From: Sally Baulch, [log in to unmask]
(...ok, now identify yourself first, and then again at the end...email
etiquette rule #54)
 
I think part of the problem over presenting controversial historic topics in
public is the notion that HISTORY is authoratative.  Growing up...hell, until
I hit upper-level history classes, I was never invited to question what I
studied.  I think many historians fall in love with history when they realize
that it isn't a knowable thing...that there will be some new kernal of
truth/opinion exposed with every new book/exhibit, etc.
 
However, this is still a secret among academicians, and therefore many people
get VERY upset when a learned "truth" is questioned.  Possibly what we need to
do for museum visitors is let them know (in the words of Robert Archibald)
"history is a discussion of honest perspectives, not a quest for an orthodoxy
to be enforced through intolerance of dissent.   The idea of one true history
is bothan impossibility and an absurdity. ...Our knowledge of even the past
few hundred years is not complete, limited only to information contained in
those documents and artifacts that survive...." (AASLH Dispatch, 1/1995)
 
I don't know the reasoning behind including the KKK in WWII Holocaust studies
other than maybe it was to let students know it (intolerance) can happen in
the US and anywhere ignorance breeds.  I believe that both sides of a war
should be addressed...not to justify the actions of either side, but to expose
each side to the other and to let each side know that we're all people, not
monsters.  I doubt that the original Smithsonian text was soooo unbalanced;
these people aren't amateurs.  And as academicians, they did the right thing
by asking groups to review the exhibit.  Part of including the public in
exhibits is the risk of upsetting someone.  But after all, "history is a
discussion...."
 
Sally Baulch
Collections Manager
History/Anthropology Division
Texas Memorial Museum
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