On a tour of Kyoto, we noticed an odd phenomenon. In several
places, centuries-old historic homes and gardens had more recently become the
property of religious organizations and thus became “temples” in the
advertising and tour guides. The ease with which new management
ignored three centuries of history and misled visitors was startling, to say
the least.
I mentioned to our leader, Doug Roth, that American museums face a
related challenge, which the pros call “fakelore” or “story creep.” Here’s how
it happens.
Almost all museums and historic houses use docents or guides to
provide tours. The museum spends great time and effort to develop accurate
story lines and train the guides to use them. But human nature being what it
is, guides often find that certain parts of the story get laughs or nods from
the visitors, which leads guides to walk farther and farther on the wild side
of the facts and get bigger laughs and more nods. Some museum directors spend a
lot of time stamping out new ghost stories.
The mayor of Charleston, Joe Riley, once overheard a carriage
driver spinning tales of Tara and Gone with the Wind for customers who
were hanging on every word. He was so incensed that he instituted a licensing
program for guides, which includes “secret shopper” checks to make sure they
are delivering facts not fiction. My colleagues have offered up a few other
choice examples of history gone wrong.
“Baltimore homes are built of bricks brought over as ship
ballast.” Nope, but try to tell the docents that. Baltimore sits on prime clay,
and bricks were made on site. Besides, they are not dense enough to be good
ballast.
As a child, Jerry Ford spent a week on Mackinac Island in the Boy
Scout barracks. The carriage drivers loved to point out the barracks steps as
the “first steps he ever stumbled down.” One Michigan Governor overheard the
line and asked that the guides be retrained. Good luck.
And a real classic concerns the tunnels in Federal Hill near the
Baltimore harbor. Dug as silica mines for glass making, the tunnels were
described by one tour guide as the place where the trains on the
Underground Railroad for slaves pulled into Baltimore. The museum director who
overheard this writes, “I loved the idea that somewhere in Georgia there was a
Harry Potter kind of secret depot serving a sort of underground subway hundreds
of miles long, with a conductor (discreetly) crying, “All aboard for the
Freedom Land.”
Quoting an old cartoon strip by Jeff Danziger, “History is what
people will pay for.”
You can read the entire AASLH Dispatch for February 2013 at http://www.mynewsletterbuilder.com/email/newsletter/1411608723/.
Q: What fakelore have you heard about the history, peoples, cultures, and environment of our County?
3 comments:
It's so true of many places. Even in Maine where I grew up there were always ghost stories, especially, that we would tell out-of-state visitors. I wonder how many of them went home and told the same stories to their friends. There's plenty of, as it's called, Fakelore in the northern states. Natives will put a spin on their own family history to make it more interesting or to hide some shameful activity of their ancestors. It does happen and New Englanders have a special way of story telling.
We tell stories about history so often that the stories themselves become history. Nell Irvin Painter's biography of Sojourner Truth illustrates this really well. She wrote about the life of Sojourner Truth the person and she also wrote about Sojourner Truth, the symbol. The stories told about some historical figures or places can be equally as powerful, if not more so, than the facts.
Interesting post. Thanks for the Underground Railroad resources posted a few days later...just in case anyone is headed to Baltimore on a quest.
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