Readership Survey
Prof studies how people use constructed images of history to understand the past
BY REBECCA KENDALL
Countless children visit living history museums on school field trips each year, and Prof. Alan Gordon, History, was no exception. He was in Grade 7 when he first visited Midland's Sainte- Marie Among the Hurons, one of Canada's many historical sites and outdoor museums that draw people into the past by re-enacting life from earlier times.
“I remember the trip well,” says Gordon, who grew up in Waterloo and joined the Department of History in 2003. “I recall going in and watching a film, and afterwards there was a door that opened up magically and we walked out into the village. I returned to the museum a few years ago, and at the end of the film, it was a rickety garage door that opened. Clearly I'd created some kind of memory of the trip that, from a kid's point of view, seemed accurate but that I now know had been built up in my mind.”
It's a similar kind of relationship between history and perception that has taken Gordon from coast to coast visiting living history museums wherever he can. He's studying the way people use constructed images and perceptions of history — like those developed at living history museums — to interpret, understand and reflect on years and events gone by.
He's using the idea of intellectual history — taking an idea and following it back through literature and wider media — and looking at how the language used in scripts, pamphlets and guidebooks illustrates the past. Through this he hopes to learn how everyone from schoolchildren to reporters covering history are digesting and communicating their ideas about the past.
“The idea is to figure out what kinds of messages about history these types of museums are presenting and how they affect people,” says Gordon, who holds a BA from the University of Toronto and an MA and PhD from Queen's. “It's important because it tells us an awful lot about ourselves and ideas we have that shape the way we react to things. The more we know about how we understand the past and ourselves, the more we can be critical of our own society and our own values.”
Gordon began the study in 2004 and says the concepts for living history museums are as varied as their locations. In British Columbia, for example, the focus of many of these museums is the expansion of the frontier and the gold mining industry. In Nova Scotia, one popular museum is designed to teach about Scottish immigration to Canada. In Ontario, which has the most living history museums of any province, the emphasis tends to be on early settlement patterns.
“One thing that's common to them all is that they look at everyday life,” he says. “They don't address political or economic history, but rather they're focused on artifacts, which I find very interesting.”
Kingston's Fort Henry, an attraction based on Canada's Confederation era, was one of the first museums to bring history to life.
“During the 1960s and '70s, there was an explosion of these venues,” says Gordon. “It was a unique moment in time for Canada.”
Operators of these museums publicly touted the educational benefits in their annual reports and how many students were coming through to learn, but privately they were factoring in the tourist side, he says, adding that these contrasting motivations often caused conflict.
“I've found there's a delicate balance these institutions walk because they need tourist dollars to operate and they also want to work the education side.”
