Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House Museums [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Patricia West's "Domesticating History" serves a useful dual function in the study of history and museums. The book looks at four museum homes in the United States. The choice of homes allows for diversity in geography, temporality, race and gender. What is most immediately striking about the book is that it is not about the homes, the interpretation that occurs within the homes or the time period in which their famous residents occupied them. Rather the book is about what went into making the home a museum, and more specifically, the political motivations and confrontations that surrounded the acquisition and development of the house museum. The house museum, being an important part of material culture, allows us to study the process through which history becomes preserved, interpreted, and emphasized for future generations. From the perspective of museum studies (a growing field in which how we interpret the interpretation is as important as how we interpret the history) the book plays an important role in allowing the reader into the world of the acquisition of some well known national landmarks. The process and difficulties through which these locations were acquired makes for an important understanding of just how difficult it can be to appropriate physical space into national myth. West states in her conclusion that "As inheritors of the material legacy of the house museum founders, we now see the proper functions of a museum as the presentation of historically accurate interpretations of the American past." Through understanding the historical context in which the properties were acquired we see the process through which figures from history are debated and placed into the historical imagination where they then become part of the national iconography. I do not use the words myth or iconography lightly and I believe that West would agree that there is in many instances a sense of the creation of or addition to the national civil religion. She makes clear reference to these aspects in the first chapter citing both the idea of domestic religion (Colleen McDannell) and Civil religion (Robert Bellah) in he study of Mount Vernon. Throughout he book, and especially in the chapter on Book T. Washington there is clear reference to the importance of religion in the make up of everyday life in American history. Her discussion of the Monticello campaign is an excellent example of her detailed accounting of the historical growth of the property as museum. She does not dwell on the intricacies of the house or the items displayed in the mansion. Rather takes the reader on a journey through the fund raising campaign to purchase the house, including the appropriation of Jefferson as democratic model for the party in the 1920s and 30s, to the establishment of a curator for the house. She clearly shows in her explorations that the appropriation of both the property and the historical inhabitants reflects in large part the political climate of time. For example her discussion the Booker T. Washington birthplace, is filled with descriptions of the desegregation movements in which the events were couched. The George Washington Carver birthplace she seems to say would not have been appropriated had I not been the result of the need to acquire an African American location in order to pacify African Americans in the 1940s. In these descriptions she pays great attention to details about the historical context of which she speaks. Occasionally I believe she may have paid too much attention, leaving the intended subjects in order to emphasis the political fervor of the time. A god example might be the beginning of Chapter 4. The section is titled "The Bricks of Compromise settle into place: Booker T Washington's Birthplace and the Civil Rights Movement." The first subsection of the chapter however is a discussion of the growth of house museums under New Deal politics. The section is extremely illuminating as to the history and expansion of house museums in the 1930s yet it has little directly to do with the chapter heading. That is not to say however that she does not provide further insight into areas that might previously have been glossed over in survey course on such subjects as the civil rights movement and gender studies in the United States. West highlights the importance that women played in the acquisition, development and promotion of these house museums. Further she approaches although does not fully develop the exploration of the transition from women as curator to men in the "professionalizing" of the filed. I think I was disappointed that the text was not more focused on the untold stories of the domestics and of women in these houses, but upon further reflection I suppose West never promised that in her title. The text is extremely useful, not only as history of the house museum movement but also in its exploration of race, gender and general history. How the Booker T. Washington birthplace became a landmark or when Monticello was dedicated as a house museum gives great insight in to the attitudes and political leanings of the country at times in history. There is a great deal of information in the book that relates to theories of consumer culture. West is only able to briefly mention these items in her book. I believe that her text could be a useful starting point for those interested in pursuing this line of thought as an exploration of consumer culture in twentieth century United States. Through the exploration of the political environment in which these homes became museums West illustrates well the power of the museum to be used as not only a center for learning and cataloguing the past but also of influencing the present and the future. As she states in her conclusion "early house museum founders knew the power of historical imagination to inform perceptions of current problems, energize social action, and legitimate authority and principles."