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“History Is Bunk”: Assembling the Past at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village (Public History in Historical Perspective)

Amazon.com Price:  $22.73 (as of 02/05/2019 15:08 PST- Details)

Description

In 1916 a clearly agitated Henry Ford famously proclaimed that “history is kind of bunk.” Thirteen years later, then again, he opened the outside history museum Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. It used to be written history’s center of attention on politicians and military heroes that used to be bunk, he explained. Greenfield Village would correct this error by celebrating farmers and inventors.

The village in the end included a replica of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, the Wright brothers’ cycle shop and home from Dayton, Ohio, and Ford’s own Michigan birthplace. But not all the structures were associated with famous men. Craft and artisan shops, a Cotswold cottage from England, and two brick slave cabins also populated the village landscape. Ford mixed replicas, preserved buildings, and whole-cloth constructions that together celebrated his personal worldview.

Greenfield Village used to be instantly popular. But that only ensured that the history it portrayed would be interpreted not only by Ford but also by throngs of visitors and the guides and publicity materials they encountered. After Ford’s death in 1947, administrators altered the village in response to shifts in the museum profession at large, demographic changes in the Detroit metropolitan area, and the demands of their customers.

Jessie Swigger analyzes the dialogue between museum administrators and their audiences by taking into account the many contexts that have shaped Greenfield Village. The result is a book that concurrently provides the most complete extant history of the site and an intimate look at how the past is assembled and constructed at history museums.

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