This week our readings centered around the current research and reviews of prominent public history organizations, and where public history is evolving towards. As we have discussed in class, one of our major concerns we have is how our audiences value the history that we hope to interpret in public history settings, and how we can produce better history for our audiences. In Imperiled Promise a report on the state of history in the National Park Service, was facilitated by the research of four prominent historians, Anne Mitchell Whisnat, Marla R. Miller, Gary B. Nash, and David Thelen. They focused their study of the NPS sites on how historians are doing history, and who exactly in and for NPS (5). This study also provided an understanding of some of the issues that many sites face, such as lack of funding, and disconnections between natural and cultural resources from historical interpretations. This NPS report concludes that there needs to be reevaluation of site resources and interpretations, that can better include previously unused resources within their interpretations. There is also a call for better understandings of funding not only through NPS and OAH, but also through grant work and other avenues of funding which can greatly assist with dwindling monetary assistance that many sites are facing.
In the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance's 2014 portfolio, we are given an insight into the many challenges that non-profit cultural institutions are facing, and we again see that lack of funding and the Economic Crisis which the nation faced in previous years has contributed to this issue. However many of the institutions that have faced cuts in funding, are slowly bouncing back and rebuilding their resources. There is also emphasis on the fact that despite these funding issues, many of the cultural institutions have been able to maintain a constant flow of programs and exhibits for the public.
What seems to be a very common theme and emphasis between both reports is the challenges that public history and cultural institutions are facing primarily from a lack of or cutting down of funding. However each report states that institutions and site need to be conscious of this, and become savvy and organized in their approaches to maintain appropriate funding. Although we as public historians strive to produce good history for our audience, we also need to recognize the challenges of funding and resources that can affect the history we hope to produce.

    This week we read Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Lines by Amy M. Tyson. Tyson’s book centers around Minnesota’s Historic Fort Snelling, a living history museum, and in particular how the interpreters viewed their roles within the museum. Like our reading from last week, Tyson creates an ethnography of the Fort Snelling environment, and its interpreters. Throughout her time at Fort Snelling, and the many interviews she had with its interpreters, Tyson discovers that the large majority of workers are torn between their true love of their work with the public and pressures from inside and outside of the job that can make it daunting. One major issue that many of the interpreters who were interviewed felt, was a sense of unimportance from their upper management. For instance, during the creation of the MHS Interpreter’s Caucus, which was an organization of the seasonal interpreters that fought for certain causes like medical leave, were unable to disassociate their employer's belief that these were only temporary workers, not professionals (Tyson 84). As Tyson points out throughout a large portion of this book, that many of the interpreters employed at Fort Snelling saw them selves and were indeed professionals within the field of interpretation, but were disheartened by lack of recognition from their employers and others outside of the interpreter’s sphere. Another major point of stress that many interpreter’s felt was emotional depletion from both their interactions with patrons to the museum, as well as from interactions with their fellow interpreters. For instance, many interpreters  found stress from the social stigma of being an interpreter, as well as the stress of having to in a sense split their personalities between one or more historical characters. Although these pressures not only cause emotional and physical toll on these workers, they all for the most part found their time with the public rewarding and strove towards bettering their public service (114-115).
    One large issue that I noticed throughout Tyson’s The Wages of History, was a large disconnect between the employer and the importance of their seasonally employed interpreters. Unfortunately, it seemed that despite certain efforts interpreters did not feel appreciated by their employers professionally or intellectually, which ultimately effected the ways that interpreters viewed their own work and their own value within the museum. What The Wages of History  lends us as public historians is insight into how we can better interact and communicate with those within our own sphere. In relation to our semester project, we can also better understand our own actions with not only the narraters with have worked with, but those who are hoping to continue this project.

The Lowell Experiment: Public History in a Postindustrial City, by Cathy Stanton presents the ways that the Lowell National Historic Park (NHP) interprets its local history. Stanton recounts three interpretive plans that Lowell NHP uses to interpret its local history. What seems to be a common trend within Lowell’s interpretive plans is a linear telling of its history, as well as a lack of connecting past historical trends with the present (Stanton). For instance, in Lowell NHP’s Run of the Mill tour, Stanton observed that the interpretive plan that many park rangers followed, revolved around a linear history that traces the history of the town’s industrial development beginning in the 1820s (45). What was emphasized within the tours that Stanton observed was a telling of this history with the inevitable conclusion that working conditions have greatly changed for the better of the laborers within the town, and the town itself. However, Stanton makes it clear that the working conditions that were endured by mill girls and Irish immigrants during the nineteenth century in Lowell are in many ways still endured by textile workers in the present at Lowell and else where. This disconnect between the present and the past within the Lowell NHP’s park rangers is a trend that Stanton traces throughout her observations of Lowell, and as she concludes can not “provide maps for actual participation in or conversation about the relationships of power and modes of production in the world we live in now,” (67).
    What The Lowell Experiment helps to provide us is with a better understanding of the effects of revitalization, and local agendas on the interpretations that are created at heritage sites. Although we have discussed many factors that can contribute to certain interpretations being created within public history settings, this weeks readings help to provide more insight into the dangers of highly selective cultural histories that are created to revitalize previously industrialized towns. In relation to our semester’s project, this reading provides us with more insight into how Mantua residents may wish to shape their own history. As a community that is actively working to improve their town, the citizens may be influenced to interpret a particular history that may unwittingly disconnect it from the present.