Exhibition Review

This modest exhibit tracks the National Park Service (NPS) from its western origins at Yellowstone National Park through its movement eastward, with the general history of the NPS serving as the backdrop to the exhibit's main focus, the NPS's interests and duties in the East. Although tourism often drove the NPS's park designs and concerns about public accessibility, the NPS increasingly assumed new and varied responsibilities, including historical site preservation and interpretation, environmental protection, and resource management. The exhibit draws largely on the NPS records at the National Archives and Records Administration–Mid-Atlantic Region (NARA-MAR) to suggest both the range of NPS activity and the wealth and variety of records available on sites east of the Mississippi River. The exhibit embraces vast social and cultural contexts, while pointing to such NPS responsibilities as memorializing events and heroes, participating in the conservation movement, incorporating civil rights and women's rights perspectives into the selection and interpretation of sites and objects, and considering the roles of transportation and recreation in shaping NPS concerns. The result is an exhibit at once provocative and frustrating. In a very limited space, the exhibit tries to tell too much, placing the emphasis on "firsts" rather than on any detailed analysis of how NPS policy and practice informed the public's understanding of nature or history.

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One of the exhibit's strengths is showing the materials the National Archives collects. In addition to the expected paper trail of correspondence on shifts in NPS administrative priorities and obligations, the exhibit displays a surprising variety of objects—from badges and bomb fragments, to coins and dolls, to photographs, postcards, pottery, and pillows, to uniforms, with several sacred relics to boot. Such is the stuff of national mythmaking now stuffed inside the NARA-MAR facility in Philadelphia. The exhibit thus reminds us that the National Archives has as much claim to being the nation's attic as does the Smithsonian Institution, with the attendant responsibility of inviting Americans to discover their pasts through material culture as well as paper documents.

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