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Visualizing Memory Dirk Schumann has issued a timely call to action on history that really communicates with the public. Attendance at museums and historical sites, plus the large and loyal viewership of The History Channel suggest that there is a public very interested in history, but not attuned to the minutia of methodological discussions that so often dominate historical discourse. May I add as a public historian that museum collections and exhibitions are on the front lines of communicating with the public through visual means? Visitors who enjoy looking at pictures often end up surprisingly engaged in discussing historical issues. For example, the New-York Historical Society recently presented a show about a steamboat disaster which killed over 1,000 members of New York City's Little Germany community. The moving and shocking photographs from the 1904 tragedy provided a opportunity to ask why New Yorkers so soon forgot both the tragedy and the numerous German-Americans in New York. Extensive media coverage of the show on TV, cable, the Associated Press Wire service and in major papers such as The New York Times, brought a glimpse of this little-known history to a very broad audience. Visitors to the exhibition and at a public screening of the related documentary film Fearful Visitation asked why everyone recalls the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Titanic, but not the fire on the General Slocum. Answers offered in various dialogues, showed that people were stimulated to see how the advent of World War I, rendered an "ethnic" German tragedy suddenly less universal and memorable. Likewise, viewers to the exhibition noted that the modest immigrants on the Sunday picnic excursion were overshadowed by the wealthy and glamorous victims on the Titanic. But in both the maritime disasters, a lack of boat safety, and shortage of life preservers and life boats raised the death toll. When viewers compared the Slocum disaster with the garment factory fire, they noted that unions and labor activists made the disaster a theme of public agitation for improved safety rules, and thus made the deaths memorable in a context of civic activism which differed from the response to the Slocum in 1904. Other visitors to The New-York Historical Society compared the city's responses to the more recent grappling with the aftermath of September 11th, and noted how disaster tended to submerge ethnic conflicts in favor of a feeling of neighborliness and mutual aid. Comments on the exhibition included a remark that a photograph of dozens of volunteers combing the East River in borrowed rowboats resembled the more recent images of swarms of volunteers who flocked to Ground Zero on September 11th to find survivors in the debris. By framing the issues within a changing ethnic community, the exhibit was able to suggest that the response to the disaster was historically specific and showed how turn-of-the century attitudes towards ethnicity were not reducible to paternalistic encouragement of instant Americanization. The focus on one survivor's story made this clear through artifacts that drew on both domestic and home country culture. Adella Liebnow Wotherspoon, a mere infant in 1904, was the oldest living survivor of the Slocum disaster. Dying just a few months short of the 100th anniversary of the tragedy, the survivor gave all her family memorabilia to the Society, and was featured in a video clip in the exhibit. This gift made it possible to illuminate a family history rather typical of Klein Deutschland, displaying German passports, naturalization papers, baptismal certificates and family scrapbooks that mingled languages and cultural customs through three generations on New York's Lower East Side. A historian's eye for the potential of such personal history embodied in the Wotherspoon bequest, made the mass impact of over 1,000 dead more comprehensible and accessible. This example demonstrates how exhibitions can raise major historical issues in accessible ways that reach beyond the classroom and the library. Visitors to the gallery were overheard discussing their own lost German roots, the mix of news clippings from both German language and English newspapers of the period, the interplay between ethnic enclave and larger civic identity, the contrasting private and public responses, and the way disasters fuel public reforms (ultimately ship inspections were transferred to the US Coast Guard Service in response to this and other accidents). Upon the 100th Anniversary of the tragedy historian Edward T. O' Donnell, author of Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat Gen. Slocum worked with the Gen. Slocum Memorial Association to offer public events, walking tours and a commemorative boat trip recapitulating the fatal voyage to members of the public who had rarely engaged with such an array of historical experiences. This case study in involving the public in history through exhibitions is a call to historians to remember to bring their students to museums, historic sites and exhibitions, so that they realize that their professional training can contribute to popular presentations of history. Kathleen Hulser New-York Historical Society
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
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