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Reviews
The New Town Square: Museums and Communities in Transition
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By Robert R. Archibald
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AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, Calif., 2004. Photographs, notes, index. 232 pages. $24.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Chet Orloff
Portland, Oregon
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| Robert Archibald's The New Town Square: Museums and Communities in Transition is an autobiographical tour of the author's life in his hometown of Ishpemig, Michigan, his adopted city of St. Louis, and his profession as a historical agency director. The book is a collection of essays about place, history, and community based on lectures and radio addresses given over the past five years to audiences from planners and arts advocates to religious groups and transit specialists. |
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This is a good book, well written by a man passionate about history and its ever more critical role in society. Before discussing its many strengths and why one should read it, however, I should acknowledge its minor weaknesses. As a collection of essays about the author's life — developed over time and for disparate audiences —The New Town Square's subtitle is misleading. It is less about "museums and communities in transition" and more about Robert Archibald, instructive and exemplary though his life has been. While we should admire this man and his countless contributions to our profession, I suspect that many of our colleagues would prefer to read more of Archibald's ample thoughts about place, history, and the museum's twenty first-century role than about life in Ishpemig. Finally, because he has used certain stories and lines in a number his talks, the essays suffer from repetition, a problem that could have been avoided by more forceful editing (a necessity for most autobiographical discourses). |
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This book holds lessons for anyone who works in public history or museums. Once, museums were about collecting and exhibiting artifacts. These are merely the objectives, Archibald reminds us. The real goal is to tell stories, to explain communities, and to "facilitate the conversation" (as Archibald often says) about who we are as members of a community. Archibald and his staff at the Missouri Historical Society have demonstrated, as well as any museum in America, how to creatively and effectively apply the lessons of place and story in exhibits and public programs. For anyone governing or simply participating in a community, the way stories are told and the way places — buildings or ground — are preserved make a difference in the quality of community life. There is a deep environmental ethic in Archibald's life work: "My perspectives as a public historian [one who practices history in the public, rather than the academic, realm] combined with my community activity have helped me acknowledge that places that truly assist in the pursuit of happiness are inherently less demanding of the earth's resources" (pp. 152–3). |
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This is a good book, most of all, because it relates one man's varied involvements in his community and profession as object lessons for peers and career aspirants. For Archibald, museums and historical agencies are not places in which historians and curators are to sequester themselves — as was once accepted and expected — like monks in a monastery. Rather, they must be at the center of their communities, as members of a profession who both hold and tell the stories that articulate and sustain their fellow citizens' identity. It is an awesome responsibility, for which Archibald has been a most outspoken, ardent, and eloquent advocate. |
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In relating the author's experience as a community leader — museum director, school board member, transit advocate, parks advisor, neighborhood goad —The New Town Square gives public historians clear marching orders: ask questions that push their community to think about itself; build relationships across the community; and provide "incubators of community" where community members can discover just how they share and how connected to each other they really are (p. 211). The concluding chapter, "Under Construction," ought to be required reading for every historical society and museum staff and board member in the country. |
5
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