The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines (Public History in Historical Perspective)

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Description

Anyone who has encountered costumed workers at a living history museum may well have wondered what their jobs are like, churning butter or firing muskets whilst dressed in period clothing. In The Wages of History, Amy Tyson enters the world of the public history interpreters at Minnesota’s Historic Fort Snelling to investigate how they take into account their roles and experience their daily work. Drawing on archival research, personal interviews, and participant remark, she reframes the current discourse on history museums by analyzing interpreters as laborers within the larger service and knowledge economies.

Although many who are drawn to such work first of all see it as a privilege―an opportunity to connect to the public in meaningful ways through the medium of history―the realities of the job almost inevitably alter that view. Not only do interpreters make considerable sacrifices, both emotional and financial, with a purpose to pursue their work, but their sense of special status can lead them to keep away from confronting troubling conditions on the job, at times fueling tensions in the workplace.

This case study also offers insights―many drawn from the creator’s seven years of working as an interpreter at Fort Snelling―into the way gendered roles and behaviors from the past play out some of the workers, the importance of creative autonomy to historical interpreters, and the ways those on public history’s front lines both resist and embrace the site’s more difficult and painful histories on the subject of slavery and American Indian genocide.

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