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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Time to Remember: Violence in Museums and Memory in Colombia, 2000-2014

March 23, 2016

By Jimena Perry

Jimena PerryDuring the summer of 2014 I had the chance to visit the Hall of Never Again (El Salón del Nunca Más) in the Department of Antioquia, in northwest Colombia. What started just as a tourist visit soon became a research interest. Growing up in a country overwhelmed by an ongoing armed conflict, the Hall made quite a huge impression on me due to the visual narrative it contained. Photographs of the faces of approximately180 victims of the violence are displayed on a wall to highlight a history in which the victim’s voices are privileged. It was quite different from the discourses shaped by state institutions such as the National Museum of Colombia that feature official histories about national identity and citizenship. These contrasting accounts of recent brutalities in Colombia made me want to explore the ways that individuals and communities remember their violent pasts. Grieving, as part of a remembrance process, has no handbook and no formulas; it is not a unilinear process. It is complex and ongoing. Grief and memories of violence are informed by history and culture and require to be understood as a social dynamic practice.

The Colombian violence of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, the subject of my work, left many victims. It also left many survivors of atrocities who needed some kind of closure in order to continue with their lives. During these decades, civilians found themselves caught among four armed actors: the National Army, paramilitaries, guerrillas, and drug lords, who were fighting over the control of land and civilians. These groups committed brutalities such as kidnappings, disappearances, forced displacement, bombings, massacres, and targeted murders. In order to cope with and overcome the trauma caused by all this violence, diverse communities set up museums and displays. These acts of memory and reconciliation demonstrate that people and communities remember and represent the past differently. Some exhibitions portray violence, others focus on personal histories and others turn to the strength their cultural traditions give them. They contain different meanings and intentions, and take a variety of forms including traveling museums, murals, houses, kiosks, and even cemeteries devoted to remembering the ones who are gone. But they all work towards the same goal: never again.

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore.

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore. Courtesy of the author. 

My interest in studying historical representations of violence was sparked when I realized that in Colombia, memories about the atrocities of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s are quite diverse and do not appear in state institutions. I also came to understand that although grieving has a place for the reconstruction of facts and a search for “truth,” these are not the most important aspects for individuals and communities. After talking with community leaders and reading the scholarship on memory and museums, I can say that instead of truth quests people want to feel that their absent loved ones are not forgotten, that their lives meant something.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia. Courtesy of the author.

Part of the attention that communities are devoting to the production of historical memories of violence is closely related to the diverse healing processes grounded in local cultures. The rural memory venues I am researching emphasize local traditions, beliefs, and patterns of behavior. Their displays illustrate how violence altered their way of life and how individuals and groups are coping with new realities, silences, and absences. Culture becomes a cohesive factor, the resource communities appeal to in order to heal and envision a future.

Therefore, my research has two major parts. First, it relies on ethnographic descriptions of the memory sites and the violent episodes they are representing. Second, these memories of violence help me analyze how contemporary citizenship is understood in Colombia, as rooted in these communities’ struggles with the violence past

And my research has a third component—public history. Writing and researching about memory venues in Colombia is my way of helping in the healing of local communities. My wish is that my work will help people feel that their histories are not forgotten and that they are an inspiration for generations to come.

I also want my writing about memory venues in Colombia to contribute to a new, more diverse, sense of national identity. I want the narratives portrayed in these venues to be incorporated into a national discourse. One of my hopes is that by reading about the testimonies and descriptions about recent Colombian violence in local memory projects, the general public can go beyond the gory details about violence and remember the victims as living family and community members, and as part of the Colombian community. My aspiration is that the diverse Colombian voices become part of the project of nation-state building. Everybody talks about the importance of respecting and understanding other ways of seeing the world, but when it comes down to concrete political actions, alterity is often ignored.

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You may also like these articles by Jimena Perry on two museums that represent the Colombian violence since the 1960s: the Hall of Never Again, a community-led memory museum in Colombia, and The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

Lessons from London: what happens when universities place PhD students in museums?

November 16, 2015

By Kevin Guyan

Stress: Approaches to the First World War is currently running at University College London and explores the effects of the First World War on the mind, the body and the environment. The exhibition is part of the Student Engager project, which began at UCL in February 2012 to explore the question, ‘What happens when PhD students from different disciplines explore links between their research and museum collections then share their discoveries with non-university audiences?’

Opening Night of Stress Exhibition

Opening Night of Stress: Approaches to the First World War Exhibition

I am one of nine PhD students who works for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department on ‘as and when’ contracts and wish to share what we can learn when PhD researchers are placed in museums and left to engage with the public. I am in the final year of my PhD in History at UCL and got involved in the project as I was aware that historians often find themselves presenting research only to those working in the same field. Through the Student Engager project, I have experienced first-hand how PhD students can use museums as locations to fine-tune their thesis through two-way discussions with visitors, as well as other curators, and avoid the dangers of intellectually narrow research.

Members of the Student Engagement Team.

Members of the Student Engagement Team.

The meat and bones of the Student Engager project is the presence of PhD researchers in UCL’s museums (the Petrie Museum of Egyptology, the Grant Museum of Zoology, and the Art Museum), working three hour shifts every one or two weeks. Similarly, during the run of Stress, an engager is always present in the exhibition space ready for conversation – making all visits a unique experience that presents a personal interpretation of the materials on display from whoever is working that afternoon.

Approaches to engaging vary but researchers generally follow the pattern of approaching interested visitors, introducing themselves, explaining the project and asking about their museum experience. This either provokes a confused look, a polite acknowledgement of the project or sparks the start of a conversation, which can last anything from five minutes to three hours. The project discourages engagers from reciting prepared monologues and instead encourages people to draw connections between their theses and the collections, and enjoy the thrill of seeing where visitor conversations lead. After every engagement, researchers input details into an online platform that enables us to gather quantitative and qualitative information on the types of people encountered in the museums and the conversations taking place.

Members of the Student Engagement Team discuss the exhibition with visitors.

Members of the Student Engagement Team discuss the exhibition with visitors.

Project responses are overwhelmingly positive. Between October 2012 and January 2015, engagers had 1,516 conversations and described 93 per cent of interactions favourably. Online responses also noted that UCL Museums and Collections was the most common talking point (38 per cent of engagements), followed by the researcher’s own work (33 per cent of engagements).

The Student Engager project has helped encourage curators to reimagine museum sites as interactive locations for conversation. It has also given me a space to test innovative and experimental ways to share my research. For example, I brought images from my research into the museums then observed the responses they provoked from visitors. I shared photographs of ideal English homes in the 1940s and 1950s, this presented an entry-point for visitors to start conversations as they drew links between the images and their own lives. Visual cues helped visitors think about their own homes, both past and present, in a new way, while also educating me on their experiences and opinions towards my research.

The project is not without its problems. It risks looking for intellectual connections between themes and across disciplines where none may in fact exist. Projects like this also come at a cost, requiring the funding for a full roster of museum staff alongside researchers who are paid for their time. Universities cannot expect PhD students to undertake public engagement work without recompense.

Above all, placing PhD students in university museums does not require a ‘dumbing-down’ of the intellectual rigour of research.  It instead opens up new skills, crucial for historians entering competitive job markets. The benefits also reach far further than dissemination alone – they allow researchers to enter into dialogues with people from different backgrounds and identify new and unexpected connections.  The process of sharing ideas with people unfamiliar with our own field forces us to change the way we present information, which ultimately results in a deeper understanding for everyone involved.

For further information on the UCL Student Engager Project and Stress: Approaches to the First World War visit http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums

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Kevin Guyan is in the final year of a PhD in History at University College London and is a Visiting Research Associate with the University of Texas at Austin during Fall 2015.  His research explores how planning experts, including architects and sociologists, used the design of domestic space to produce new performances of masculinity in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s.  He is from the North East of Scotland and works as the Student Engagement Coordinator for UCL’s Public and Cultural Engagement Department, a project that provides a platform for PhD students to share their research with non-academic audiences.

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All images courtesy of the author.

History Museums: The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

October 21, 2015

By Jimena Perry

September 23, 2015, marked a historic day in Colombian history. President Juan Manuel Santos and Timoléon Jiménez, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia-People´s Army (FARC-EP), agreed to sign a peace treaty. Concluding negotiations that started in 2012, the two leaders will sign the treaty on March 23, 2016, ending sixty years of armed conflict. Questions will now be raised about the need to offer reparations to the victims of the violence and how the country can move forward after a civil war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

President Raúl Castro of Cuba, center, with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, left, and Rodrigo Londoño, of FARC. Courtesy of Desmond Boylan/Associated Press

President Raúl Castro of Cuba, center, with President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, left, and Rodrigo Londoño, of FARC. Courtesy of Desmond Boylan/Associated Press

This healing process has already started in some parts of Colombia in the form of several grassroots movements and state-led initiatives. Since the early 2000s, different communities across the nation located in both urban and rural environments began to create spaces where they could grieve and mourn the loss of their loved ones. These memory sites allow different communities a space to represent their specific experiences of the violence and make sense of their collective trauma. They also offer the country as a whole a series of strategies to help heal, now that peace is on the horizon.

One example is The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation (Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación), founded in 2012. It was created as the result of discussions of Human Rights NGOs and peace organizations that started in 2008. The Center is an inclusive and participatory space, where survivors of violence can participate in constructing their public historical memories. The main structure of the Center is the Memorial for Life, which is a wall built for remembering casualties of the armed conflict. The architects promoted a participatory process where the survivors of atrocities could bring, as a symbolic gesture, a handful of soil dedicated to the victims. The soil symbolized the source of the armed conflict in struggles over landowning but also represented something that belongs to everybody. They wanted people to feel part of the initiative for peace that the Center promotes. Therefore, the wall represents the dead, memory, and the future.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia.

The Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Colombia.

The Center´s intention is to promote commemoration that is meaningful to the local population, rather than to perpetuate an official state narrative. For example, the coordinators of the Center have organized exhibits related to the extermination of the political party, The Patriotic Union (Unión Patriótica). The UP was the target of political violence from drug lords, paramilitaries, and agents of the security forces during the mid-1980s, leading to its disappearance. The Center also organized an important exhibit called “Exhibition of the Mothers of Soacha,” in which a group of mothers claimed justice for the assassination of their sons. In 2008, some members of the National Army killed civilians, claiming they were guerrilla fighters. During the last months of that year, approximately 19 corpses of young men appeared in Norte de Santander, a region bordering Venezuela in the north, but officials from Soacha, a city on the southern edge of Bogotá, were able to establish they had been recruited as workers and then appeared dead far away from their home. Since then, the so-called Mothers of Soacha have been threatened, harassed, and kept under surveillance due to their efforts to commemorate their sons.

Now, as Colombia seeks to achieve a lasting peace, these efforts of commemoration and memory in local communities, NGOs, cultural organizations, and the state need to come together to begin a project of national reflection that includes every individual effected by the violence.

Plaque describing the memorial. Courtesy of the author.

Plaque describing the memorial, which reads “This Memorial for Life is inhabited by handfuls of soil that citizens brought during three years. They are kept in 2012 glass tubes embedded in the walls of the building. They symbolize more than 40,000 records of victims of murders and disappearances and thousands of stories of violence. We recover voices, we make visible what has been hidden or silenced because memory resists death. We create the past so dreams can return.” Courtesy of the author.

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You may also like:

Jimena Perry discusses the Hall of Never Again, a community-led memory museum in Colombia.

And other posts in our series featuring history museums

 

History Museums: The Bullock Texas State History Museum

May 7, 2015

By Brian Long

The Bullock Texas State History Museum. Courtesy of the museum website.
The Bullock Texas State History Museum. Courtesy of the museum website.

As a native Texan with a degree in history from UT I’m probably a little biased in this area, but my favorite history museum is The Bullock Texas State History Museum. Not only is the building itself beautiful, but I like the way the history displays are laid out on the inside. Starting with the first floor, you start with the earliest inhabitants of the state of Texas, and work your way to the present day on the second and third floors. The original Goddess of Liberty statue from the top of the Capitol dome is also on permanent display there, although a part of me wishes it was still on the UT campus at the Texas Memorial Museum. The rotating exhibits on the first floor are also always very interesting. Several years back I remember going to see a temporary display there of historic Texas flags there which kept me mesmerized for the better part of three hours in that one room.


The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

History Museums: Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico

April 30, 2015

By Robert Wilks

Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico. Via Wikipedia.

Museo Nacionál de Antropología, Mexico. Via Wikipedia.

My favorite history museum, and one of my favorite museums of any type, is the Museo Nacionál de Antropología in Mexico City. It is housed in an enormous structure filled with the pre-Columbian culture of Mexico. It covers every civilization, period and style in its artifacts. They are beautifully displayed, perfectly lit and present a dazzling array of forms and colors. There is so much to see, multiple visits are required. I was totally amazed at the richness and variety of cultures. I highly recommend it.

Monolith of the Stone of the Sun, also named Aztec calendar stone.

Monolith of the Stone of the Sun, also named Aztec calendar stone.

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History Museums: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum

April 16, 2015

By David Conrad

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at Naka-ku Hiroshima Japan, design by Kenzo Tange in 1955. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, at Naka-ku Hiroshima Japan, design by Kenzo Tange in 1955. Via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s strange that of the two most famous war-related museums in Japan, the one in Hiroshima, within sight of the untouched-since-1945 “Atomic Bomb Dome” that provides a stark reminder of the city’s destruction, is the more palatable. The other is the Yūshūkan, attached to Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, controversial because it puts the onus on the war on every party except Japan and neglects to mention the military’s atrocities in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. The Yūshūkan is well worth visiting in spite of its sins of omission, because it houses one of the only Zero fighter planes on public display. But the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum is a must-visit despite its distance from Tokyo. Its displays are up-front about Japan’s share of responsibility for the war and about the factors that made Hiroshima a target (it was for decades home to a major army base), while condemning with visual horrors the disproportionate, indiscriminate atomic destruction of the city. The museum offers a walk through of Hiroshima’s history with a tight focus on the moments and days after 8:16 AM on August 6, 1945. The walls of the ground floor are paneled with copies of every letter that each Hiroshima mayor has sent to every world leader whose country has tested a nuclear weapon. Most of the recent ones are addressed to President Barack Obama; although the U.S. has not tested a nuclear weapon in the old-fashioned way since 1992, it carries out “subcritical” tests to this day. Another wall display shows the number of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors who are still living, and where in the world they are. At the time of my last visit to the museum in December 2013 there were still survivors in every prefecture of Japan, but within a few decades they will be gone and this museum will be even more crucial in preserving their memory.

Letters of protest written by the Mayor of Hiroshima.

Letters of protest written by the Mayor of Hiroshima.

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History Museums: The Hall of Never Again

April 9, 2015

By Jimena Perry

Entrance to the Hall of Nevermore.

Entrance to the Hall of Nevermore.

The Hall of Never Again (El Salón del Nunca Más) is located in Granada, in the highlands of Antioquia, Colombia. Granada is small place which lost 70% of its population between 1998 and 2000, going from 18,000 inhabitants to 5500 due to violence. The region saw near constant fighting among guerilla, paramilitary groups and the National Army between 1988 and the early 2000s.

When these violent episodes ended and the survivors felt it was safe to go back to their town and surrounding lands, they decided to get together to repair the urban area and remember those who died. With this in mind, they created the United Victims Association of the Municipality of Granada (Asociación de víctimas unidas del municipio de Granada), or Asovida, in 2005. The mayoralty gave them a space adjacent to the cultural center and Asovida used it to found The Hall of Never Again in 2009.

The Hall functions as a museum because it has displays and record books, and the coordinators attend workshops related to museum work, but they do not want to be considered a museum. Instead The Hall of Never Again, for them, is a memory place, a space for reflection and life.

The main goal of the Hall of Never Again is to make the public aware of the violence this community experienced. The main display consists of a wall covered with 180 photographs of some of the 2000 or more people of Granada who died since the 1980s. In this Hall, the survivors remember crimes such as 128 disappearances, 83 victims of landmines, and the displacement of nearly three-quarters of the population.

The intention of the picture display is to strike the visitor, to make him or her feel that these were persons just like them; people whose life affected a community and who therefore deserve remembrance. On another wall, there are children´s paintings, products of the workshops the project encouraged. To the left of the picture display there are images of 15 mass graves found in Granada. In another room, the visitor finds a large photograph of a march that took place in December 9, 2000, three days after one of the guerilla groups, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC), disputing the territory with the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional or ELN), destroyed the town. And still today, when someone is murdered, his or her picture becomes part of the wall.

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore.

View of the wall with the pictures at the Hall of Nevermore.

One way the creators of this Hall have found to help the survivors cope with the brutal attacks they experienced is the use of bitácoras. These are notebooks where relatives and friends of the victims can express their sadness over their losses. The bitácoras are designed to make the grieving process easier. There are now approximately fifty bitácoras, in which one can find mothers talking to their children, husbands to their wives, brothers to sisters, children to their parents, wives to their spouses, and other family members remembering their departed loved ones.

These notebooks become both objects to be exhibited and historical sources for studying the violence endured by a particular person or family and how they survived. The bitácoras relate the history and character of the dead person, and why he or she was important. They also help the public and visitors of the Hall to learn about local history and to link the surivors to community reconstruction processes.

View of some bitácoras.

View of some bitácoras.

The Hall of Never Again is the response of a community commemorating its own history in the absence of State presence. Its funding does not come from the Colombian government and due to its scarce resources it only opens during the weekends. However, the Hall has received international agencies´ economic help and has won national peace prizes. The emergence of this Hall and the fact that their funding is not from the Colombian State demonstrates the unwillingness of the government to take care of all the victims of the armed conflict. It also shows a kind of indifference towards small towns and municipalities that do not represent a big contribution to the national economy. But as Gloria Quintero, one of the local leaders who made the Hall possible, said, the Hall represents “…the value of remembering. Our loved ones die when we forget them. We want children to learn that forgetting is not the way to mourn.”

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All photographs taken in August 2014 by Jimena Perry.

 

This essay is based on interviews by the author and draws on the following printed sources:

“Sepultadas 21 personas de la masacre en Granada, Antioquia.” (Medellín: Caracol, 2000). Accesed April 9, 2014, http://www.caracol.com.co/noticias/judiciales/sepultadas-21-personas-de-la-masacre-en-granada-antioquia/20001105/nota/75878.aspx.

Alonso López, N. (2010) “Granada, Antioquia, el pueblo que dijo ´Nunca más´ a la violencia. El Tiempo. Bogotá

History Museums: Race, Eugenics, and Immigration in New York History Museums

April 2, 2015

By Madeline Y. Hsu

New York Historical Society (Wikipedia)

New York Historical Society (Wikipedia)

Ideas about race and eugenics have had a long influence on U.S. immigration and citizenship laws. A pair of historical exhibits ongoing in New York City vividly convey this troubling history.  The regulations governing U.S. borders reveal the beliefs of legislators, but also many Americans, regarding what kinds of people are “fit to be citizens.”  These two exhibits, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” at the New York Historical Society and “Haunted Files: The Eugenics Records Office” at New York University, demonstrate how deeply entrenched such beliefs have been and the many forms of inequality that they produce and signify.

A political cartoon from 1882, showing a Chinese man being barred entry to the "Golden Gate of Liberty". The caption reads, "We must draw the line somewhere, you know."

A political cartoon from 1882, showing a Chinese man being barred entry to the “Golden Gate of Liberty”. The caption reads, “We must draw the line somewhere, you know.” (Wikipedia)

For example, in 1882 the United States set a precedent in making Chinese the first and only group identified by race for severely restricted entry rights into the United States and bars against their naturalization.  The so-called Chinese Exclusion Law lay the foundations for future U.S. immigration laws that targeted an expanding array of undesirable people by race, national origin, illiteracy, imbecility, and likelihood to become a public charge.  By 1924, a majority of the world’s people, originating everywhere from Palestine to Southeast Asia, could not legally enter the United States and eastern and southern Europeans faced much higher bars against entry than their counterparts from western and northern Europe.

'Chinese Must Go' pistol from the 19th century. (Wikipedia)

‘Chinese Must Go’ pistol from the 19th century. (Wikipedia)

The “science” of eugenics made such immigration controls seem to be a necessity for national preservation. As one slogan claimed: “Every 15 seconds $100 of your money goes for the care of persons with bad heredity,” thereby mandating the use of laws to protect U.S. population, civilization, and resources.  Bolstered by protracted schemes to measure quantitatively, systematically categorize, and document racial and other inherited attributes, eugenics bore the force of natural selective processes, thereby tempting its practitioners to intervene in its principles in order to improve the caliber of American human beings.  Such quests for a higher order of civilization and society irreparably marginalized and damaged humans identified as inferior by their ancestral traits.

In conjunction, “Chinese American: Exclusion/Inclusion” and “The Haunted Files” provoke insights regarding the very close relationships between U.S. immigration laws, our restrictions upon citizenship, and naturalized assumptions about what kinds of persons deserve to join America’s democracy.

Hsu Book Cover
Madeline Hsu’s book The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority is now available for pre-order from Princeton University Press.

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More from our series of history museums:

NEP editor Joan Neuberger visits the Museum of Liverpool

 

You may also like:

Madeline Hsu’s article on Chinese Texans

UT Professor of History Philippa Levine on the global history of eugenics

 

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History Museums: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

March 23, 2015

by Joan Neuberger

What makes a history museum “work”? This is one of those things we don’t usually think about. As it happens, I love history museums. I especially like small, quirky museums in out of the way places with unique collections, in part because they are often conserved and curated by a devoted staff.

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Michigan Firehouse Museum, Ypsilanti, MI

But I also love a grand museum with an epic story to tell. In the past year I drove from Austin to Los Angeles and back, and from Austin to Michigan and back, and I’m spending this semester in England, all of which has given me a chance to visit an astonishing variety of history museums, and to start wondering what made some of them so wonderful and some of them so – meh.

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Taos Pueblo, continuously inhabited for 1000 years.

I hope to write about some more of these in the future. And I hope that you, our readers, will send us something about your favorite history museums. Send in a paragraph (or more!) or  just send us a photo and a caption and we’ll post it in our series on history museums. (You can use the Contact button at the bottom of our homepage.) We might even start to visit each others’ favorites!

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Liverpool in 1680. Earliest known image of Liverpool. (wikipedia)

A couple weeks ago I had a chance to compare three popular history museums in close proximity to one another in Liverpool. I should start by saying that I am reporting as merely a tourist who happens to be a historian. I haven’t done any special research, I don’t know the goals of the curators of any of these museums, I haven’t read much about how history museums are changing to make use of new technologies or to attract bigger crowds. And it was only by visiting a lot of museums lately that I began to think about what makes some more fun and satisfying than others.

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Liverpool, like many seaport cities that had fallen on hard times, has turned to its historical sites – its Mersey River waterfront and docks – to revitalize its economy by attracting tourists. The dock area of Liverpool now sports three major history museums: the Museum of Liverpool, The Beatles’ Story, and the Merseyside Maritime Museum. It also has a branch of London’s Tate art museum, the Tate Liverpool, as well as hotels, coffee shops, and souvenir stores. And for readers of a certain age, there is a ferry launch just outside the Museum of Liverpool where you can catch a ferry ‘cross the Mersey.

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The Three Graces

The ferry docks just in front of the Three Graces, the three buildings that comprised the business center of the city during its 18th and 19th centuries heyday: the Liver Building, the Port of Liverpool Building and the Cunard Building. Altogether the area has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City.

The_Museum_of_Liverpool,_Pier_Head,_Liverpool_(geograph_2978672)

Museum of Liverpool (wikipedia)

I began my visit at the Museum of Liverpool. It was a busy Saturday afternoon and the place was packed with families. I like to see people in museums so I didn’t mind the crowds, but I immediately noticed that only a few of those people were really looking at the exhibits. It was quickly apparent why. The exhibit cases were full of diverse things in kaleidoscopic display: historical photos, documents, and colorful, everyday objects used by sailors and merchants and families living in the city, rich and poor. In fact, the display cases were as packed as the space around them, with a dizzying amount of stuff, but there was only the slimmest explanation or historical text. So there was a lot to look at but little to help make sense of anything.

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Inside the Museum of Liverpool (wikipedia)

Some historians may be glad to hear that there was no “master narrative,” but I wanted some kind of historical thread linking one period to the next, or linking social life to political life or to the shipping history of the port or to the history of the families looking on. The historical texts didn’t whitewash the history of the city. Liverpool’s connection to imperialism and the slave trade as well as to enrichment and impoverishment at home were clearly indicated and objects representing these large movements were on display. But no one could construct a coherent narrative with any nuance from the abundance of objects and the scarcity of text. One could, perhaps, see this kind of organization as a general introduction to history for young children and their history-averse parents who might want more things to look at and less to read. For me, on the other hand, this is a kind of looking without thinking that leads only to frustration. But I can’t argue with the crowds. The other museums I visited were much better at presenting history in ways that were more visually and intellectually stimulating, but they weren’t packed.

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Video display at The Beatles’ Story, Liverpool.

I left the Museum of Liverpool and headed for The Beatles’ Story, a little worried that it would be equally superficial and haphazard. I was also wondering if my familiarity with the Beatles and their story and pretty much everything Beatles would make it boring. I grew up with the Beatles; they introduced me to pop music at just the same time I got a transistor radio, which I listened to for hours every day. I wasn’t one of the screaming girls but I was the right age and one of my best friends was there in Los Angeles screaming her head off (for Paul) when the Beatles played the Hollywood Bowl in 1964. And I’ve watched all the films and documentaries since. So what could I learn? Why even go? Probably for the same reason we listen to the same song over and over again, we like familiar stories as much as we like to learn new ones.

So stay tuned. Over the next couple weeks I’ll report on The Beatles’ Story and then I’ll tell you about one of the best history museums I have visited, The International Slavery Museum at the Merseyside Maritime Museum.

In the meantime, send us pictures or tell us about your local museums, your favorite museums, or history museums you think we would all like.

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Photos are all the author’s except where otherwise noted.

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Lecturing in Kherson: A One-Year Reflection on Maps, Occupations, and Russia’s War against Ukraine

March 15, 2023

By Steven Seegel

One year ago, on March 18th, 2022, I was lecturing via Zoom on the history of Ukraine and Ukrainian cartography in the city of Kherson. My public talk to a classroom of students, faculty, and administrators was entitled “Ukraine Mapped: Between History and Geopolitics.”

My talk was not normal. Kherson is a strategic port city in Ukraine today, about the size of Pittsburgh or Cincinnati or my post-Rust Belt hometown of Buffalo, New York. My lecture took place in a Zoom chamber, with a war outside. Checkpoints were blocked. The audience was besieged. I spoke to Ukrainians about map uses and abuses as Russians were killing Ukrainian Russophone soldiers and as Ukrainian civilians were getting shelled. From the outset, I struggled to find the right tone. Should I be muted or melodramatic? Deliberately shaky? Show propaganda? Be sober or exhortative? How should I teach or commemorate a map? Was it right to urge other perspectives and voices? How asymmetrical it was to be “westplaining” Ukraine during war, even though I’ve been active in Ukrainian Studies (doing research in 10 languages) for over twenty years. My space remains a relatively privileged vantage point in Texas.

I’m a historian of maps, archives, and geography. I tried to do what I could.

The title slide from Dr. Seegel’s March 18th presentation at Kherson State University. Image courtesy of the author.

On that day a year ago, my 45-minute lecture turned into a two-hour conversation. I started by talking “to” the occupied. I had no idea how to start, and I haven’t shared this until now. How I began: “In times of war, every map becomes a weapon. You need maps now, very desperately, to see where enemy troops are stationed, how they are actively attacking. Maps are useful. They gather people into a snapshot. You assemble now against threats no one else can comprehend, to exercise your rights as citizens. Americans are arrogant bastards, so I am not here to tell you how to make choices. That’s your business. You’ve studied your history. You live in a sovereign, independent Ukraine. You have used your intelligence to elect your officials in local government and the Rada [parliament], based on manipulated lines. These lines were drawn by mapmakers whom you’ve probably never met, or will meet. In times of peace, we forget about the power of maps because they seem so ordinary. Apps on our phones. Demographics. Migration. Money makes maps. Power puts books into libraries and artifacts into museums. Maps of Ukraine, now attacked on at least three and likely four fronts, are something to hang on the wall as nostalgic mementos, curiosities, or patriotic gestures. There’s no time for that anymore here on the 18th of March, as you experience life and death. Yet we use maps all the time: for walking around, getting from place to place. They can kill us. Maps will kill you. Geolocation can kill your population, your civilians, as we know from Mariupol. You are in Kherson, and I am not.”  

All to say: I didn’t want to lecture “at” the Khersonians. Indeed, Ukrainians–citizens of a country of 44 million people–do not need to be re-told their tragedies; or that they are permanent victims of decolonization; or that, as Europeans, they “have agency.” Since the annexation of Crimea by Putin’s forces in March 2014 and the start of the Russian-separatist backed war in Donbas, which has resulted in the loss of 14,000 lives on the Ukrainian side, Ukrainian civic identity and agency have been toughened. Ukrainians in the defense forces fight for a future EU-in-Ukraine and Ukraine in the EU. Americans are volunteering to fight alongside Ukrainians in legions of the Ukrainian armed forces. There are prayerful Muslims, devout Christians, and practicing Jews in Ukraine. Ukraine has multiple frames, multiple maps, and multiple histories. Poets know this well, as do decolonial literary scholars and historians. Yuri Andrukhovych, Serhii Zhadan, Oksana Zabuzhko, Andrei Kurkov, Oksana Lutsyshyna, and many more. Ukraine has a revolutionary past characterized by a struggle for civil rights, transparency and democracy not merely in 2013-14 or 2004, but also throughout a long, protracted fight for independence. This extended through two world wars.

Early modern Ukraine was located at the crossroads of empires. Modern Ukraine, facing Soviet promotion and demotion of Ukrainization, political and geopolitical issues of collaboration, and ultimate erasure, was a land and a people in between. This was true even during the period of Soviet Ukraine.

Two images from Dr. Seegel’s March 18th presentation: at left, a 1904 pictorial map by a Japanese satirist critical of Russia’s imperial ambitions; and at right, a Russian map from 2014 disseminated online as a piece of “neoimperial” propaganda. Images courtesy of the author.

The geography of Ukraine’s imperial and postimperial borderlands should be better known: Sweden; Poland-Lithuania; the Romanov dynasty; the Habsburg Empire (later Austria-Hungary); the early modern Cossack Hetmanate, a proto-state and perhaps a proto-Empire; the Ottoman empire; and of course, Crimea. Every map is a prejudice, a blind spot, a way to avoid facts. People look at maps to live in myth and avoid history, in the way that Putin does. Or rather, to turn everything into geopolitics and geoeconomics. G20 into G8, G8 into G7, G7 into G2 (or G3). Great power imperialism, colonialism, neo-Stalinism, neo-fascism. When I first studied Ukrainian history as part of the Harvard Summer School, I learned from Professors Yaroslav Hrystak and Timothy Snyder the historical regions of Ukraine: Transcarpathia, Halychyna/Galicia, Volhynia, Podolia, Left- and Right-Bank Ukraine, Kyiv, Chernihiv, Siberia, Sloboda Ukraina, Bukovina, Donbas, Crimea. Hrytsak brought maps designed by Paul Robert Magocsi, another prominent historian and cartographer now in Toronto.  

Putin is a dictator. He refuses all of this. Let it be told: he wants to exit his bunker in a mythic time, during the neocolonial Soviet Russocentric world of May 9th, 1945, otherwise known as Victory Day. Conquest and territorial revision, with new maps. He denies a genocidal policy, or any connection to European fascism in current Russian politics, or that there is any such thing as modern Ukrainian history or democracy in independent Ukraine.

Ukrainians have a new day, February 24th, 2022. That also seems imperfect to me. I have come to share long stories of Ukrainian maps over many wars, transnational Ukrainian-Polish and Ukrainian Jewish and German-Ukrainian histories, how conflicts and coexistence came to be–and were–developed and preserved. Maps, too. After the Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine, when I was still a Ph.D. student at Brown University, a substantial collection of 900 maps was donated by the family of a famous Ukrainian poet-journalist to Harvard University. I wrote a book about it, in which I curated a private collection of maps donated by the Ukrainian Bohdan Krawciw (1904-1975), who came from an important family in the North American diaspora. He became much loved by experts, for his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke from German into Ukrainian. Krawciw was influential, and is counted among the founders of HURI, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

A slide from Dr. Seegel’s March 18th presentation displaying a sketch and photographs of Ukrainian cartographer Bohdan Krawciw. Image courtesy of the author.

In the lecture, I displayed these maps of Ukraine, mine and Bohdan Krawciw’s, at a moment when the Kremlin was trying to destroy the country, its people and history. All part of a fair commemoration now in mid-2023, though I’m not sure how to do it in the face of Putin’s denial of genocide and the Kremlin’s ridiculously Goebbelsian propaganda. Pundits (some, anyway) continue to urge Ukrainians to sue for a “peace” that 90% of the population regards as a surrender to a brutal occupation and genocidal policy. The EU and NATO security environments are pro-Ukrainian; they have also been changed substantially in just a year. For many, the February 24th date is a convenient start to the war. Don’t all wars need a convenient starting and ending date? I’ll return to this.

Some non-specialists think of independent Ukraine even after 1991–the independent state existed for much longer–as a borderland or a “former Soviet” space that somehow lacked agency and was mapped by others. But Ukraine has a long history–running straight up to the present–of independent agency, and it is full of groups and individuals with agency and historical rights and claims that clearly have histories (in the plural). Ukraine is not blameless: it has its own history of Holocaust collaboration, pink “greater Ukraine” maps, and Eurocentric and (neo)colonial traditions in cartography. This independent country of 44 million people, with now roughly eight million displaced people, has a rich and unacknowledged history of geography. Ukraine has even richer histories of cities beyond Kyiv, provinces and zones of contact, and regional geographies.

The founder of modern Ukrainian cartography, the “map man” Stepan Rudnyts’kyi (1877-1937), was a geoscientist (we’d now say) and a speaker of Ukrainian, German and Polish.  Mapping out of Habsburg Galicia, he was born to a German world of European empires. Though he had hoped in build a school for the study of Ukrainian geography, and in fact moved from Vienna and Prague to Kharkiv in the 1920s, Rudnyts’kyi was arrested by the NKVD in 1933 and murdered during Stalin’s purges in 1937. He was a victim and an agent of history, a storied and layered cartographic architect of modern Ukrainian politics.

The experience of lecturing to the residents of occupied Kherson showed me that war commemoration doesn’t work. We tend to think of history in time and maps in space, with wars having a clear beginning and an end, the guns going quiet on the front, the roads demined, or the flowers blooming again from the trenches. In reality, wars are muddy and messy, and so are the maps that tell their stories. War anniversaries propped up by historians strike me as odd. As any student who has designed or examined one in an archive can tell you, maps require frames. Yet something is always distorted, or left out. Maps of Ukraine in 2023 show us fluctuating borders: worlds of hope and fear, desire and impermanence. Their details speak of loss, and of the human stories of unquantifiable pain. I post endless maps on my Twitter feed, but I am also aware of the ineffable and the intangible. Not all of this can be mapped: long memories of forcible displacement or removal might go unearthed for generations. Traumas of famine and genocide in Ukraine aren’t digestible, and often decades will pass before they get told, until we write them, map them, relive them.   

It is an existential matter. Khersonians knew they could be killed for maps, and as a result, some mobilized very quietly (or not at all). Despite my evident obsession with cartography, maps are not just for describing what’s already been. They are futuristic. Maps draft and anticipate hopes and dreams. They are tools to guide us, instrumentalize (often dangerously) and explicate, interpret new worlds spatially, and help us along. As I said to Khersonians, “Kherson today should be mapped into Ukrainian history as well as Russian history, Greek history, Jewish history . . . social history, LGBTQ+/gender history, feminist history, and many other histories. It makes little sense to me to think of fabricated fictions like ‘Novorossiya’ or ‘Russkii mir’ or other such pretexts for re-colonized empires and destroyed populations. The Kremlin wants you to leave, and at this point, three weeks into its war, it probably wants you destroyed. Mainly as a scholar, I think maps are failed claims and arguments, or rather questions that anticipate failed arguments. Clearly, Mr. Putin’s mental map is of a new world order, with Russia (and Moscow, and himself, because he allows no elections and considers no alternatives) at the center of everything, backed by military, siloviki, security services, and armed police. Maps are a means to his end, and those who do not agree with his world maps can be eliminated.”

Russian president Vladimir Putin announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions on September 30th, 2022. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

The future of Kherson and of Ukraine was in doubt now, and to some extent, remains in doubt. I now know that the people I’d “met on Zoom” were busy arming the resistance, even as they wondered about the checkpoints and fates of their families. There was no romance to any of it: it was dangerous there since the start of the escalated war. I compare this map imaginary to occupied Warsaw or Lwów/Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg (and many, many other Ukrainian or Soviet Ukrainian multicultural cities) during World War II.

The talk I gave to Khersonians on March 18th, 2022 took place several months before the successful Ukrainian counter-offensive of August 29th–November 9th, 2022. Ukrainian defense forces effectively liberated the city. But Russian forces continue to launch terror attacks on the city and the civilians within it. Students and young professionals who have been forcibly displaced express fears of going back there permanently to live, work, and story. Some do it anyway, like Kherson’s hunted, recently profiled, heroic mayor.

One year on, I think of my connection to the people of Kherson as a kind of emotional transnational map, a bond of global solidarity. The lecture went on, after which point the students went to sleep in the dormitory rooms, hoping to avoid missile attack. My audience had assembled at Kherson State University. Through the first month of the war, I had watched Russian missiles literally destroy university offices and classrooms where some of my colleagues had been teaching. I tried hard to get people to pay attention, in my Twitter feed and elsewhere. I am a public-facing historian, a historical geographer and an academic, but I know now that the people in my audience had special, rare courage. Their “public” was a civic space in war. Young and old, they studied maps. They had put up heroic resistance in defense of a Ukraine rich in traditions and history, right in the center of their city. Not virtue signaling, or merely performative in the ways of the West when they sang Ukrainian songs or waved Ukrainian flags.

In my talk on the Krawciw Ucrainica Map Collection and Ukraine’s history, I showed how Sweden, the Ottoman Empire, then Dutch, German and Italian cartographers drew from Renaissance and early modern mappings of the country. One of the centerpieces was the famous mid-17th century maps of “Ukraine” (so noted) by Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan (c. 1600-1673), who served the king of Poland-Lithuania as a military topographer, hydrographer, and cartographer. In Kherson beyond Russia, I literally had no idea where to start or what to do or say, what tone to choose. But we managed, and we did it together because we knew that Ukraine had a history. It has a history. Ukrainians have fought back, for a future Ukraine. They remember the Euromaidan protests in November 2013, and the forcible annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin during March 2014. I signaled for Putin’s Russia to return to history, not myth. Ukraine was not Russia, I intoned, and Russia is not the center of all maps.

One of Guillaume le Vasseur de Beauplan’s 17th-century maps of “Ukraina”–note the name used in the map’s title in the lower righthand corner. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

We must pay attention to such maps and how Ukraine is mapped. What maps did to the Khersonians in March 2022 is something the world is only starting to process as war crimes investigators move in. The Crimean annexation of 2014, the siege of Sarajevo and genocide in Bosnia, the Budapest memorandum of 1994, the partition of India in 1947, the occupation zones of Berlin, the fate of Poland at Yalta, the annexation of the Sudetenland and then Austria in 1938, the world of national self-determination that failed under US President Woodrow Wilson, the end of Europe’s great power empires in 1917 and 1918, the Berlin Conference carving up the map of Africa, the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795. Ukraine mapped geopolitically is its curse, like partitioned Poland in the 19th century, or Soviet Belarus after 1921. I concluded, “Maps of Ukraine are sites of famine, genocide, ideological claims to power, and modern (and now postmodern) mass death. But maps of Ukraine also suggest peace. We pay attention to your maps, because they connect us. Maps have life. Those lives of Ukrainians I know and love bring me here with you. And those lives give me hope, as you do, to resist.” The work done by war crimes investigators will need to be combined with the history of maps and Ukraine’s tragedies to further contextualize the larger stories of population displacement, ethnic cleaning, and genocide.  

Maps can help us resist, by speaking truth to power. But this is difficult in a place like Ukraine with all its historical regions, because maps are power. I can explain these imperfect tools and artifacts on my channels of history, and I would like to think of map history as a noble cause. It is not. My writing or lecturing about Ukraine’s history can’t stop the mass death. This was apparent to me in Kherson on March 18th, 2022. And while I wish I knew how to commemorate a war, I’m still figuring out how to speak to a Ukrainian audience, and how to give them the maps to resist an occupation. I don’t, but I will.

I will never forget that lecture in Kherson.

Steven Seegel is Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Map Men: Transnational Lives and Deaths of Geographers in the Making of East Central Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2018), Ukraine under Western Eyes (Harvard University Press, 2013), and Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has been a contributor to the fourth and fifth volumes of Chicago’s international history of cartography series, and has translated over 300 entries from Russian and Polish for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum‘s Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, in multiple volumes, published jointly by USHMM and Indiana University Press. Professor Seegel is a former director at Harvard University of the Ukrainian Research Institute‘s summer exchange program. He is active on Twitter @steven_seegel and currently as the host of author-feature podcast interviews on the popular New Books Network. He is the founder of The February 24th Archive, an ongoing community-driven digital project (with 1000s of threads, 8 GB of tweets, 15 million people in terms of audience reach) that focuses on building global solidarities during Russia’s war against Ukraine.    

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