In Sense of History: The Place of the Past in American Life, David Glassberg asserts that people use places to form focal points for history. In short, that people associate events in their lives with the places they were when the event happened or with places they remember fondly. This is a powerful concept that can explain why we value historic places and sites as well as why we feel the compulsion to return to places where special events in our lives took place. Who hasn’t ‘gone back’? We flock to high school reunions, family reunions, and commemorations of past events; we celebrate anniversaries by returning to the restaurant where we became engaged or plan second honeymoons at the resort where we spent our first honeymoon; and we make pilgrimages to places like Graceland and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.
Just as events give value and power to the places where they occurred, places give power and value to new events held on their ground. Glen Beck’s recent scheduling of his conservative rally at the Washington Monument on the anniversary of Dr. King’s I Have a Dream rally and speech is a case in point. Simply by choosing that particular place and that particular date, Beck gave his rally and by extension his viewpoints added value in the perception of audiences. He, in effect, guaranteed that he would have an audience by co-opting the sense of place that the Washington Monument and the date of Dr. King’s speech have with American audiences. Another recent example of the power of sense of place can be seen in the Islamophobia stemming from the proposed building of a new mosque near the Twin Towers site in New York. The site of the proposed mosque is two blocks away from the Twin Towers site/memorial and is in the legal sense a non-issue and a geographically a New York issue, but the site’s power over memory is so strong that politicians across the country are using the issue in their campaigns.
Understanding the power that sense of place wields is especially important to those practicing public history. As public historians mediate between academic and public, there are many opportunities to encourage and discourage projects, programs, and uses of historic places. As the Glen Beck rally, the mosque turmoil and the equestrian statue in El Paso so aptly demonstrate, for every historical place there are many perceived senses of value and senses of history. What is joyous and affirming for one group is hateful and disrespectful to another. It is the public historian’s lot to try and mediate the history of all groups into the larger history of us all.
