Just a few Odds and Ends from the last couple of weeks.

What I’ve been doing – I spent this weekend in Oklahoma for the annual reunion with a group of people I’ve known since we were all freshman in college. This event started about fifteen years ago. We get together on an away weekend for the OU football team – that way we can easily get hotel rooms. The game gets varying levels of attention – this year not so much. When the game is good, we watch and cheer, but it’s the excuse, the reason is to chat, catch-up, and reminisce a bit. I never would have guessed when I moved onto the 9th floor of Walker Tower, that fifty-one (yes, 51) years later I’d be spending an afternoon with the other folks who moved in that same August. The women who were my suite mates in my second semester that year are often there as is my roommate from my sophomore year. One person brought her college scrapbooks filed with all sorts of memorabilia and lots of pictures of people with funny hair and clothes. Compare that to the scrapbook of pictures from last year compiled by one of our group. The most common reaction for each of us to those pictures was “Who are all these old people?” Yes, our looks have changed, but the fun has not and we keep making more memories while we remember the first ones. It’s one of my favorite things to do.

If you don’t have a group of friends from your past, I’d encourage you to try to gather such a group together. Facebook was the mechanism of our group’s organizers. Even if you can’t go to a location Zoom isn’t a bad substitute. Getting together with people who knew you when you were younger, getting to know them now, and to share your on-going lives is a special kind of magic.

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What I’m doing in school – Classes are going well though I have to admit, I have dropped one class. My original plan was to only take two classes, but they all sounded interesting so I took three. One of the things I didn’t know, since I knew nothing about the public idea of public history, was the amount of out of class work we’d be doing. What with my trip this weekend and the fact that I’m now working on deadlines for publishing my book, it was getting to be a bit complicated. I reminded myself that I am on no timeline, so I dropped a class. I was sorry to do it, but I felt better immediately.

Labor Day weekend, Peter traveled with me to San Antonio, and we took a tour of the Alamo. I haven’t been to the Alamo in many, many years. A lot has changed and in a good way. Part of my analysis says they have improved the history presentation in many ways, but it’s still a shrine. I also learned from one of my readings, and they share this on the tour, that Phil Collins, drummer of Genesis and singer/songwriter, was an Alamo fan and collected hundreds of artifacts though according to the book, Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth, many of them are of “questionable provenance.” But don’t worry, you can still buy a replica of Davy Crockett’s coonskin cap at the Welcome Center, though I think they are all sized for children, and more items than I can list from the gift shop.

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What I’m reading – No surprise, my reading list is mostly academic right now. The titles of the books are a bit heavy, but I’m finding the subject matter fascinating and my teachers and fellow students are creating interesting discussions.

For Monday’s class, we read Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today edited by Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida. Lots of complicated examples, though I didn’t have enough art history knowledge to track all of them. But even so, it raised interesting questions about the responsibility of curators when putting together exhibitions of works that were propaganda or at least used to support the regime of a fascist dictator. It links for me to the question of struggling with favorite books or movies when I later learn that the authors or actors have taken positions or actions that I find reprehensible.

For Tuesday’s class, our text was Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America’s Culture by Chip Colwell. The title lays it out there. What is the appropriate thing to do with the thousands of artifacts and human remains stored in museums across the country? In one story of building a highway and finding a cemetery that held the remains of both white people and an “Indian girl and her baby,” they put the twenty-six white people in new caskets and reburied them. They put the bones of the Native American woman and her child in a box and took them to the State Archeologists for study. So many examples across the years, but this relatively simple one seems to me to put the issue in stark relief. The good news is that many people have worked together for decades to find a way forward through contradictory good intentions, bureaucratic systems, and what seemed to be mutually exclusive value systems. By the end of the book, this was a story of shared respect and positive outcomes.

One of the lessons I’m learning as I begin this study of public history is the importance of collaboration, conversation, and listening as we try to understand the complexities of our shared histories. It’s good to know that the things I have tried to bring into my work over the years applies to this new field. These two books with their very different subjects both provide important reminders that there are multiple ways of knowing in the world and often contradictory stories about right and wrong.

I hope you’ve had a good week and have found a way to spend time with friends, to do something that takes you out of your routine, and read something that sparked your thinking. Finding time for all three of these are good for our mental health and worth the time – challenging as it may be to fit it all in.

Take care,

Gage

Quote of the Week

“We lawyers are always curious, always inquisitive, always picking up odds and ends for our patchwork minds, since there is no knowing when and where they may fit into some corner.”

Charles Dickens
“Charles John Huffam Dickens (/ˈdɪkɪnz/ 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870) was an English writer and journalist. He created some of literature’s best-known fictional characters, and is regarded by many as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. His works enjoyed unprecedented popularity during his lifetime and, by the 20th century, critics and scholars had recognised him as a literary genius. His novels and short stories are widely read today.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens