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"A wonderful intellectual adventure.” That’s how Laurel Ulrich described her OAH Lecture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum last April.
Several other OAH Distinguished Lecturers have similarly high opinions of speaking in public, off-campus venues. During 2004-2005, more than twenty Lecturers spoke at events hosted by historical societies, museums, libraries, and other community organizations, representing nearly twenty percent of all OAH Lectures presented last year. [See sidebar list that accompanies this article.]
“I decided to take the opportunity to develop something new that would give me a chance to explore topics I might not otherwise have done,” Ulrich said of the Gardner Museum talk. She visited the museum near her home, selected a few objects from its collection, and developed a new lecture, which she presented in the museum’s beautiful “tapestry room” to people interested in women’s history, material culture, and social history. She described the audience’s questions as excellent and helpful, “no different in quality than those at universities, though perhaps less specific to methods or historiography and more directed to broader comparatives issues.” She concluded, “It was a high point of the year for me.”
Lecturer David Blight spoke in March to a small group of public history site staff and teachers in Philadelphia, sponsored by the Heritage Philadelphia Program and funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. “I have spoken to more public, non-academic audiences than I can count,” Blight said, “and they are almost always rewarding and valuable for me, and I hope for the audiences. Often these lectures are for museums or for public school groups. I think it is extremely valuable for OAH Lecturers to reach out to all such groups with good history.” After Blight’s lecture, participating librarians from the Pennsylvania Historical Society showed what he described as “stunning” documents from the antislavery movement, and together they discussed how to use these documents in educating students and the public. Professional development activities like Blight’s visit “provide our constituents access to excellent and contemporary scholarship,” said Heritage Philadelphia’s senior program associate Laura Koloski.
Public lecture hosts also count on the OAH Distinguished Lectureship Program for high caliber speakers and engaging presentations. “We look for an intriguing, interesting presentation that ends with engaging the audience in a dialogue of questions and answers,” reported Scott Bruscheen, executive director of Salisbury House, a historic house museum in Des Moines, Iowa. “Our audiences are bright, well-read individuals who love history,” he continued, adding that the house’s popular History Series is supported by private sponsors as well as ticket sales.
Lecturer Lance Banning spoke to approximately one hundred people there last spring and worked with local middle and high school students the next day. Banning described “the satisfaction that comes when such an event goes well, the honorarium, and the increasing experience at pitching such talks at general, educated audiences” as benefits of giving public lectures, but added that “this trip was not greatly different from others I have done.” [For more on another Lecturer’s visit to Salisbury House, see the sidebar by Kenneth Goings.]
In February, Lecturer William Kenney gave a pre-concert talk at the Smoot Theatre, a restored 1920s vaudeville stage in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He spoke on the history of riverboat music to approximately one hundred people prior to a performance by the Julliard School’s Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. Kenney commented that the questions following his talk were “well informed, since river boats were an important part of local and regional culture until 1945. The mature audience knew more about my topic than a younger college group could have known.”
Kenney added, “These occasions are, in my opinion, crucial in the outreach of professional historians to the informed public. This kind of mature audience can provide absolutely essential support in a time of political difficulty.”
The event was sponsored by the West Virginia Humanities Council, which presents a number of lectures on different topics annually. “We have used national speaker bureaus for large events, and OAH has a nice selection of speakers and topics,” said humanities council program officer Mark Payne. “Many of the large bureaus have few humanities and history-related speakers, as they seem to focus more on TV journalists, celebrities, and motivational speakers.”
“The OAH speakers are distinguished by their long-established reputations for historical research and the presentation of it,” said education director Stephanie Davenport of the DuSable Museum of African American History. This Chicago museum has hosted several OAH Lecturers for public programs as well as Educators’ Open Houses over the past few years. Davenport commended Lecturer Wilma King in particular on using of slides as visual aids as well as interpretive objects.
Curator Christopher Pike at the Thronateeska Heritage Center in Albany, Georgia, agreed that slides “help demonstrate the speakers’ purpose.” Formed by the merger of the Albany Museum and the Southwest Georgia Historical Society in the 1970s, the center hosted five OAH Lecturers—Thomas Dyer, Edith Mayo, Greg Nobles, Theda Perdue, and Donald Yacovone—in a monthly lecture series last spring, funded by the Georgia Humanities Council and an NEH We the People grant.
“Being able to rely on OAH for some speakers is a boon, because I know that OAH has already approved the scholars’ credentials,” said public programs associate Danielle Dart of the Minnesota Historical Society. This historical society hosts an annual six-part History Forum that connects thematically with exhibits at its History Center Museum; in 2004-2005, Lecturers Thomas Brown and Robert Divine spoke there in conjunction with an exhibit on the American presidency. Both lectures were sold-out, accommodating more than three hundred people. The series is supported by ticket sales, private donations, and institutional budget.
In April, Lecturer Kai Bird spoke at the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, which is dedicated to preserving the history of the Manhattan Project and the role that Oak Ridge played in it. “It was a terrific event for me,” Bird recalled, “given the topic of my new book, J. Robert Oppenheimer. I have been speaking to other groups in the course of a book tour organized by my publisher. But this Oak Ridge crowd was probably the largest audience I’ve had.” Bird spoke, in conjunction with a screening of an interview with Oppenheimer and a photo exhibit organized by the Oppenheimer Memorial Committee, to a group of over 200 people, primarily retired physicists, chemists, and other scientists who had spent their careers working at the Oak Ridge nuclear facility. “Their questions were very good,” Bird said.
“The question-and-answer period [limited to thirty minutes] could have gone on for a very long time,” said American Museum of Science and Energy curator Julie Browning. “Also, people tended to linger at the museum after the program, checking out exhibits.” Given this positive response, Browning said that the museum intends to sponsor other speakers in the future.
Annette Windhorn is OAH’s lectureship program coordinator.
Lecturer’s P.O.V.: Kenneth Goings on visiting Salisbury House
On November 10, 2004, I was privileged to lecture at Salisbury House in Des Moines, Iowa. Salisbury House—a 42-room “castle” modeled after the King’s House in Salisbury, England—is spectacular, to say the least. I was invited by the foundation that now runs the house to be part of its History Series, one of the activities sponsored for its members and the general public. My lecture was entitled, “Aunt Jemima and Uncle Mose: Black Collectibles and American Stereotyping.” I was extremely pleased that some members of the foundation and one or two persons from the community brought some collectible items of their own to be displayed in conjunction with the talk. Although I use slides with my presentation, there really is no substitute for being able to see and touch the actual collectibles. I was also pleased by the display because one of the points I try to make in my lecture is that the collectibles were national and not just southern. Here, in the middle of Iowa, my audience had made the point for me.
The attendees were very different from the typical college audience to whom I generally lecture. They were people largely “of a certain age” who remembered the collectibles from their own homes or from the homes of relatives and friends. They could also recall what race relations had been like before the Civil Rights movement. The question-and-answer period became a matter of their recalling their memories and placing them in the context of the history I had presented. It was very affirming for me: these audience members really transformed themselves into participants. I actually learned a great deal from them, especially about how white Americans from the Midwest had viewed and responded to the collectibles.
The next morning I made the same basic presentation to a group of middle and high school students. While they had read my book and their questions and responses were topnotch, they obviously lacked the emotional connection of the previous night’s audience. Nonetheless, it was a wonderful experience overall.
OAH Lecture Hosts
These groups hosted OAH Distinguished Lecturers for public lectures or conferences during 2004-2005.
- American Museum of Science and Energy (Oak Ridge, TN)
- DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago, IL)
- Henry Lee Willis Community Center (Worcester, MA)
- Heritage Philadelphia Program
- Historical Society of Palm Beach County
- Indiana Historical Society
- Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, MA)
- Minnesota Historical Society
- Salisbury House (Des Moines, IA)
- Thronateeska Heritage Center (Albany, GA)
- West Virginia Humanities Council
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