Museum Review: Andrew Low House, Savannah

I've lived near Savannah for twelve years now, and so I'm a bit cynical about the city's charms. True, the historic district, with its fabulous Regency and early Victorian architecture, is remarkably beautiful, and worth a visit on that basis alone. But too much of the historical tourism in the city is pretty dire: The railroad museum, for example, is underfunded and tatty (if you've been to the California State Railroad Museum, you'll be shocked by Georgia's effort.) City tours are overpriced and frequently outrageously ill-informed: I once listened to a cocky young tour guide tell everyone in a matter-of-fact way that slavery didn't come to Savannah until after the Revolution. I wouldn't have minded his many errors quite so much if he hadn't been so boring. And the ghost tours? One of my students was a Savannah tour guide for many years, and assured me that she and a friend made up several of the best ghost stories over a few beers. I believe her.
The worst sin that Savannah has committed in my book, however, is that I and others have endured too much snottiness among the history-powers-that-be in the city. I recently made the mistake of taking a city walking tour offered by the Owens-Thomas House, on the subject of the Wanderer, the last slave ship to arrive (illegally as it happens) in America. It was led by a volunteer, it was free, and it was worth every penny I paid for it. Actually, I ought to have been paid: Disorganized, uninformed, dull, and most importantly, rude, the guide was a good example of why Savannah desperately needs better and professional public history. At the tour's end, my historian friend and I agreed that it had been a waste of time, and a terrible disappointment, especially because there is so little African-American history on show in Savannah. Another historian friend of mine encountered what she described as a very snotty tour guide at the Andrew Low House a few months ago, and so I asked her to accompany me back there today.

The Andrew Low House (1849) was built by a Scotsman who made his fortune as a cotton merchant, and then very sensibly retired on the proceeds of slave-grown cotton to the less malarial climate of England. It was in England that his son met and married Juliette Gordon Low, later the founder of the Girl Scouts, and they lived in the house periodically, although England remained their principal home. Since 1928, the house has been owned by the Colonial Dames of America, first as their HQ, and, since 1952, as a house museum.

Savannah isn't really a destination city for families, and so I usually forgive its house museums for being inattentive to kids. However, the Andrew Low House is frequently visited by one particular group of kids, Girl Scouts, because of its connection to Juliette Gordon Low.

On this particular day, only my friend and I were on the tour. The House is open in the midst of a massive restoration project which involves a few boarded-up exterior areas, but we didn't mind since we got a three dollar discount off the usual $8 tariff. Our tour guide wasn't particularly friendly, but nor was she insufferably snotty. She was fairly well-informed, but seemed a bit bored, and wasn't very encouraging of questions. In other words, she was par for the course in Savannah.

Most of the furniture was true to the period, although almost none of it was original. The tour, although it took us to both floors, wasn't too long, but included no view of the service area, or any mention of the African-Americans who staffed the place in slavery and freedom. Perhaps the stories about them don't exist. What we didn't get, however, was a better sense of the personalities who had inhabited the house: Andrew Low, the merchant, who came to Savannah as a Scottish teenager and fled it to become an English gent, was an intriguing guy.

I wondered to myself whether he left letters or diaries that might have helped us bring the house to life. The guide told us a couple of funny stories about Juliette, but only after the official tour had ended. I didn't see any evidence on the web site or in the shop that the Museum makes any effort to reach out to children, despite the fact that hundreds if not thousands of Girl Scouts are brought through the building every year. A scavenger hunt, a lively background briefing on the house and its inhabitants,or costumed character tours, all would enliven an otherwise stuffy presentation.

My historian friend described how rudely another of the docents had treated her group, including a Girl Scout whose angry mother protested. I hope that at least that experience isn't typical, but I fear that it may mark one end of a very narrow spectrum of unsatisifactory tour experiences at the Andrew Low House.

Particularly because I, admittedly, did not share my tour with Girl Scouts or any other kids, I do welcome feedback and suggestions from Low House staff or any reader who has visited within the past year, particularly Girl Scouts and their chaperones. Also, I do plan a visit to the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace soon.

Homeschooling and History

My eight-year-old son has bravely volunteered to be a guinea pig for the next year, and take advantage of my new-found freedom (I resigned from my university job this week) to become a homeschooler.
I don't actually approve of homeschooling as a first choice: Children are entitled to a life apart from their parents, and to have influences other than them. But, being a world-class hypocrite, I'm homeschooling all the same: One year, one child, and plenty of socialization time for him (work time for me) as he will remain enrolled in the afterschool program at his elementary school.
Here on the blog, I will happily share our adventures and misadventures. While Alec is not in any sense a representative sample, he does help me understand what is inspiring and what is not in history teaching for kids. Our trial run week, in which we studied the Ancient Greeks (a subject about which I knew less than he did) was not an unqualified success, but it was a good start. And it's much more fun to teach my son than to teach college freshmen.
In my next posting in this series, I'll talk about lessons learned (by me as well as Alec) and useful resources for getting started with the Greeks: How we connected past and present, and how a boy's love of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series can be parlayed into other interests. As ever, I welcome comments from readers.

Georgia Social Studies Test Fiasco, Part 2

The president of the Georgia Council for the Social Studies has issued an announcement about a hastily-proposed revision of curriculum following the disastrous results of the multiple-guess test administered to middle schoolers this spring.

Honestly, without a great deal of autonomy for classroom teachers in choosing curriculum to cover, and without essay exams (the sine qua non), I'm not sure that tweaking will work.

I always remember asking my British history teacher in the Seventies to show me the syllabus for the "O" level exams we took at age 16. With great solemnity, he pulled a chunky book off his shelf, opened it, and passed it to me. As I recall, the entire Government-created syllabus was "English history, 1066-Present." That was it.

How did this work? On the day of the exam, we all received booklets of essay questions, and we flipped through them until we reached the areas we had covered in class, then picked out three we wanted to answer. While imperfect, this system allowed teachers to teach to their strengths and interests, and for us to learn in depth, which also meant learning a passion for the subject and the critical thinking skills that come with it.

And as for periods we didn't cover? Did we remain forever ignorant? Sometimes we covered them earlier or later in our school careers...and, by the time our formal education ended, we had been equipped with the enthusiasm and knowledge to pursue whatever interested us on our own, then and later. For the record, I taught myself American history for pleasure in my mid-teens, and now have a Ph.D. in it, a subject we barely covered at school. Contrast that with my college students, who have been repeatedly force-fed broad surveys in American and World history, and arrive in my classroom without a clue or a care.

All that said, I have asked a few Georgian colleagues to work with me to create and submit our sixpence worth to the proposed revisions in the Georgia social studies curriculum. Meanwhile, here's the text of the GCSS email:

"As social studies educators, we often long for more attention to be given to our disciplines – more emphasis in the classroom, more support by administrators, and more attention by the public. Though the circumstances are not what we necessarily would have desired, social studies has certainly been “in the news” around our state for the past few weeks. Many of us were disappointed with the performance of our 6th and 7th graders on the CRCT this spring; there clearly were problems in our curriculum and our testing program that needed to be addressed.
The State Department of Education took immediate action by forming a committee of social studies teachers, supervisors, state DOE leaders, and college faculty that worked tirelessly during late May to revamp the curriculum for 6th and 7th grade. I’d like to thank these individuals for giving their time and expertise to this task. Such decisions are not easy to make and require both debate and compromise. The results of their work were presented to the Social Studies Advisory Council in early June, where further discussion took place and further changes were suggested.
In addition to the extensive changes made to the 6th and 7th grade GPS, the standards for grades 3-5 and grades 8-12 also underwent a scheduled Precision Review this spring. The proposed changes for these grade levels are relatively minor in most cases, often rephrasing or rewording standards and elements for the purpose of clarity and better alignment.
Now, here’s the exciting part for us as GCSS members! ALL of the proposed revisions that I just mentioned (grades 3 through 12) are now posted on the DOE website for public comment. This is your chance as a social studies professional to voice your opinions about the proposed changes and to help shape the state social studies curriculum. The period for public comment will continue through early August. I strongly encourage you to participate in this process! Your comments and suggestions are vital to the process of finalizing the proposed revisions before the state Board of Education votes on them in August. Go to www.georgiastandards.org and click on Social Studies to view the revisions and submit comments."

Benjamin Franklin House Review Response

I am delighted to find that Dr. Márcia Balisciano, the Director of the Benjamin Franklin House in London, has responded with a long and detailed comment to my rather snarky review. I recommend my readers take a look at her full and exciting description of changes made and yet to come, including a better arrangement for ticket sales, weekly opportunities to tour the house without the theatrical "historical experience," and much more.
As an early American historian, I really do want to see this museum succeed, and all these changes seem terribly promising: It's great to see museums taking a proactive approach. My only continuing beef is that I remain skeptical that architectural features alone can evoke imaginative response in most audiences, but I'll hold my fire for now, and cheerfully accept the invitation to make a repeat visit to the Benjamin Franklin House at the next opportunity, this time with a child or children in tow. For now, if you're considering a London trip, please do read over Dr. Balisciano's comment (appended to my original review), and consider booking tickets to visit the house. I will be interested in readers' responses in future.

Everyone Should Read This

As a mother and a history professor, I share Jordan Sonnenblick's anguish over the travesty that is No Child Left Behind. His article "Killing Me Softly: No Child Left Behind," written for the School Library Journal, deserves a far wider audience. Read it, take note of it, and pass it on.

http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6555540.html

Book Review: Learning to See The Land ***

Annette's note: This is not a book for kids, although kids may well like the pictures and some of the text. So this rating does NOT incorporate the opinion of Alec, my son/kid assistant. I review it because it is a book that can be used with and for kids.

Burton K. Kummerow, Christine H. O'Tooler, and R. Scott Stephenson, Pennsylvania's Forbes Trail: Gateways and Getaways Along the Legendary Route From Philadelphia to Pittsburgh (2008)

I first learned how to "see" rural western Pennsylvania in 1993, in the company of Pastor Weiser, an ordained Lutheran minister who used his many personal connections in the area to take visitors beyond the tourist trail. Our group, from throughout the University of California system, had been studying Early America in Colonial Williamsburg for three months. Now, we made contact with the colonial past's tenuous survival into the present, as we travelled among the German-Americans of Lancaster County. We visited a market staffed by Amish and Mennonite farmers in their otherworldly costumes, and pondered how deep the food roots of the amazingly artificial "traditional" Whoopie Pie could possibly go. We climbed the stairs of a rural house, and met an eighty-year-old Amish bookbinder at work. We descended to a church basement for a scrumptious lunch of Pennsylvania "Dutch" grub cooked by Pennsylvania "Dutch" ladies, while a cheesy but earnest local duo sang German-American folk songs. Pastor Weiser kept us grounded, as did all the Pennsylvanians we met: These locals not quaint relics, but real and complex people who inhabited the same world as us. This tour was worth a million boring roadside "historic landmarks."

It was the memory of this day in Pennsylvania, and my realization that I have so many vivid memories of it, that piqued my interest in Pennsylvania's Forbes Trail: Gateways and Getaways Along the Legendary Route From Philadelphia to Pittsburgh.

Published to commemorate this year's 250^th anniversary of the French and Indian War, the book's timing is not altogether lucky: This is not so much a book for reading as it is a luxurious road trip guide. As I write, gas is pushing $4 a gallon, so it might actually work better as a guide for the armchair traveler.

That said, and assuming that the road trip has any future, this is an intriguing and creative approach to engaging visitors in the presence of the past.

Inviting the reader to retrace the route through western Pennsylvania taken by the British and Colonial joint forces during the French and Indian War, the book focuses on John Forbes , a Scottish officer who won military victory, brokered careful negotiations with Indian allies of the French and pacifist Quakers, and generally set about winning hearts and minds as well as battlefield victory. The creators are upfront in their hope that this story will serve as a model in an age when we have been more inclined to resort to saber-rattling and aggression than to diplomacy. Fair enough.

True, the muddy trail that Forbes, his men, and others followed has since mostly given way to asphalt. But despite dramatic changes in the landscape, the Pennsylvania of the 1750s has not vanished. Even the original unpaved road has been preserved in part, the authors tell us, and is open to the public. Some of the taverns on what is now called the Old Lancaster Road, such as the General Warren Inne in Malvern, already existed in the mid-eighteenth century. Looking for colonial survivals, and understanding that things aren't always as young (or old) as they seem is a great way for everyone to learn to think historically.

Recognizing that most vacationing families who might undertake the quest lack the obsessiveness of historians, however, the authors envision the trip as one that should be broken up with distractions. Capsule descriptions not only of historic sites and museums, but also of restaurants and even theme parks, offer plenty of advice for breaking up the journey.

While a journey through the area with this guide will encourage travelers to take a deeper interest in the environment—both built and natural—it would have been even better to have included a broader focus on the region's people, both past and present. Longer excerpts from letters and diaries (rather than indirect quotations with snippets of the original, more readable, language don't cut it) would have helped, as well would interviews with modern residents. The engaging and vivid illustrations help distract from the often ponderous text.

My question for the book's creators is whether they were interested in cultivating the broadest possible audience. Was it tested with families? If the intention was always to appeal to a niche audience of military history geeks, fair enough. But the theme and tone of the text may be offputting to anyone who doesn't fall in that group, and that's a shame.

Anyone considering writing future guides like this should think hard about producing a book that will actually have wide appeal. There is a great fear in America of dumbing down history by making it accessible, and we cut off too many people's interest in the past by limiting the scope and appeal of public history. It doesn't have to be military history to be history, nor does it have to rely on dense text. The sooner that we recognize this, the faster we can rescue historical literacy from the abyss.

Homeschoolers and teachers: Use with caution. Read through and think about this book before you hit the road, and be prepared to put in some work to use it effectively. Resist the temptation to read large portions of the dry narrative aloud to the family or your students. Instead, translate it into your own words. Plan your own narrative. This book doesn't teach kids well, but, with it as a guide, you can.

Museum Review: Atlanta History Center, June 12, 2008

I am deeply ashamed that, while I have lived in Georgia for twelve years and visit Atlanta several times a year, I have only this past week actually darkened the doorstep of the Atlanta History Center, tucked away in a residential area of the chi-chi Buckhead district. I do promise I won't wait a decade for the next visit.
Alec, my son/kid assistant and I, arrived early on Thursday afternoon: Forewarned that the only affordable food on the premises was Chick-fil-A (a fast food offering that, frankly, grosses me out) we ate beforehand.
We had what I thought were modest goals: To tour the main exhibits about Atlanta history, and the Tullie Smith Farm, an 1840s farmhouse that is presented as a pointed reminder that few Antebellum Georgian plantation houses bore much resemblance to Scarlett O'Hara's Tara. In a moment of weakness, I accepted the offer at the front desk of a guided tour of the Swan House, the other historic house at the Center, about which I knew diddly-squat.
Turned out, I was overly optimistic, given an eight-year-old in tow. But it's a mark of how impressed I was that I also whisked him into the Civil War gallery and a temporary exhibit on school desegregation ofr a quick look, even though he was tired and I normally get very sanctimonious about adults who force-feed kids history.
The Swan House, our first stop, was probably a mistake on my part. Turns out, there's an audio tour three days a week, and we arrived on one of these days. Good audio tours for families can be a godsend, but this one was "one size fits all," and spent too much time cooing deferentially about the antiques, the architecture, and the original owners, who were "prominent"in Atlanta (read "rich".)
That said, there were interesting points to be made about the lengths to which the wealthy (and all of us who aspire to gentility) go to turn homes into theatres to impress our friends.
The first owners, who commissioned the building in the 1920s, were avid Anglophiles, who tried desperately to create an 18th century English country house. Alas, they were done in, not so much by the ugliness of modern technology (which the architect cunningly hid, such as in a small room for the phone, or carefully camouflaged heating ducts), but by the grandchildren.
The audio tour included snippets of interviews with those grandchildren, who recalled being banned from various rooms (presumably lest they conflict with the decor), running toy trains in the grand hall, and eavesdropping on phone conversations by pressing their ears to the heating grilles... Encouraging Alec to think about how hard it is to have a perfect living space when kids are around helped him to survive what was otherwise a less than suitable tour.
The Tullie Smith Farm was much more kid-oriented, and led by a real, live docent, the kind who gives docents a good name. She constantly engaged Alec and Bryce, the other eight-year-old on the tour, asking them questions and tolerating their off-the-wall comments with great humor. The house and its outbuildings were appealing spaces for small boys, who dashed about exploring after the tour. When Alec recounted his visit to his father, it was the farm that figured largest in his recollection.
Throughout our visit, in the exhibition halls and gift shop as well as the historic houses, the staff members and volunteers of the Atlanta History Center were unfailingly friendly, and did their best to make Alec as well as me, in my T-shirt and jeans tourist mode, feel welcome. One of my beefs with museums (anywhere) and the city of Atlanta's cultural attractions is that staff too often are grumpy, snotty, or even border on the hostile (High Museum, anyone?) To find a museum in Atlanta, of all places, with a srong ethos of hospitality was truly a pleasant surprise.
While the AHC's displays are not particularly oriented toward kids, the Tullie Smith Farm, the attractive exhibits, the full program of family-oriented events, the gorgeous gardens, and the friendly staff make it a good bet for families with older kids, especially if you're willing to take the lead in helping interpret the exhibits for your children. Alec got tired and grumpy at the end, but we were there for three hours, and his exhaustive account of the day, given later to his father, showed that he took in a great deal: He also expressed enthusiasm for returning.
Just be sure to bring a lunch or eat first (we recommend Johnny Rocket's, about a quarter-mile away at the intersection of Peachtree Road and Paces Ferry Road, or the new branch of Flying Biscuit Cafe, at the intersection of Pace's Ferry and I-85.) Otherwise, be prepared to splurge at the posh Swan Coach House restaurant, or deal with the horror of the Coca-Cola Cafe, serving a limited menu of elderly Chick-fil-A products: The day we were there, they were selling pre-cooked sandwiches from a cooler. Ugh.
For details of hours, exhibits, etc, visit the AHC site at http://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/index.cfm