In defense of nostalgia

Dan Spock

We all know what nostalgia is and why it must be greeted with deep skepticism by
the historian. We think of nostalgia as the sentimental view of the past in which the
“good old days” are seen through rose-tinted glasses. The nostalgic past is better
than the present and this, we know, is a false and heretical thing. But the derivation
of the word tells a more complicated story because nostalgia, it turns out, literally
means homesickness.

Ponder this. Five years ago we conducted a phone survey to test the level of
awareness about the Minnesota History Center among habitual museum-goers in
the Twin Cities. What we found was puzzling at first. As best we could tell, less than
17% of respondents had ever visited. Yet the perception of institutional favorability
was exceedingly high. What people seemed to be telling us was, even though I
don’t really care to visit you, we’re glad you’re there. What’s this all about?

I’ve come to the conclusion that we history museums have had a way of conceiving
of ourselves that is completely different to how people relate to us emotionally and
this disconnect is a potentially fatal detriment to the history museum enterprise.
The traditional historical society is a parochial affair, more often than not dedicated
to a particular state or city. Almost without exception it is the least visited museum
in the city. Like the motto of the police department, the mission statement is a
variant of “To Protect and Serve.” Protecting in this case entails preservation of
evidence of the past. Serving presumes some level of public access and
interpretation. Because of our traditions and their roots in the Enlightenment ideals
favoring the higher faculties of reason, we are liable to see these core activities in
strictly rational terms and to communicate outward in the same spirit. We make
collections so they can be studied comparatively and dispassionately. Interpretation
is couched as a kind of summary dissertation, based on the best scholarship a
curator can muster. Theoretically, this is responsible history museum tradecraft and,
if museum-goers have the grace to avail themselves of the wisdom imparted, they
will be the better for it.

But look at it for a moment from the perspective of the public. The past, such as
they experience it, is a deeply personal and resonant place, a great well of feeling.
It exists within the brittle framework of living memory and nourished by the
tributaries of storytelling, bits of reading and the mass media. It is charged with
nostalgia, not merely because people inherently desire a gloss on the past, but
because the past exists as a stark reminder of the relentless passage of time, of
losses, and grieving, of homesickness. As humans, time reminds us of our mortality
as we reflect on the changes it brings. Time forever changes our loved ones, the
places we call home, the things, the narratives, the spirit that defines who we sense
ourselves to be in relationship to everybody around us. Nostalgia is bittersweet,
neither entirely happy nor sad, but nearly everyone experiences it; indeed it
humanizes us. If you think of the old historical society as a rickety source of
comfort, a levee against the sense of things slipping away, then you can understand
how that hoary emblem of history might hold some value to someone who never
intends to visit it. Though you might be glad there a place for old stuff, the
presentation of it at the historical society strikes a person as arbitrary, almost
indiscriminate. As Bob Dylan put it archly, “museums are cemeteries,” in this sense,
cluttered memorials to the fading past. If you saw Night at the Museum 2, you no
doubt were struck by the absurdity of the idea that retired exhibits from the
American Museum of Natural History should go to their final resting place in storage
at the Smithsonian. Tied up in this depiction, though it may be wildly inaccurate, is
a real sentiment that museums exist in order to hang on to everything, whether the
public sees it or not. Like it or not, this is our brand.

If this weren’t bad enough, there are other reasons not to visit the old historical
society. The problems center on the interpretation of collections and scholarship. As
an analogy, I draw on my very brief career in journalism at my high school
newspaper. A primary lesson for reporting imparted to us then was that we were not
to “bury the lead.” This meant, that as we set about organizing the information in
an article, we were supposed to lead with the information that was most interesting
to the reading public, moving from there through a hierarchy of context-setting
deeper layers. Yet, in too many museums history is represented through the
collection nearly exclusively. While a historic site has certain inherent advantages of
“placeness,” of imaginative time travel, of a complex of experiential variety, it has
long been implicit that museums are the special preserve of the artifact. Yet, not all
artifacts are created equal. To treat historical objects in the ways that art museums
often do—as things of self-evident beauty and meaning—has been
counterproductive. A butter churn is not a Rembrandt and it is certainly a pillar of
the history museum’s negative brand that we often look more like a flea market, a
bazaar of dull brown things well patinated with a layer of dust, than something to
get excited about. The trouble is people need to see these things in relationship to
the lives of other human beings and too often this is either left out entirely, or
shrouded in scholarship devoid of the human touch.

History museums, by reasoning with people, rhetorically laying out a case for the
thesis, and presenting exhaustive representative taxonomies of silver or butter
churns, are talking past people’s feelings about the past, in effect, burying the lead.
In newspaper writing, the lead might be the most current bit of information, but it
just as often may be a note of human interest. The reporter then steps away from
the particular to increasing levels of general background information. This craft has
developed over centuries guided by a discipline enforced by the hard fact that the
newspaper that loses touch with its readers is doomed in short order. Contrast this
with academic history writing which very often starts and stays at a high level of
generality. People are discussed as groups, as social classes, as races or ethnicities,
as battle units, more rarely as individuals. In order to generalize authoritatively, one
must often tamp down the irregular and atypical story details that make things
interesting. Historians martial facts to support claims, set movements in social and
political context, worry whether one’s point of view is perceived and accepted. The
audience, to the extent that the curator/historian has considered one, is a select
group of peers, those on equal footing in terms of knowledge and expertise. History
museums, pursuing this academic approach, are consequently indifferent to their
primary allure, as touchstones for human interest and relevancy, triggers for
memory and nostalgia. Perhaps even, in pursuing our trade with relentless logic,
we’ve cauterized something in our own souls. Sure, we subscribe to the ideals of
historic preservation, to take one example, for ostensibly rational reasons. But in
our hearts is an overriding sense of despair at the sight of the past carelessly
obliterated. In so many instances, the logical choice is, in fact, to throw something
out and replace it with the new. It is nostalgia that keeps the wrecking ball at bay.

I think a case can be made that, when history museums harmonize with the natural
desire to experience nostalgia in highly personalized ways, the more apt the public
is to make that visit and engage. This is certainly one important conclusion I’ve
drawn from over a decade of visitor research. If the museum becomes more
emphatically a place where one can find some powerful evocation of one’s own
past, it will more likely be seen as a relevant thing rather than as an ossuary. An
effective history museum will anticipate how a person is liable to feel. It will
accommodate the desire to express those feelings in the form of stories and social
interactions. It will illuminate the static thing with the animating human motivation
that, at the end of the day, makes that object worthy of attention.