Having just gotten cable tv this week, it’s kind of funny to think that we have more channels, but still not that much substance to watch. At the least, we now have mucho sports – very exciting to see the Mets doing really, really well in the first four games of the season. Of course, let’s not get too giddy – this is a marathon, not a sprint, and there’s some 160 games to go before the post-season.
Although, I sometimes still wonder if having baseball season begin in the beginning of April is a little too nutty – when games are postponed because of 20-something degree windchill (cold-outs?) or snow-outs (not rainouts)…
NY Times’ Edward Rothstein’s examining the development and prospects of Colonial Williamsburg seemed very well written and gave a lot of thought on how we think about history, or what history is really doing to us:
Colonial Williamsburg, where all this took place (about 150 miles south of Washington), is variously called a historical village or a living museum. But that means much more now than it once did. Aside from dramatizing historical controversies, the town is also caught up in living ones: debates about who writes history and how it is told, about what historical realism is and how it should be portrayed, even about what aspects of our past are to be celebrated in this strange combination of education and entertainment.
Everything here, for example, is from late-18th-century Virginia, with crucial exceptions including: no slavery apart from the dramatizations (although until just a few decades ago here forms of discrimination and segregation were still commonplace), flush toilets and freshly painted buildings as carefully tended as suburban developments, which in some ways Colonial Williamsburg resembles.
One doesn’t really step into the past here, or in any of the other historical villages developed after Colonial Williamsburg’s pioneering success…. nothing seems quite real. Reproductions and renovations and innovations intermingle, creating an image of the past so carefully constructed that it is a re-creation in all senses of the word.
But what an astonishing enterprise it is, and what a difficult task Colonial Williamsburg now faces. It was always meant to be an inspiration. In the early 20th century the Rev. William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin, rector of the local parish, imagined creating “a living shrine that will present a picture, right before our eyes, of the shining days” when the town was “a crucible of freedom.” He won the support of John D. Rockefeller Jr., who later said the historical village “teaches of the patriotism, high purpose and unselfish devotion of our forefathers to the common good.” At its opening in 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt visited and pronounced its central Duke of Gloucester Street “the most historic avenue in all America.” Since then almost every president has toured the premises; President Ronald Reagan even held an economic summit of industrialized nations here in 1983.
But that symbolic weight may now be a burden. This living museum’s very point — a celebration of the origins of the United States — is often greeted with skepticism. In their preoccupation with this country’s past flaws and failures, organizers of the nearby Jamestown’s 400th-anniversary events in May have shunned the term celebration in favor of commemoration.
Even if it were flush with cultural confidence, though, can a 301-acre historical village now hope to compete with more extravagant theme parks? … there were 745,000 paid visitors in 2006 — but the peak was in 1985 with 1.1 million. [….]
Meanwhile Colonial Williamsburg has been changing its symbolic character. Instead of offering itself as a model colonial town, it presents itself as a town whose colonial past provides an opportunity to explore the United States’ defining dramas. As Richard Handler and Eric Gable point out in their 1997 book, “The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg,” the perspective changed under the influence of social and political historians in the 1970s. For the most part (and to the disappointment of those authors), this has meant not radical self-skepticism, but the establishment of a broader perspective, understanding, for example, as the institution’s literature has said, “how patriots and loyalists reached their different points of view.”
It has also meant incorporating something previously ignored. As its Web site puts it: “During the 18th century, half of Williamsburg’s population was black. The lives of the enslaved and free people in this Virginia capital are presented in re-enactments and programs by Colonial Williamsburg’s Department of African American Interpretation and Presentations, founded in 1988.” Black craftsmen and guides are now familiar figures, as are interpreters playing the roles of slaves. [….]
Williamsburg … really was Virginia’s capital, a Southern counterpart to Boston, a political incubator for ideas about governance and liberty, where one of the colonies’ first newspapers, The Virginia Gazette, was published. But after the capital moved to Richmond in 1780 under Gov. Thomas Jefferson, Williamsburg descended into sleepy irrelevance until Rockefeller secretly began to buy up houses in the late 1920s, under Goodwin’s guidance. [….]
It is impossible to stroll the village without feeling that sense of artifice, beginning with an introductory film shown in the cavernous Visitor Center. A 1957 historical mini-epic, “Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot,” invokes the sentiments of its cold war era, being “dedicated to the principles of liberty wherever and whenever they may be threatened.” Shot on site, the film can veer toward camp, with its images of smiling plantation slaves and story of a landowner won over by Patrick Henry’s revolutionary convictions.
The film is dated in manner and vision, but for all its flaws, it still has an effect: It dramatically captures many of the colonial era’s issues, provides a sense of the period and reasons to pay attention to it, and provokes curiosity. Ultimately, its sentiments seem far less dated than they do at first.
That same shift takes place while experiencing Colonial Williamsburg itself. The place is artificial and always was. But the debates I witnessed that rainy day among gentry legislators and anxious slaves provided glimpses of the significance and character of colonial-era Williamsburg; the repeated exposure to crafts seriously executed gave some sense of the devotion and labor that characterized colonial culture; and the hints of pain and shadow were enough to suggest the complications of the past, without eclipsing reasons to celebrate it.
It is not the injustices that make Williamsburg unusual, but the steps taken there to seek more just forms of governance. The place’s artifice eventually casts its spell, even while acknowledging that artifice is indeed at work. Perhaps that makes Colonial Williamsburg more postmodern than colonial.
The strange realization that Hugh Laurie’s breakthrough as House is leading a trend of Brits coming to America to play… Americans.
The British are coming, indeed.
NY Times’ Mark “The Minimalist” Bittman on making homemade falafels.
NY Times’ website posts in advance the article on 36 Hours in Hong Kong. Is their itinerary any good? Well, since I’m no expert, I’ll let others on this blog determine that.
