity. …We minimize the distinctiveness of these proliferating pasts, unite
former ‘greats’ by viewing them all as ‘old’, and impart the same vintage aroma to most of our
relics and memories. Revived and surviving pasts collapse into a single realm, temporal
specificity yields to a blurred continuum.”
“The past’s apparent homogeneity stems from several causes. For one, things of the same
material weather in roughly similar ways whatever their age; decay affects an Attic temple and
the Albert Memorial in the same fashion. Obsolescence also has a homogenizing effect; all
relics now functionally useless fall into one temporal category, equally anachronistic ten years
out of date as ten centuries.
Alterations and additions to the past strengthen the feeling that it is all essentially one. Popular
historical icons – half-timbering, cut-glass pub windows, signposted castles, cloche hats, [and]
steam engines – come to stand not simply for a particular period or episode but for the past as a
whole, triggering a generalized sense of bygone days.”
“Acting out a fantasy our own time denies us, we remake the past into an epoch much like the
present – except that we have no responsibility for it. The present cannot be molded to such
desires, [because] we share it with others; the past is malleable because its inhabitants are no
longer here to contest our manipulations.
Imbuing the past with present-day intention and artifice also distances it, however, segregating it
in its own world – quintessentially the world of the museum. Relics absolved from functional
contexts can be molded solely for display, and appreciative veneration underscores the
distinction between the now useless but attractive past and the workaday present.”
“We think, talk, and act toward the past as our ancestors rarely did – as a realm of particular
concern to the present yet one essentially apart from it.”
“Enlarged or diminished, embellished or purified, lengthened or abbreviated, the past becomes
more and more a foreign country, yet also increasingly tinged with present colors.”
“Such alterations segregate and homogenize us along with our relics: as we reshape the past to fit
present-day images, our perceptions of it become more like those of our contemporaries.
Whereas an unrevised past elicits diverse explanations, a past formed to fit received views
reduces the variety of historical perspectives and limits the range of historical experience. Less
idiosyncratically encountered, the remade past is more monolithically interpreted: the restorers
and guides through whose eyes we see it fit us all with the same distorting lenses.”
Chapter 7: Creative Anachronism
“We require a heritage with which we continually interact, one which fuses past with present.
This heritage is not only necessary but inescapable; we cannot now avoid feeling that the past is
to some extent our own creations. If today’s insights can be seen as integral to the meaning of
the past, rather than subversive of its truth, we may breathe new life into it.”
“Only by altering and adding to what we save does our heritage remain real, alive, and
comprehensible.”
Conclusion
“We must reckon with the artifice no less than the truth of our heritage. Nothing ever made has
been left untouched, nothing ever known remains immutable; yet these facts should not distress
but emancipate us. It is far better to realize the past has always been altered than to pretend it
has always been the same. Advocates of preservation who adjure us to save things unchanged
fight a losing battle, since even to appreciate the past is to transform it. Every relic is a testament
not only to its initiators but to its inheritors, not only to the spirit of the past but to the
perspectives of the present.
Some preservers believe they save the real past by preventing it from being made over. But we
cannot avoid remaking our heritage, for every act of recognition alters what survives. We can
use the past fruitfully only when we realize that to inherit is also to transform. What our
predecessors have left us deserves respect, but a patrimony simply preserved becomes an
intolerable burden; the past is best used by being domesticated – and by our accepting and
rejoicing that we do so.”