Duke University Alumni Magazine

The New History in An Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg


By Richard Handler and Eric Gable. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. 272 pages. $16.95 paper, $49.95 cloth.


n 1931 stonemasons were hard at work building Duke Chapel on the new Main Quad, designed to invoke the "dreamy spires" of historic Oxford University. While James B. Duke was constructing a Tudor Gothic campus to honor his father, the son of another millionaire was creating a very different national educational institution. Late that same fall, John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired brick masons to reconstruct the Capitol Building and the colonial Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia. He had secretly bought up most of the sleepy college hamlet, displacing many local residents in order to reconstruct the town to resemble Virginia's colonial capital on the eve of the American Revolution.

In 1934 Colonial Williamsburg already had more than 100 employees and drew 31,000 visitors. Twenty-five years later, the site employed 1,800 workers and absorbed more than 400,000 paying visitors each year, bringing in nearly $10 million. By 1990 (undaunted by the success of a major theme park at nearby Busch Gardens), the restoration's ever-expanding staff was serving roughly a million paying customers annually and creating yearly operating revenues approaching $120 million.

At about this time, two Virginia-based anthropologists began more than a year of fieldwork at CW, taking tours, examining annual reports, and conducting hundreds of interviews with managers, workers, guides, and visitors. Richard Handler and Eric Gable tell us they "wanted to understand Colonial Williamsburg as an institution that makes history for the public," to explore "the total social life of a contemporary museum."

The results of their foray make fascinating reading.

Given wide-ranging access to mingle with the "natives" who work for CW, the pair of ethnographers come away with a revealing picture of the interconnections of culture and business in late twentieth-century America. They describe the institution's anxious concern for "authenticity," down to the smallest door hinge, and its incessant quest to convey a "proper image." The authors describe the contradictions between luring consumers to buy collectibles and attracting visitors to address imponderables, between providing a challenging history lesson and a relaxing vacation. They probe the tensions between business managers with only a limited sense of the general educational mission and educators with only a dim awareness of the financial bottom line. Like partners in a strained marriage, top brass on both sides of the institution seem to need one another, defend one another, and resent one another, while working hard to hold things together and prosper in a changing world.

What changes is not only the dress code and attention span of the average tourist, but history itself. And this, as the title suggests, is where the authors find their greatest fascination and clearest story line. The New History of the title does not refer to expanding archaeological knowledge or clearer identification of porcelain fragments. Instead, it suggests the paradigm shift of the past generation, downsizing the role of great men in history and emphasizing the active involvement of the majority population extending beyond white men of substance. Handler and Gable set out to discover how Mr. Rockefeller's "Old Museum," built upon veneration for the Founding Fathers and the Virginia gentry, was coping with this not-so-new social history.

In the early 1990s, the authors found that everyone--administrators, tour guides, visitors--had trouble reconciling the tensions posed by a post-Sixties historical perspective, especially when it came to the dilemmas represented in the matter of race slavery. But a glance at this spring's new visitor brochure suggests that CW still has the marketing savvy to resolve most of these paradoxes. Shrewd copywriters reconcile exploring the past and collecting antiques under the headline "They fought, they won, they decorated." Facing up to social conflict and enjoying the Southern sun are resolved with the squib "Here, there is rumor of rebellion and war everywhere.... There is also golf." The Founding Fathers still remain present and "accessible" ("Introduce the kids to some real father figures"), but enslavement is now all part of "Becoming American" ("Share a compassionate moment with a slave").

This suggestive book prompts thoughts about more than Colonial Williamsburg. I found myself wondering whether Handler and Gable might find similar tensions if they became participant-observers at Mr. Duke's university instead of Mr. Rockefeller's museum. We too have lived with a strain between our educational mission and our financial priorities ever since the first stones were laid in the Depression years. We too have ongoing conflicts over our exclusionist inheritance and our multicultural present. What is the proper balance for our intelligent, upscale student consumers between challenging, even troubling, intellectual work and healthy relaxation, especially if we are to expand our share of an increasingly competitive market?

Again this spring CW is offering a special package, titled "Felicity in Williamsburg," inviting young girls and their moms to "experience the world of Felicity, a spunky nine-year-old character from the American Girls Collection of books and dolls." Since Duke already makes deals with shoe manufacturers, perhaps there is a mutually beneficial contract with a doll company in our future. One thing is sure: The students from my class on the American Revolution who accompanied me on a short trip to Williamsburg over spring break were asked to read this provocative book before we set out.

--Peter H. Wood

Wood, professor of early American history at Duke, will be teaching his class on the American Revolution for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program this summer.

A Way of Happening: Observations of Contemporary Poetry


By Fred Chappell '61, A.M. '64. New York: Picador USA. 320 pages. $24.


n 1931 stonemasons were hard at work building Duke Chapel on the new Main Quad, designed to invoke the "dreamy spires" of historic Oxford University. While James B. Duke was constructing a Tudor Gothic campus to honor his father, the son of another millionaire was creating a very different national educational institution. Late that same fall, John D. Rockefeller Jr. hired brick masons to reconstruct the Capitol Building and the colonial Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, Virginia. He had secretly bought up most of the sleepy college hamlet, displacing many local residents in order to reconstruct the town to resemble Virginia's colonial capital on the eve of the American Revolution.

A collection of book reviews, even by a writer of spritely prose, has great potential for being dull. Most reviews come down to a word--yes or no--and a whole book of such reviews could be nothing more than a kind of Congressional roll call vote, with the deep-throated critic droning yea or nay ad nauseam. But if the critic taking on the job is one Fred Chappell, you can bet that the usual sort of voting is not what you're going to get.

In A Way of Happening, Chappell has collected reviews produced over the years, mostly for the Georgia Review, and, taken together, they provide a very fine map of the landscape of contemporary poetry in the United States. He achieves this cartography by means of what he calls the "essay-review," a meditative piece that concentrates its energies on the first half of the phrase. As he explains in the introduction, "I decided the assessments of books would have more point and cogency if they were organized around a single topic common to all of them."

It's a good plan, and the reader of A Way of Happening is treated to discussions of humor, Southern poetry, narrative poetry, and the long contemporary poem, among others. These over-arching concerns make this book a valuable resource for anyone interested in what's happening in American poetry, and Chappell's prose is a model for the student of creative nonfiction. Here, for instance, is how he starts the essay on humor:

"A dreary thing happened to contemporary poetry on its way to the American forum. It tried to grow up, to dress in long pants and coat and tie, to comb its hair, and to sullen into dark irony. All too successful in these ambitions, it no longer skipped to the rhymes of Theodore Roethke, stopped attending the rent parties thrown by archy and mehitabel and their rowdy friends, and decided that the bumptious waggeries of e.e. cummings should be treated with Clearasil."

If you're going to talk about humor in poetry, a humorous beginning is in order, especially one that supplies some historical context for the subject at hand. Chappell, a gifted poet, novelist, and short-story writer, shows he knows how to put life as well as intelligence into literary journalism. But he goes much further than just good beginnings. By applying his overall notion of, say, narrative poetry to specific instances of a poet's work, Chappell is able to make concrete what would otherwise be just theorizing. For example, after quoting a lengthy passage from Mary Kinzie's book Autumn Eros and Other Poems, Chappell is able to muse a bit on the role of narrative in fiction and poetry:

"If we came across this passage in fiction, we would mark it as a faulty transition, flimsy and arbitrary. It would not be successful in narrative poetry, and even in this story poems it finally does not work: We are able to recognize the crossover between auditory and visual imagery as a bit of a cheat, and we must decide whether the charm of the notion makes up for its implausibility as a structural element. It is in instances like these that a lyric or story poet might with some justice claim 'principle of association,' while a narrative poet might cry 'Foul!'"

If you came across that passage (as you are now) unattached from the specific example it relates to, you might find it windy and academic, but because Chappell has set it up carefully--a hallmark of this book--it becomes instructive to poets, fiction writers, and literary critics.

Another instructive, and very refreshing, element of Chappell's review-essays is his willingness to take on some of the sacred cows of contemporary poetry. Multiculturalism has become the battle cry of many current anthologists who are dragging the "literary" results of get-in-touch-with-your-anger workshops into print. On this subject, Chappell cuts right to the chase: "That is the trouble with a poetry that has little content but much Attitude, with pages that are almost nothing but shockshuck and aggressojive. Such writing is mere emotional reflex triggered by rhetorical clichŽ, and it produces lines that are hasty, often insincere, and sometimes unwitting self-parodies."

Chappell's more than three decades in the poetry reviewing business and his thorough knowledge of poetry, both classical and modern, give such critical assessments the sting of truth. And the years of toiling in poetry's fields has made him fearless. You can hear his Appalachian persona, "Ole Fred," chuckle, "You know, these days I just don't give a rat's ass," as the learned professor Chappell dismantles highly-praised poets like Alfred Corn, Allen Ginsberg, and Robert Bly.

While Chappell takes poetry seriously, he doesn't take poets, including himself, too seriously. So, I'll let him have the last word about this book: "If the poet makes mistakes, how many more must the critic commit! The poet gets off easy by comparison; his blundered poems are soon forgotten. The critic's inept judgments show him a fool for as long as the poems he has wronged may live. Because I have tried my best to do right, I am willing to live with this prospect. But I don't look forward to it."

--Michael Chitwood

Chitwood's most recent book is The Weave Room, published by the University of Chicago Press. He is a visiting lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.




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