Exhibits all over the United States. His book is curating america. He is also the author of the book that were going to be more focused on tonight which is for sale in our shop. And richard has very kindly offered to sign copies of the book after we talk this evening. The book is called curating america. It is a beautifully written book. I had such fun preparing for this evening because it is a perfect combination of you as an incredible collar with an enormous amount of academic background and deeply personal and funny and warm. So i urge you all to have a look at it. What were going to do is talking for about 40 minutes and open it up to questions from all of you. So i think richard is going to start us off by reading a few paragraphs from the book. This sunday 29 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 walk 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 lived or how they carried them around. I went home that night and couldnt sleep and i got up the next morning and decided i got to do something else. I drove back out there and got myself a job for 1. 10 dollars an hour. I have a couple people in the audience that work for me. I always told that story. I worked as one of those costume interpreters with a funny hat. And i fell in love with the idea of meeting visitors and talking history and it still sort of the passion of my life is telling those stories. So i thought id 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 catches the glint of a bronze sculpture. You can see the appeal of the night at the Museum Movies when the old precious objects, come alive. Sturbridge was never like that. Even before Opening Hours the place was alive with weather, with light and shadow and with bird song and animal calls. As the costumed interprets took their places it was something new to notice how Difficult People looked as they crossed the village common in their winter capes. 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 kept discovering how time and space and light and color and stillness and sound mattered. The touchable past by its nature abolished an 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 attributed to some kind of footnote. A source was called for. And these sources are still resigned in the archives or cooked concoctions of well reputed scholars. The Outdoor Museum hinted at a different truth that our forebears and we share a complex commonalty of sensory motor engagement with the universe around us. In this way, accessing the touchable past vastly widened and deepened what i could consider to be historical fen that, words spoken as well as 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 kind of and the feeling that we had that we could really still hear the sounds of the morning and of the bird song in the morning and we could feel the way in which the ground under our feet gave way in that kind of 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. Sort of a school master. And my visitors would come in and they would slide into these old desks and you know, there was no artificial light in the room. I would get 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 smell of the room and the kind of way in which if you didnt get the right answer you might sort of shrink behind somebody to not be called on again. And people began 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. And so i realized that the museum was also a place where people would talk back, where i could hear the visitor, where i could really 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. In a neighborhood like this, every building is a testament to a whole set of historical actions and decisions and things like that and also the way in which in a museum we could teach by putting people into situations where their basic human skills, the nothing that they brought, the experience that they had 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 was a kind of thats really the kind of transformation that coming into these field a half century ago god, thats amazing. It was just after my bar mitzvah. So i wasnt that old. Anyway. 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 youve tone work all over the country and youve thought about this issue of placebased history and im wondering if you have some particular moments or examples of being in a very different place than eertither england, where you studied 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 . 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 walk with a filipino cannery worker and have him explain the work, the dangers of the work, the family stories, the way and then, i would be able to ask questions and i would be able to bring to him a kind of conversation, you know let me tell you what i think this might have been like 75 or 100 years ago and we would have these kfgs about that or walking along a rice field in a day like today in january in South Carolina when youre in the rice fields and youre walk 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 not august that is the real horror of the rice field if you are a 17th or 18th century enslaved person who has to walk through that cold water and pull up the weeds around the rice plants. And to understand that slavery is not an abstraction. Its not an economic phenomenon entirely. Its a human dilemma. Its 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 . Then immediately you start to think the africans who were there came from so many different places. Africa is a 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 the place really became tremendously important. In the 1970s and 1980s, a lot of the work we were doing was coming out of the fact that a lot of the American Industrial towns in the northeast and midwest of course, deindustrializing. We have heard a lot about White Working Class times. It was clear that a whole Architectural Heritage of our Industrial Age was threatened. There was no longer an economic use for a lot of 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. And in every case, it was a matter of locating the memories of people from that place and trying to find, what was the investment that they had in a place . Capitalism is a great powerful energy. It has the power to take a company, a steel mill or a cotton mill and move it 8,000 miles in one month, right . Relocate. But it leaves behind an enormous investment of a community. We see this happening. And so in a lot of ways the work of the public historian and those of you who are here, is to try to figure out how to treasure what that investment is and to try to find a way to preserve that and to not to allow it to become simply a 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. They have many generations layered on the land here. All of us who work in this field have to take this sense that our job is to argue for those multiple layers, right . Not just to say that a developer, i hope im not offending anybody here, that the developer can come in and simplify this place by describing it as some place thats totally new. Right . Thats a kind of mistake that i think. Our job is working to restore the idea that the brooklyn waterfront it wasnt ornamental or a park space. 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 the Brooklyn Historical societys role in just remembering that, recapturing that. That of course also means that in recapturing the water front you are also dig fieing the lives of people who for years made a living sometimes dying on those places. It was a hard life. And those people get bypassed so often in our telling of the history. We have a wonderful story. Our director of public history, 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 there, what he made, where his wife was, where they lived in dumb bow and what his situation was and out of what his situation was came this fullblown story. I think the point is that all of us have fullblown stories, and it history is reduced. Sometimes social historians like me reduce it to statistical measures. We talk about the average Life Expectancy or income per year but the real pleasure of this history is to reconstruct the lives the full lives. To understand that men and women in the past had a view of nature. They had a view. They were fiphilosophical 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 very important. So this is im allowing myself one slightly nerdy museum question, which has to do of course with the juxtaposition of story telling to objects. And the stuff that 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. But in History Museums the truth is our attics or slightly upgraded storage spaces are full of these objects. And i would love to hear you talk a little bit about your relationship to those objects and what youve come to understand about them. You know, i was not a museum rat as a kid. We didnt collect spoons and we should schlepp up to the museum of the city of new york and the museum of Natural History every year from east new york. I never thought of myself as a museum 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, as i was saying about the schoolhouse, for me as a teacher to give you an object to hold in your hand and to allow you to have a bodily relationship to that object, ive got two absolutely brilliant and beautiful grandchildren. I could show you pictures. And im having the pleasure again as a grandparent to watch the way in which the cognitive process of a toddler its so much of what is learned is just by this physical process of learning how to manipulate. Thats why i use the term sensory motor engagement. Its a big fancy term. But its not just the 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. So they begin to develop a sense of language of metaphor that comes out of that physical experience. So for me as a student of history, its its really and i think it all came down to the fact that my mother who died last year she was in the middle of her 100th year, was a woman who came to new york and to brooklyn from poland. She had very little schooling. She was the most intelligent person that i have met. Her intelligence was all in her fingertips and she had an amazing kind of wisdom. If she dealt with anything in the physical world especially with food she had a sensitivity to the story of that object. She wouldnt buy green beans at the Public Market in Deerfield Beach without sort of understanding how was it fresh . What was she going to do where it tonight . What was she going to do with it tomorrow . She had a storytelling ability about every thing. Nothing spoiled in her refrigerator, to say the least. It took me many years to realize as i used to say, i had to get a harvard ph. D. 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 a lot of my colleagues really 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 in lifting, hoisting, you know, these bags of coffee and sugar that were coming into the brooklyn water front was not just brawn. There was a tremendous amount of skill involved in that and danger involved in that. So for me, you know, objects are immediately generate a kind of story. I mean, linda and i went to paris to do somebody had to do it we went to paris to do some research for an exhibition we were doing on the haitian revolution at the New York Historical society and i found a letter in the archives of the Defense Department which was a letter from napoleon to the actual letter. He says no honor is greater for you to be a citizen of the great french republic, right . And by the way im sending my brotherinlaw to take over the power in the island and you will be sub ordinate 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 our win. This guy is a son of a bitch. He signs a big b for bonaparte. You just think, man, the physicality of that letter is just something that you cant substitute. You could read that letter and it 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 in that particular moment and you know, of course that hes sitting there in the palace and hes got this kind of quill and hes got this kind of inkwell and the paper has been made. You dig deep and find the whole story. What is he doing . How is he managing this kind of thing . And you can really take it and your imagination is just set on fire by that kind of stuff. Great. You are a storyteller at heart. Heres one of the things that im very struck by whenever i talk to you. Your command of historical knowledge is extraordinary. But you have the soul of an educator. And that is essentially what i ive seen that you kind of combine. And which we share. Which we share. Right. Thats where from whence i come as well. Right. 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. So its in my heart as well. Right. But one of the things that you are eloquent about in the book and which i think then manifests itself in the exhibits that 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 . Well first moment you know, you have these experiences. So i was reading in in college i was reading wordsworths long wonderful poem 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 discovered or looked at. I just became so interested. If you could slow that down, what actually happens biologically and intellectually and physically . Because its all those things that are happening to us as we engage the world, as we pick something up. And you know, we just we feel the sense of the need for ba