Mapping Context

I love maps. Always have. I have a profound aversion to using GPS devices on my road trips, much to the consternation of fellow travelers. I like using maps as a puzzle solving device and looking at the terrain to see if it matches what I'm looking at with the map. I see them as a tool for exploration and a way to provide additional context and richness to my adventures.

While I tend to complain about doing demographic and statistical research for my scholarly endeavors, once I am well into it I am stunned at the pictures those numbers create. But what I love more are seeing the ways that those numbers can create a literal picture in a graph or a map. Even when I pull numbers from something like the census, I always look for a mapping option because the full weight of the numbers doesn't hit me until I see it in picture form.

We were talking about ancestry at work the other day and so I immediately went to go print out the ancestry demographics map from the last census and we had a great time talking about different aspects of it (it's an office full of historians so we have odd tastes in entertainment). So in light of that, I thought that I would share some of my maps of choice.

For most of these maps, you can get them directly from the source: the US Census. But their website is a bit difficult to navigate, so when I'm using maps just for conversation, I tend to just google them and make sure that they look right. When I'm printing out a report, then I go get it directly from the Census (and don't forget the Historical Census Browser)...but for blogging purposes, let's go the informal route.

For a quick view of what is out there, one blog has compiled most of the really intriguing census maps in one place. What they also include, though, are the religious maps. The Glenmary Research Center (located in Nashville, TN) compiles and maps out the religious data that comes from the Census. Despite being a Catholic organization, they compile information on all faith groups.

The Bible Belt should perhaps change its name to the Baptist Belt.

Even though Glenmary creates these maps, the best place to browse them is actually from a website operated by Valparaiso University: American Ethnic Geography. There are several things that I love about this map. One thing is that you get a real feel for why religion in the American South is so different. Another is that despite Glenmary being Catholic, they are located in the middle of the Baptist heartland. When people move to Tennessee, they initially think that I am joking when I tell them that many people here don't think of Catholicism as being Christian. But after a look at this map, you can start to understand why that situation has evolved.

While they do not differentiate between the Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ (they split in 1906 and now bear very little resemblance to one another), you can clearly see that out in the midst of Baptist Country, there are two Church of Christ strongholds in Tennessee. Those areas happen to be where Freed Hardeman and David Lipscomb campuses are (Church of Christ universities for those not in the know).

Now, when you look at this map and then compare it to the ancestry map, there's a whole different level of information.

Who are your people?

When I first saw this map, I was shocked at the number of people who claim German as their primary ancestry (granted, this is self reported). When you compare the two maps, you see that the German Catholics and the Hispanics account for the large number of Catholic areas in the country. The reason why I was first looking for this map, though was as part of a discussion about why Southerners tend not to celebrate their European roots (I was trying to find a Robert Burns Supper for my grandparents to attend while they visited us in Tennessee and they were shocked that there were none nearby). I'd read an article talking about how the number of people who simply identified themselves as "American" had risen with this past census and that geographically, those people tended to live in the South.

There's a whole host of reasons for this. I could posit that because the South did not experience a great deal of impact from the waves of immigration in our history, the ancestry wars that took place in other parts of the country (people tend to strongly cling to what makes them different and separate when a new group moves in and supposedly "challenges" the status quo). The real battle in the South, until recent Hispanic immigration, has been about whether you are black or you are white. Also, when you take into account the Civil War and dynamics of how people must psychologically deal with a failed revolution (Are we traitors? Are we real Americans?), I think that the need to prove your loyalty by identifying yourself as American takes on a whole new meaning (although, I wonder if "Southern" were an option what people would pick).

But when you look back at the demographics of the American South, you see that while there are a bunch of "Americans," the legacy of Deep South slavery is still present on our landscape. To further that point, this is a map that I found at the US Census website when I was compiling a marketing plan for bringing African American tourists to Tennessee sites.

The American Black Belt still exists.

I am a product of the Southern Diaspora, which consisted of African Americans and Caucasians leaving the South in droves after the Civil War to find work and lives elsewhere. My great grandfather was born on a covered wagon on the trip north (they were from East Tennessee). I am also a part of the newer trend of return migration back to the South. After several generations, many families that left the South a century ago are again returning. While this is true for Caucasians, it seems to be almost doubly true for African Americans. For the first time in a very long time, there are areas in the South that are seeing a rise in African American population. For Southern heritage tourism purposes, there are all kinds of reasons that make the African American tourist audience very attractive to marketers, not the least of which is proximity. And I don't think that you get the full impact of how strong that audience is until you see something like this demographic map.

In terms of my own life, it was a demographic map in a 2007 issue of the National Geographic that made a huge impact on my perception of daily life and my future.

Where the singles live.

I'd been complaining that it was hard to find datable men...and then I saw this. You can clearly see both Murfreesboro and Nashville on this map as dots that illustrate a preponderance of single women. Where are the single men? West Coast. Where am I hoping to get a job once I finish my degree? You guessed it: West Coast. I mean, wow! The census has a similar map to illustrate the issue.

Brokeback Mountain doesn't seem so far fetched now, does it?

The map pretty much sums it up. It also gives me hope for my prospects in other parts of the country. But there are other things to look at in evaluating other parts of the country. The way that I cope with things that worry or frighten me is to research it obsessively. One of the things that I have problems wrapping my head around is the issue of hate. I suppose that in part explains my fascination with religion (there seems to be an element of hate/hope tied into religious practices and congregates). I am a supporter and subscriber to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report. When I want to freak myself out about the scary things that are out there, I peruse their website. In this last edition of the Intelligence Report, it came with a large fold out map that labeled the different hate groups in the country.

2008 Year in Hate

Aside from this being shocking in general, there are several ways that I can be dispassionate and analytical about it. I know that the New Jersey area has seen a spike in hate group membership in recent years and that this coincides with a rise in poverty and the loss of several of their major industries. I was a bit surprised that places in the heartland that have a reputation of harboring fringe elements did not really have a lot of hate group activity. If anything, you come away with seeing that high population areas and poverty stricken areas are where hate seems to thrive. I also noted that South Carolina (the only Southern state I have not visited) continues to struggle with a legacy of racial strife (brings to mind the words of James L. Petigru who in 1860 described his home state thusly, "South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.").

In sum total, it is sad. But it also shows the areas where we need to work harder and find better solutions.

Have You Done Enough?

This weekend's excursion was to Rock Island State Park. Three of us went and we decided to make a full weekend of it and camped at the main campground. The camping facilities were adequate, the staff was friendly, and the park offered some great scenic views. Because I of what I do, I no longer simply go and enjoy an outing like this: I analyze it. Each of us kept making little comments over the weekend about the little things that the park could do to improve their operation. Jen kept making comments like, "$20 would fix that problem." Most of what needed tweaking wouldn't require massive infrastructure changes or costs, but it would require an overhaul in state park management/staff philosophy.

Our car-side campsite featuring my new tent and our much tended campfire.

Before I get into the things that I would change to make this place more visitor friendly, let's talk about the aspects that I truly loved. The staff members that I interacted with were both knowledgeable and friendly. When we checked in, the woman at the desk asked us how many tents we had and recommended that we take a particular campsite because it was better for tent camping, and she was absolutely correct. When we were making our first attempts at making a campfire (once we got it going, we lovingly tended that thing until we left...a process I am now calling the saga of the campfire), a seasonal ranger stopped by and handed us a flier about weekend activities. He was friendly, approachable, and was able to answer other questions that we had about the park. Maintenance personnel were by every day to pick up our trash and they always said hello. Each person officially associated with the park seemed genuinely interested in quality customer service and seemed to love their job.

Not only was the staff attentive, but the buzzards took a keen interest in our campsite as well.

The hiking trails introduced us to much of the scenic natural beauty of the area. The different trails took us through woods that had a wide variety of wildflowers or out to the limestone river beds. The treks down to the river usually had you passing by one of many waterfalls that just seemed to be everywhere. It was lovely.

Megan and Jen winding their way to a small waterfall.

But here is where I start to get a bit nitpicky. The trails that led down to different spots on the river all desperately needed maintenance. We saw a similar deterioration at Fall Creek Falls State Park where a rock slide covered a section of the main trail (so much so that it took us a while to figure out exactly where the trail started again). Let me take back what I said earlier about cost...fixing those trails would take a chunk of money and labor to repair. And while the long forest trail seemed well maintained, it didn't make a lot of sense. The parking spot to start the hike seemed sort of accidental and then the path just meandered pointlessly through the woods. Perhaps a guided tour would have helped, but what about the occassional interpretive kiosk to say where we were, what we were seeing, put in a little bit of history. Greenways do this, so why not this park? We ended up coming out the other end without understanding why someone had chosen that path for us.

Footbridge that led from the historic cotton mill.

Some of the points of interest that other people remembered from years past were no longer available to us. One of those was the foot bridge that led from the historic cotton mill to the other side of the river. This park doubles as a TVA facility, which makes for an interesting setting as well. If there is water recreation involved in a site in Tennessee, then TVA is going to be there in some shape or fashion. So, in the middle of Rock Island State Park is the Great Falls Dam. While many TVA facilities used to be open for tours, in our post 9/11 world, many of them have limited public access. This site offers problems to that situation, though, because it is in the middle of a state park. The bridge from the cotton mill is closed and there are signs telling visitors that the TVA structures are not open to the public. There were some disturbing signs all over the riverbeds (that were littered with tourists) saying that you needed to leave immediately when the alarm sounded because the water level could change drastically.

View from just under the Great Falls outlook.

In general, I am in favor of not having people play around dams and water generation facilities (in the name of safety). But the large groupings of power lines often intersected hikes and the impact of TVA was ever present...but there were no attempts at telling that story on the landscape. And that seems to be a wasted opportunity. And that got me to thinking about something Dr. Spencer Crew said in our May-mester class. When evaluating sites of conscience, he would ask us if they were doing enough. And that is quickly becoming the standard by which I judge heritage tourism sites. With the natural and historic resources on this landscape, I wish that they were doing more to leverage those assets and create a more educational and dynamic visitor experience. There's only so much those helpful staff members can do and then the site needs to do some of the work on its own. Currently this park needs a more solid interpretive foundation to make the efforts of the staff more effective.

I'm a huge nut for signage and while there were several signs welcoming you to the park, but once you were inside the park, none of the signs faced the other direction. That meant that we did a lot of turning around in order to find things once we were there. That was one of the situations where just a little bit of money and a bit of foresight would make a huge improvement: print labels on both sides of the signs. Also, it was basically required for you to drive around the site. The hiking trails were scenic, but they were self contained. The roadways did not have room for pedestrian traffic and it was even a bit treacherous for car traffic in some areas. It seemed a bit silly to be so automobile dependent on a camping and hiking trip.

One of my favorite signs for the park, though, is one that I did not take a picture of (for some curious reason), and it was a large iron fence that looked like it belonged at the entrance to a western ranch. It proudly stated that you were entering "Rock Island." In addition to being the location of a state park, Rock Island is also a town. It was picturesque and had the types of shopping that campers needed. But more importantly, it had one of the smallest and cutest depots that I have ever seen. And it looked like someone was living in it!

Rock Island Depot.

And yet, even the town had a lot of untapped potential. Are any of these places doing enough? No, I think that they are coasting upon what they have. TVA has shifted its focus over the years and recreation is not one of its main missions anymore. But in terms of being an effective business, they have the opportunity to engage customers at sites like this and they are passing up that chance. The state parks are strapped for cash, but in the case of this particular park, they seem to have employees that have a strong emotional investment in their workplace (not always the case in my experience of Tennessee state parks). But without a solid intepretive foundation on the landscape, those employees are limited in what they can accomplish. And while the town has an impressive sign to welcome visitors, maybe their visitor outreach could move beyond the corner gas station (and contextualize that business by integrating it with the community which supports it).

I want them all to do more and be more thoughtful in how they approach shaping the landscape and serving their audience.

Old School Tourism

Last weekend I went to Mammoth Cave with my friend Megan. I was joking with another scholar of heritage tourism that I should take my copy of John Sears' Sacred Places: American Tourist Attractions in the Nineteenth Century (a standard for anyone studying the history of tourism in America). We went in part to continue our hiking trend, but we also planned to drive some of the Dixie Highway and explore the fabulous roadside attractions on that route.

Our tour guide/ranger laying down the law before we entered the cave.

The Park was beautiful and we saw deer and one turkey. We did an outdoor hike to get ourselves warmed up and then we went off on the Grand Avenue Tour, which was supposed to take 4.5 hours, but I think it lasted a little longer than that. The tour was very interesting. There was just the awe inspiring aspect of the cave itself. I kept wondering to myself if this was how a worm saw the world (if they had eyes, that is). They incorporated a lot of history and even demonstrated a historic lantern that early tourists would have used. They pointed out historic graffiti, talked about cave ecology, and even talked about some of the current conservation efforts.

Rangers of various types swapping stories in the Snowball Room.

What I really liked about the tour was the level of humor. Our main guide/ranger was young, told us that he was a chemistry major and that this was his strength. If he didn't know the answer to a question, he was honest and told you that he didn't (and I pelted him with a bunch of technical and maintenance questions, so I was impressed with his amiability in light of me being such a pest). And he wove in quite a few jokes without over doing it.

Our lead ranger talking about cave ecology and trail maintenance. Note the electrical box next to him.

Analyzing Mammoth Cave as a tourist environment was a lot of fun (to me) as well. The ranger pointed out old tourist paths (from a time when people didn't have to worry about lawsuits from tourists apparently), talked about the CCC putting in paths and how they maintained them, and some of the damaged to the cave system. The paths were obviously constructed and there were a lot of stones stacked to keep people on the trail, prevent them from touching sensitive areas (ie, the gypsum), and to mask some of the electrical infrastructure. It was the electrical stuff that I was particularly interested to see. In Sears' book he talks about tourists a century ago complaining about the light shows and the kitschiness of Mammoth Cave.

Fellow tourists in the Drapery Room. You can see some of the artificial lighting in this picture as well.

While the lighting did create a sort of artificial setting, I can see how it increases the safety of tours, and it makes it possible to highlight certain features without a tour guide trying to find them in the dark with a flashlight. There was mold on some of the walls of the cave where the old halogen lamps had caused unnatural growths, but the new LED lights were supposed to stop that from continuing. The damage to the gypsum, particularly in the snowball room, was kind of disturbing, but I can see the arguments for that not being too terrible because there are plenty of places in the caves where the gypsum is not damaged and continues to grow. It does give me pause to think about balancing access with conservation.

But the artificial part that I loved the most were the bathrooms. The little restaurant set up in the Snowball Room was fun, but the bathrooms next to it with the stacked stone treatment was fabulous. The stacked stone is kind of a pet peeve of mine because all of a sudden you see it everywhere in new construction (which means it will start to look dated just any time now). Here is kind of worked because it was using natural elements to shield something unnatural. But the stacked stone doesn't really echo the cave setting, rather it echoes the human stacked stones along the pathways and around the light fixtures throughout the cave. The second bathroom still has institutional brick, but I suspect that stacked stone is in its future.

Bathroom at the Snowball Room.

The second bathroom on our hike.

The second part of our excursion was to travel to Cave City and enjoy the 20th century roadside attractions that are still there despite commerce moving away from highways to the interstates. We were both so excited that we took a lot of pictures of colossi of various sorts and several great business signs (complete with neon). Growing up in Michigan, one of my favorite parts of our regular trips to the Upper Penninsula was seeing the giant Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox at Castle Rock. There were also plenty of roadside colossi here, including a Dinosaur World that looked fabulous.

Megan posing with "Big Mo"

But our main reason for this excursion was to travel a bit of the old Dixie Highway (which also runs through Murfreesboro, and Megan is writing her MA thesis about how the highway reshaped Murfreesboro both aesthetically and socially...or I think that's what she is doing) and to see concrete tipis. For roadside architecture enthusiasts, the phenomenon known as "ducks" is a particularly joyful find. Ducks are any building that is designed to mimic something else. So some of these buildings look like actual ducks, or shoes, or elephants. And the ducks that people seem to love the most in Kentucky are the Wigwams. We were so excited to find it, we walked around the grounds, took pictures, went into the gift shop, Megan bought a post card. It completed our roadside tourist experience.

Concrete tipi at the Wigwams.

And while I argue for historical accuracy/authenticity in some settings...in both Mammoth Cave and Cave City, it is the carnival nature of the sites that tickles my heart. I am not saying that every place needs to be this way. It is that kind of boom and bust infrastructure that has crippled tourist economies and I am definitely in favor of most places moving towards a sustainable tourism model (as opposed to continually building fake attractions). But that doesn't mean that some of these relics from the heyday of roadside attractions can't stay around. I think that they have their place and their context. And I'm perfectly okay with celebrating them in their limited niche.

And seriously, who wouldn't want to stay in a wigwam?

Tennessee Caves from Dunbar to Bell Witch

Today I prepare to attend the last session of the last class that I will take in a very, very long time. The class has been intensive, but I have have learned a lot from Dr. Spencer Crew about how museums can truly be transformative places and how they can have a real time impact on social issues. But the class has also been mental and emotionally taxing. And my treatment for that has been to escape into physically taxing ventures (where I don't have to use my mind for nearly anything, just the body).

For the past several weekends I have been visiting state parks with my friend Megan to do some hiking and explore some of Tennessee's back roads (and roadside architecture, of which both Megan and I are big fans, which might explain why we are also both fans of the show Supernatural, particularly the motels the main characters stay in for each episode). This past weekend we did a cave hike at Dunbar Cave State Park.

Megan on a trail at Dunbar Cave State Park.

We tried to call (several times) to reserve a spot on the cave hike, but never got through, so when the weekend came, we just went on up there. We found out that while the cave hike was full, usually there were no-shows so we planned to swing back by the visitor center right before the tour. We did the two overland hikes that they offered that morning and the best part for me were the turtles that we saw. I love pointing out wildlife: I'm like a little kid that way. But the hoards of turtles in the human-made pond was quite stunning and I eventually stopped pointing them out because it was getting redundant. I did stop to mimic one that was posed with it's rear leg sticking up in the air.

Turtles were on every tree or twig sticking out of the "lake."

The landscape was lovely and there were many families out with their kids, plus lots of military families (because Dunbar Cave is at the edge of Clarksville, which is where most of the troops stationed at Fort Campbell live). There were indeed some no-shows for the tour, so we got to go on the cave hike. Our tour guide was wonderful. He was knowledgeable, funny, and engaging...despite have some real problem tourists in the group. I'm always amazed at people who can handle a group like that where there are folks who refuse to follow the rules, seem to go out of their way to make everyone else miserable, and our tour guide kept them in check as best he could, never lost his cool, and even worked hard to engage the folks who insisted on being yahoos. Ends up most of the guides at the park are interns from nearby Austin Peay. To be a guide you have to be at least a junior in college and be studying in a field related to the work at the cave (biology, history, geology, etc.).

Our intrepid tour guide at the cave entrance.

On the cave we got to see several bats, cave salamanders, some cave fish, and graffiti from throughout the ages. They did not allow photographs inside the cave, so you'll just have to take my word for what was in there (or go see it for yourself). They had graffiti from the last two centuries left by tourists, or the promoters who labelled certain rooms in order to brand them. While the caves had a long history of use, in the 1930s a company hired teenagers to quarry out deeper paths and put in some carved steps in places. Ruined some of the cave ecology that way, but now you don't have to crawl to get to some of the spaces. But the best cave art were the petroglyphs, pictographs, and mud glyphs from the Mississippian people and even as far back as the Archaic Period (9,000-10,000 years ago).

All in all, a good tour. Actually, the great tour more than made up for the difficulties we had in trying to secure a reservation the entire week prior to going.

From there, I thought we could try and check out some of the Bell Witch silliness. I'd never heard the Bell Witch story before I moved to Tennessee, but I've learned to love it for its quirkiness. There are two major versions of the Bell Witch story, but they are very different depending on the oral tradition of the Bell family in Tennessee and the one that migrated to Mississippi. Some of the other major difficulties with the stories is that they don't seem to show up until the end of the nineteenth century when the events supposedly took place in the early 191th. And the corroborating evidence they site (namely an incident with Andrew Jackson getting scared away by the ghost) doesn't actually have any corroboration (you'll find nothing about a visit there or any incident in Jackson's papers or as part of Jackson family memories). But it's a story, it's fun, people get a kick out of it.

I knew that they had a cave as part of a tour out there, but that didn't make any sense at all because even with any of the wildly divergent versions of the legend, there's no cave. But if you're going to have a story that has evolved in leaps and bounds, why not add in a cave for more recent tellings. The town of Adams, TN, is very cool with great farms (and fantastic barns) surrounding an almost picturesque town. Unfortunately, the Bell Witch site is much less inviting. The first sign we saw at the entrance, we just thought was a lot of fun...but I'm less certain now if it was really an attempt at levity.

This is how they greet visitors to the site.

They also had signs saying that this was private property and not to trespass on it. Once we got to their visitor center, we had to wait for the guy behind the counter to finish yelling at someone on a walkie-talkie before he turned to glare at us. We asked where there was to do and he informed us that nothing was free and we had to pay to go any further. He didn't offer any further information, try to engage us in any way, he just glared at us. So we left.

Their "unwelcome" center.

I'm not going to pay money (no matter how small the amount) to be treated poorly. And now that I've asked around, we are not the only people to have had rough treatment there. But it was bizarre. One of the worst customer service experiences I've had, and one of the unfriendliest site visits I've had. And in comparing that experience with the friendly and informative staff at Dunbar, it was almost more jarring. At Dunbar I was glad to pay for the tour.

But on the way back out of town, we decided to enjoy some of the roadside architecture. Someone made some good business a century ago with pressed block construction because there were multiple houses with decorative concrete block. But our favorite was a historic church that someone had heavily stuccoed so that all of the additions to the building all had the same facade treatment. There's a historic church under there...somewhere.

Sustaining the King

I've had an up and down relationship with Graceland and this most recent visit continues that trend. There is no denying that Elvis was a dynamic person, had a huge impact on music and pop culture, and that he continues to be an icon of American culture. The reason why he continues to be such a mainstay, though, is because of Jack Soden, the chief executive officer of Elvis Presley Enterprises. He's been involved with the site and the larger corporate management of the Elvis brand since 1982. His background is in financial planning and he has put his considerable skills to work in building the Elvis brand and managing the legacy of Elvis' image so that they continue to build market share.

This solid financial foundation is something most historic sites would kill for. It is also something that Elvis never achieved in his lifetime (he wasn't much of one for long term financial planning). But while this aspect of the Elvis image is sitting pretty, the physical site of Graceland has loads of untapped potential that no amount of financial planning and marketing will unlock.

They are so savvy with their branding that even the renovations at the Heartbreak Hotel incorporate Elvis' personal motto of "Taking Care of Business"

For a business that makes so much money (mostly from licensing, which also builds brand strength), I don't understand why so much of Graceland is done on the cheap. Last time I was there I thought that the cheap carnival feel of the strip mall that serves as the visitor center/gift shops was sort of an appropriate approach to the Elvis' legacy. He came from a working class background and loved kitsch, so why not celebrate that? The only reason to denigrate that kind of experience is if you're being an elitist about social class, right?

Dr. Spencer Crew and class loaded into the shuttle at the visitor center on their way to Graceland.

In touring the house, I was both really impressed and really disturbed by what I saw. The audio tour is done exceptionally well. It is available in several foreign languages (and this pulls in a considerable international audience) and managed in such a way so that you could hear as little or as much as you wanted. It incorporated details about the room, memories of friends and family, and a little bit of the history of Elvis' life.

Dr. Crew's audio tour had problems at the beginning and the staff at Graceland was incredibly helpful in resolving his problems (and polite about it too).

What I was really disturbed by were their conservation practices. While I am definitely on the adaptive use end of the museum spectrum, they took things further than I was comfortable with. It looked like that rather than UV protection and inert mylar, they were using polyvinyl coverings for much of the furniture (which off-gases and destroys what it encapsulates). Now, I don't know this for a fact and Dr. Crew suggested that I ask them if that's what they are using rather than assuming...but it sure didn't look like mylar.

In addition to that (and supporting my non-conservation thesis), all of Elvis' clothing were on department store style mannequins. That's what poor museums do when they have to make the most of their resources. For an industry that is making mad cash, why are they doing things on the cheap? They can afford to buy conservation forms, so why do they still have the cheap stuff? The result for me was that rather than being delighted by the Elvis aesthetic, I thought it was a bit tawdry. I was also strongly concerned about the longevity of the material culture on site. The image of Elvis can live on in an ephemeral way, but the material culture of his life is a very important aspect to conserve.

Now, most people probably wouldn't notice those details. I know that I see museums very differently than your average visitor. I think that it would be interesting to do a survey of visitors to get their impressions of the experience and get genuine feedback on how successful the site is in telling the Elvis story and honoring his legacy. Speaking of his legacy, another aspect that disturbed me was that they nickle-and-dime you for every aspect of the experience there. This does not seem to be in keeping with Elvis' ideals. Now, they make a lot of money and I think that's the goal there, but it adds to the cheap carnival atmosphere.

The design of the site leads to a cattle corral feel as they herd you through Graceland.

Elvis' legacy of charity seems to be in contradiction to some of the practices at Graceland. They have a plan for constructing new facilities and say that they are going to construct an entirely new Graceland experience and make things more upscale. I'll withhold judgment until they roll out what that will look like. I'd really like to see some quality museum exhibits, though. What is there now is really in the style of the amateur "stuff" exhibits of volunteer museums (there I go being elitist again). They have great artifacts, but they seem content to just shove a bunch of them in a case with little or no interpretation. The labels that they do have tend to be packed with entirely too much text and try to tell way too much on a single label (also in the style of amateur exhibitry).

Fellow classmate John George looks up at the all of the artifacts that are plastered in every surface in the former racquetball court. In addition to very high light levels (a conservation issue), the visible storage exhibit technique doesn't completely work here.

I suppose that my main problem here is that the site (be it a music museum, house museum, shrine, what-have-you) does not seem very professional. They do phenomenal financial management, but have kept so focused on controlling the branding image that I think they have shut out the potential of having a real museum or allowing for some real history on the site. They do not allow scholars to have access to their archives (other corporate entities do this by incorporating restrictions that ensures genuine scholarship as opposed to salacious, tabloid misuse). They don't so educational programming. And this is a point that I think bothers me most. After a recent visit to the Experience Music Project in Seattle, I don't understand why Graceland isn't further leveraging their brand by doing something that is experiential and educational on site. They could link it to Elvis' musical roots or his evolving legacy. It could be part charity, part outreach, and also make the Elvis brand relevant in real time as opposed to in the past. It could make Elvis Presley Enterprises cutting edge as a cultural institution as opposed to being a typical corporate entity. The brand identity is sustainable, I would love to see them implement sustainable tourism (especially sustainable heritage tourism) strategies at Graceland.

Maybe that's a direction they will be heading in with this new facility that they plan to break ground on in five years. I'm hoping that they begin to staff Graceland with cutting edge and creative museum professionals so that this site can contribute to Elvis' legacy in an evolving cultural way that also promotes quality of life (instead of just bring in money for the corporation). After being incredibly critical of what they do, I want to take a moment to comment on something that I think they do very well. This site will probably always be a shrine in some respects. I love that they allow fans to leave tributes at the graveside. They take in flowers (both real and fake) and other items and place them along the perimeter of the graves until nature takes its toll on them. This allows for fans to feel a very real connection to the site and it does play into a cultural tradition of grieving. I wish that they were doing more than just this, but no matter how they change, I hope that they always keep this part of their operation.

In the meditation garden, visitors get to honor the dead and even donate tributes of flowers and nicknacks that the staff then place around the Presley family graves.

Transformative Museums

I am doing a May-mester course with Dr. Spencer Crew on issues of conscience, commemoration, and memory at museums and historic sites. Because the course is a semester's worth of work in just 2.5 weeks, everything is very intensive. We're looking at sites that deal with strong emotional issues and reading up on lots of theory, and that amounts to exhaustion on a number of levels.

Part of my mental exhaustion is that I am honestly rethinking the purpose and mission of historic sites, what they can accomplish, and what areas of culture they should be a part of. As my brain is literally rewiring itself, I find that I am having trouble forming cohesive sentences and yet I am making numerous connections within my head. It is making me consider how the brain works and the type of research that a friend of mine is doing at Michigan State in psycho-linguistics.

For the class we did a two-day visit to Memphis to experience the National Civil Rights Museum and Graceland as places that are involved in commemoration and memory. I have been to both sites a number of times, but with the context of this class I found an entirely new way of looking at what they do. The result ultimately was that my opinion of the NCRM went up and my opinion of Graceland went way down.

Dr. Crew and class at the NCRM

I've always had problems with the sheer amount of text that is in the exhibits of the NCRM. On the one hand, I think that they are trying to cover too much of the history of the Civil Rights movement, on the other hand, I'm disappointed in some of the things that they leave out (there's no pleasing historians, is there?). But I have always liked that rather than just being a shrine to MLK, that they strive to educate people about the movement he was a part of and what the legacy of that movement is. Now, they do have a shrine to MLK. There is the exterior memorial where he was shot that anyone can see as they pass by, and inside they have a viewing area where you can look at the rooms as they would have looked when MLK died.

The museum itself is packed full of information, but going into the shrine with all of that context makes seeing where MLK was all the more powerful. It is chilling and stirring every time I go. A bedroom is a place of intimacy and security, and when he stepped out of those doors and back out into the world, he was shot. What I think truly completes the experience is that the museum purchased and interpreted the boarding house where James Earl Ray stayed and the assassin took his shot. As a kind of parallel, they preserved the room where Ray stayed and the bathroom that they know was where the assassin shot MLK from. You can stand right next to that and look out onto the balcony where the exterior shrine to MLK is. Purely chilling.

Fellow classmate Angela Smith visiting with infamous protester Jacqueline Smith (no relation to one another)

But what I see as the most telling part of the NCRM's integrity is that they don't run away from controversy. In that boarding house they address all of the conspiracy theories about MLK's death and whether or not Ray was the real assassin. They also see the protestor who is at the entrance to the museum as part of the story of the site. They welcome controversy and dissent and see themselves as a place for dialogue. And that is part of their larger mission as a member of the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Their programming seems to be very much in line with fellow coalition member Monte Sole in Italy.

We asked the NCRM staff tough questions and they welcomed them. They also spoke of how they want to use their legacy to expand their international programming and be activists in the world community to support social justice. And they have a plan to do that.

While I had been skeptical about museums as transformative institutions, I think that the NCRM does exactly that. They make a place for commemoration and sharing of memories, but then they take a step beyond that to spur themselves and others into action. This, of course, just encourages me further down the path of the dreaded label "activist historian."

I'll tackle Graceland tomorrow, which is a site that does commemoration well, but doesn't seem to have even considered the full potential of what their site could offer.

Having Fun with History

I have taken quite the hiatus from blogging, but that is because I was running the academic gauntlet and getting some of the final hurdles of my academic career out of the way. I finished up the Professional Residency Colloquium where we presented the work products from our residency (mine with the Tennessee Department of Tourist Development), how this fed into our dissertations, and how all of our work up to this point has shaped us as professionals. In true gauntlet form, I survived, but came out feeling a bit bruised after class.

The more positive note was defending my professional portfolio and my dissertation proposal to my doctoral committee. Where the class was supposed to be a practice/dry run of this event, the actual defense was much more enjoyable than the classroom experience. We basically had a conversation. I talked through some of my work products, discussed how my actual work with heritage tourism on a state level was reshaping how I thought of history and community development, and also my thoughts on adaptive reuse.

The discussion was incredibly helpful. I felt like I was genuinely treated like a colleague and they were all providing insightful feedback about my work, where it could head, and some challenges that I needed to consider. In part it helps that I've selected quality people for my committee. But I also can't help but think that i set the tone with how I approached my committee for the defense.

Rather than this being a stiffly formal affair, complete with Powerpoint (don't get me wrong, Powerpoint has its place and can be very helpful if people use it appropriately). But given a choice, I would much rather have a conversation than participate in a rigid structure. I did not want to lecture to my committee or then do the more traditional question and answer format where I literally defend my positions in a debate style (we did this for my orals, and I see the place of it there and I can do that type of thing if the situation calls for it).

I came armed with food (all of my defenses or qualifying exams, even for my MA, have involved me bringing food of some sort for the committee) and wearing a new tshirt that I hoped would set the tone:


The shirt is from BustedTees and it commemorates an early computer game that I loved to play in elementary school called The Oregon Trail. We had one computer for several classrooms and it was a big deal to be able to get computer time. We would play the computer, usually this game, in teams of two or three. I think that games like this helped me engage me in a creative way as a child and instilled an interest in history. It was also a lot of fun (you got to shoot bears and try to navigate a river) and we thought that it was hilarious to leave behind silly inscriptions on tombstones for "fallen" classmates. The most common way to die in the game was from dysentery and this still sticks out in my mind and of anyone who sees my tshirt and remembers that game.

I told my committee that I was wearing this shirt in honor of the long legacy of American road trips and the perils therein. We all got a good laugh out of it. And while I wanted to set a tone of friendliness and levity, I was also trying to evoke a very personal connection to history through my nostalgia for this game. I have a number of shirts from Vintage Roadside (supporters of the National Trust for Historic Preservation) and while some of them fit in with my love of history and my sense of humor (I wear my Slick Chick Drive-In shirt at least once a week), none of them spoke to my personal experience of history (they commemorate a roadside heritage that I love but was not around to directly experience myself).

But the Oregon Trail shirt also played into one of my larger points about how I see history: history can be fun. There are topics that call for contemplation and respect, I'll grant you that. But history doesn't have to be boring or overly serious. I think that it is possible for history to be fun without being the dreaded "edutainment" that scholars look down their nose at. I'm holding to the idea that I can be passionate about history while also bringing my quirky sense of humor to many of the subjects that I deal with. And I think that certainly has a place in the world of heritage tourism. History can have integrity while also being exciting and fun.