8/29/08: When we can touch, history touches back

Last week, I wrote that history should be handled differently than, say, modern paintings, in the way we display and expect to encounter it in museums.

I also mistakenly claimed that "all the walls" of the New Britain Museum of American Art are white -- in fact, many of the walls of the first floor's galleries of historic paintings are toned in browns, greens and yellows, and a few of the rooms have Oriental rugs of the kind that would have been found in the homes of the 18th- and 19th-century gentlemen who would have originally displayed the paintings.

This is a good step toward contextualizing art, helping viewers to put it in its place historically, and I'm sorry I missed it in last week's column.

But a museum such as the Museum of American Art, dedicated to showing art, is a different type of archive than what I want to write about this week: interactive museums.

Most of you who grew up in Connecticut will remember elementary-school trips to Mystic Seaport and Old Sturbridge Village. The thrill of going on field trips may have overwhelmed their educational content -- remember when riding a bus for hours at a time was fun? -- but I'm betting you have at least one vivid memory of the seaport or the colonial village.

It may have been the ships in dock at Mystic or the "strange" colonial clothes worn by staff at Sturbridge. My most vivid memory of these field trips is of playing with a wooden hoop and stick in a colonial games area of Old Sturbridge Village.

I don't think it's a mistake that this is what I remember.

Kids, especially, enjoy the chance to interact with things -- to move them, kick them, talk to them, run around them. It's part of how kids learn.

More than that, though, things that can be experienced directly -- a painting can be looked at, for instance, but it can't be fired up the way a colonial stove might be, or crouched in like a cramped sailor's bunk -- teaches us differently than indirect or mediated experience.

According to Alison Landsberg, author of "Prosthetic Memory," people can easily form vivid, lasting memories by participating in the kind of direct experience offered by Old Sturbridge Village, Mystic Seaport or, in Landsberg's example, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Landsberg explains that in places, displays or museums that encourage prosthetic memory, "people are invited to take on memories of a past through which they did not live." In the case of Old Sturbridge Village or Mystic Seaport, this means being able to pretend that you're a colonist of a 16th- or 17th-century American. At Mystic Seaport, you can tour a 19th-century coastal town and historic vessels and think about a life at sea.

These are valuable experiences, ones that help us understand a few of the hardships -- that sailor's cramped bunk again -- and triumphs -- finally getting the hoop to roll down the lane -- of some of the Americans who came before us.

But what may be the most vital and valuable use of interactive materials and museums is helping us tell and understand the stories of the disenfranchised. Mystic Seaport does this when it hosts the Amistad; the Holocaust museum does this with every visitor.

Remembering the survivors of injustice and oppression throughout history is not an exercise in self-pity or self-flagellation. It's necessary for preventing that kind of injustice or oppression from happening again.

Remember that next time you're at the seaport or among the colonially clothed -- and be glad.