Of the book that we will be selling in our shop. The book is called curating america journeys through stories gives of the american past. Is a beautifully written book. I had such fun preparing for this evening because it is the perfect combination of you as an incredible scholar with an enormous amount of academic background and a deeply personal and funny and warm i urge you all to have a look at it. What we are going to do is talk for about 40 minutes, and then open it up for questions from all of you. So, i think richard is going to start is off by reading a few paragraphs from the book. Theard so, this sunday, 29th, will be the 50th anniversary of a trip i took as a disgruntled, tired, bored graduate student in history. I went out to an outdoor History Museum in Central Massachusetts called old sturbridge village. Some of you have been there. It was a day like today, but 30 degrees colder. Instead of rain, it was a lot of snow. I pretty much had the whole museum to myself that day. I walked around and told the story. It was kind of a revelation. I was in graduate school discovering new england history. I was shocked at my ignorance. I had no idea what the people i have been studying for years looked like or where they left where they lived, how they carried themselves around. I went home that night and just could not sleep. I got up the next morning and decided i had to do something else. I drove back out there. I got myself a job for 1. 10 an hour. I have a couple people in the audience who have worked for me. I always tell them that story. That is what i was paid, to work as one of those costume interpreters with a funny hat. I fell in love with the idea of meeting visitors and talking history. The passion of my life is telling those stories. I thought i would read a little bit of what happened to me at sturbridge. At professional gatherings, Museum Workers remark on passing through the marble floors at night, and the dim lamps barely catch a glimpse of a bronze sculpture. You can see the appeal of the night at the Museum Movies when the old precious objects, life. Sturbridge was never like that. It was already alive with light and shadow, with birdsong and animal calls. There was something new to notice, how different people looked as they crossed the village common in their winter takes, how a dry april affected the gardens, and how the ice melted in the morning sun. Being outdoors in historical environment generated new angles of vision, new phenomena to see, and a new life pattern to explain. Opening myself to the sensuality of the past, i discovered how time and space, light and color, and the stillness and sound matter. The touchable past abolished and arbitrary boundary between the historical and contemporary. In my university classes, everything we knew about the past, including its persistence into the present, had to be interviewed and to some kind of be attributed to some kind of footnote. These sources are still resigned in the archives or cooked concoctions of well reputed scholars. The Outdoor Museum hinted at a truth that our forebears share a complex commonality of sensory engagement with the universe around us. Accessing the touchable past vastly widened and deepened when i considered to be historical phenomena, words spoken and written, stuff that was made, used, discarded or preserved, the ambience of human life, and its daily, seasonal, and annual rhythms. Tactility brought me closer to the everyday past. That was the impulse of that experience, kind of experience that feeling that the past was still accessible to us, and the feeling we had that we could still hear the sounds of the morning, of the birdsong in the morning, and feel the way in which the ground under our feet gave way in that time. It was a transformative experience for me. When i went to teach there, i realized that for example, i was a schoolmaster. My visitors would come in and slide into these old desks. There was no artificial light in the room. I would give out copies of a textbook, a 19th century textbook. People would hold it up and try to catch the light. They would also feel the snow of the room the smell of the room, the kind of way in which if you didnt get the right answer, you might shrink behind someone to not be called on again. People begin to talk back to me as an interpreter. Although they may have once been silenced in class, in the museum they were filled with words. I realized that the museum was also a place where people would talk back, or i could hear the visitor, where i could understand their experience of history as well. Those experiences of understanding how much their history was around us in everything, in every way we looked and walked down the street. Every building was a testament to a whole set of historical actions and decisions. Also the way in a museum that we could teach by putting people into situations where basic human skills, the knowledge and experience they brought as children suddenly they could talk back to you. They could tell you things they themselves were part of the story we were telling. That is the transformation, that coming into this field a halfcentury ago god, that is amazing. It was just after my bar mitzvah. [laughter] richard, as you talk about this, i cant help but tie this to some of the issues we were all thinking about in the present day. We are accused occasionally in new york of living in a bubble. And you have done work i am wondering if you have had some particular moment or example of being in a different place than the new england, which you started deeply, or new york where you grew up, better striking examples of what you learned that were striking examples of what you learned because they were in that context. Richard that is a good question. We worked in 34 states. It is always a question of walking, finding someone to take a walk with in a salmon cannery in puget sound. To talk with a filipina cannery worker filipino cannery worker, and having him explain the dangers of the work, the family stories. I would be able to ask russians. I would be able to bring to him the kind of conversation. Let me tell you what i think this would be like 75 or 100 years ago, and we would have conversations about that. Or walking along a rice field. In a day like today in january in South Carolina when you are in the rice fields and are working with somebody i did not know the history of all these places. The pleasure i had was to meet people that had deep roots. For a new yorker, it is surprising to learn it is january that is the real horror of the rice fields, not august, if you are a 17th or 18th century enslaved person that has to walk through the cold water and pull up the weeds around the rice plants. And understand that slavery is not an obstruction. It is not an abstraction. It is a human crisis. I would sit there and try to say, what did it feel like with the cold . How did people talk to each other . The africans that were there came from so many different places. Africa is a much more linguistically than europe, so you might have six or seven much more heterogeneous linguistically than europe, so you might have six or seven different indigenous languages. When people came to South Carolina, they had to find a way to talk to each other and construct a language. The language that emerged in that culture. Learning that with a rootedness in that place became tremendously important. In the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of the work we were doing and out of the fact that a lot of American Industrial towns in the northeast and midwest with the industrializing. Midwest were deindustrializing. It was clear there was a whole Architectural Heritage threatened. There was no longer an economic use for those militants. Those mill towns. We got hired to figure out what to do with those places. We constructed programs in new york and massachusetts and ohio and pennsylvania to create heritage parks. In every case, it was a matter of locating the memories of people from that place and trying to find out, what was the investment they had in the place . Capitalism is a great powerful energy. It has the power to take a steel mill or con no and move it or cotton mill and move it a thousand miles in one month. But it leaves behind an enormous investment of a community. In a lot of ways, the work of the public historian is to figure out how to treasure what that investment is, and to find a way to preserve, not to allow it to simply become fungible, something that gets tossed into the ash heap because the factory is gone. What to do with those churches and synagogues, the stories, all the commercial districts left behind that need to be repurposed and reconstructed as sites for a new civilization. That often means bringing in a new immigrant population. This is an amazing country because we have this churning in our lives. We are no longer a young country. We are no longer a place where things are first generation. Over many generations later on the land there are many generations layered on the land here. Our job is to argue for those multiple layers, right . I hope i am not offending anybody here. But that the developer can come in and simplify this place by describing it as someplace that is totally new. Is the kind of mistake that is a kind of mistake. Our job is working to restore the idea that the brooklyn waterfront it wasnt ornamental or a workspace. It was a working waterfront that was traditionally important. This was one of the great ports in the United States. There is a whole history in remembering that. For years, these people made a living, sometimes dining places. Dying in these places. It was a hard life. And those people so often get bypassed in the telling of history. Deborah we actually have a wonderful story. Our director of public history, julia, who i dont think is with us tonight, but who was driving the project at the waterfront she and her team discovered an obituary of a laborer who worked in the empire stores, lifting bags of goods, and who, starting with the obituary, because this man was killed by a bag of seeds that fell on his head, work backwards and learned about him. Where he worked, how long he worked, his wife was, where they left, closer situation where they lived, what their situation was. Out of it came this fullblown story. Richard i think the point is that all of us have fullblown stories, and it history is reduced. Sometimes social historians like me reduce history to statistical measures. Life expectancy or income per year, but the real pleasure of history is to reconstruct full lives. To understand that men and women in the past had a view of nature, they were philosophical about things. They had long family lives. It is easy to simplify and reduce people to statistics. I think our job, to find the human stories everywhere, just as a way of seeing ourselves as connected with that great chain is important is important. Deborah i am allowing myself one slightly nerdy museum question, which has to do with the juxtaposition of storytelling to objects. And thus, stuff, as you call it, that many museums are made of. Which is to say, we often start out and continue to be collections of objects, sometimes artifacts. In art museums, it is a more obvious relationship. Slightly if it is Storage Space is our slightly upgraded Storage Spaces are full of these objects. I would love for you to talk about your relationships with these objects and what you have come to understand about them. Richard i was not a museum rat as a kid. We would schlep to the museum of Natural History every year from east new york. I never thought i was particularly interested in that. I didnt come from a family that were really collectors. Then i began to realize within the object, just as a teacher, for me to give you an object to hold in your hand, and to allow you to have a bodily relationship to that object i have two beautiful and brilliant grandchildren. I can show you pictures. I am having the pleasure again as a grandparent to watch the way in which the cognitive process of a toddler. So much of what is learned is just by this physical process of learning how to manipulate. That is why i use the term sensorimotor engagement. It is a big fancy term, but it is not just physicality of the object. When a child put something on top, the develop an idea of the metaphor, the top is the good thing, but the thing on the top is good. They will say tomorrow we are going to have a big experience, we are going to top it off with something. You get that sense of metaphor that comes out of that physical experience. As a student of history, i think it came down to the fact that my mother, who died last year she was in the middle of her 100th year was a woman that came to new york and brooklyn from poland. She had very little schooling. She was the most intelligent person that i have met. Her intelligence was in her fingertips. She had an amazing kind of wisdom. If she dealt with anything dealing with the physical world, especially food, she had a sensitivity to the story of that object. She wouldnt buy green beans at the Public Market in deerfield without understanding was it fresh . What was she going to do with it tonight and tomorrow . She had a storytelling ability about every thing. Nothing spoiled in her refrigerator, to say the least. It took me many years, i had to figure out to get it phd i had to get a phd to figure out how my mother made an apple pie. That was a kind of revenge. I felt that a lot of my teachers and colleagues were focusing only on the way in which history was captured in documents and texts. I really wanted to value the kind of knowledge that was hosting this was not just brawn. There was a tremendous amount of skill and danger involved. Objects immediately generate a kind of story. Linda and i went to paris somebody had to do it we want to do research for an exhibition on the haitian revolution at the New York Historical society. I found a letter, archives from the defense department. It was a letter from the polling from napoleon. He says no honor is greater for you to be a citizen of the great french republic. Right . By the way, i am sending my brotherinlaw to take over power in the island. You will be subordinate to him. Immediately after that he writes a letter to his brother and thought and says, i want you to get in and master his soul, and insinuate yourself and twist him to power. This guy is a son of a bitch. He signs a big b for bonaparte. And you just think, man the , physicality of that letter is something that you cant substitute. That letter has been quoted in more history books, sure. But it is one thing to read the text, nice times new roman in a textbook, but when you see the thing physically and really feel it, you can feel the hate coming into that moment. You know hes sitting in his palace and has this kind of quill and this kind of inkwell, and the paper has been made. You dig deep and find the whole story. You are imagination is set on fire by that kind of stuff. Great. You are a storyteller at heart. This is one of the things i am struck by when i talk to you. Your command of historical knowledge is extraordinary. But you have the soul of an educator. That is essentially what i have seen that you combine. Richard in which we share. Deborah right. That is from whence i come as well. Before i came to Brooklyn Historical society, i ran the Education Department at the museum of modern art, and before that at the Brooklyn Museum. It is in my heart as well. One of the things you are eloquent about in the book, which i think then manifests itself in the exhibits you create, is not just a passion, but an understanding of educational philosophy. You have studied the great educators. You have studied john dewey. And you work with that constantly. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about where that came, how you came upon that, and how you have maintained it in your practice. Richard you have these experiences. In college i was reading wordsworths long wonderful poem called a prelude. Tries to capture the experience of a small child. I think the adventure of how the human mind grasps onto something in the world is the most wonderful miraculous thing that could ever be discovered, could ever be looked at. I just became so interested. If you could slow that down, what actually happens biologically and intellectually and physically . It is all of those things happening to us as we engage the world, as we pick something up. We feel the need for balance. My arm moves out here. I am already conducting a physics experience physics experiment of sophistication, but i just dont know it. I dont know the words of what to call it until i am much older. To me, the museum slows down at its best the kind of engagement with something that is alien and foreign, not part of our world. Even things that seem to be familiar to us. If you go to a Tenement Museum as new yorkers, we have been in a kind of space. But something is different. The way the wallpaper is set, the chairs you begin to become, frankly i got very excited by my own process of learning, but especially by the way in which i could work with a group of kids. At sturbridge, i had this very lucky thing. I was the head of the baby boom generation by 10 minutes. There was a good job open when we were waiting for the rest of the baby boomers to finish college. I had this experience first day i was education director. I thought a group of kids brought a group of kids in. I taught them the recipe on making rice cakes. They had they not on a bus had been on a bus for hours to come to sturbridge. I said, we are going to make rice cakes today. One child said, we need a pound of rice. One said, where do we get the rice . Someone looks at the map and said we can go to this farm. They said, mr. Freeman, can we have a pound of rice . He said, this is massachusetts, we aint got no rice here. God bless this one little girl, she said, well what do you have . He said he had some cornmeal they could have. They spent the whole day making it. What is a cup of water . Before pyrex cups, it is a matter of judgment to what is an actual cup of water. We had volunteers to churn the butter and all of this stuff. This was the worst cornbread i ever had. [laughter] it was dreadful. The cornbread crumbled and it was all over their face. It was the best learning those kids have ever had, i think. I learned just so much that day. The pleasure of watching learning take place is the joy of this kind of work still. It is hard to recapture that innocent in yourself, and to keeps attracting all of the things that you think you know to get back to the core experience touching the raw experience of life. That experience