Say NO to the KISS (Keep it Simple, Stupid)

I finally got around to reading the blog “I went to the War of 1812 Experience and All I Got was this Postcard: Ideology, Politics, and the Function of History” by The Idle Historian. This was a very interesting article. Albeit, you had to gleam through some ranting on Canadian politics, but the author’s point is valid that museums shouldn’t make history into simplified, conformist, and ideological exhibits for the public, especially when covering a diverse, complex, and important subject such as, in this case, the War of 1812. 

The Idle Historian in this blog explains his utter dismay upon going to the “Canadian Heritage War of 1812 Experience,” part of a large effort at historical commemoration of the War of 1812 by the Canadian government- costing over $28 million. What the author explains is a simple, watered down, feel-good version of the War of 1812. As the author states, it entirely ignores the “many complex reasons for the War and the geopolitical tussle between Great Britain and the United States.” Something that I would think would be quite elementary to cover with an exhibit on the War of 1812. The Idle Historian goes on to connect the reason for the lameness of this exhibit to the fact that history, as well as the humanities as a whole, has been exceedingly pushed aside for funding, as well as simple acknowledgement increasingly over the years by the national government of Canada. Plus, for so much money to go into such an incredibly watered down version of history, such as this exhibit portrays, it is simply a shame for this to be the way history is presented to the public by a national government. This most assuredly is going on in the US, as well, but I concede that is not the point of my analysis of this article.

The most important point that I believe the Idle Historian makes with this blog is that keeping an exhibit simple is not the way to go. As the author contends, history is not something that can be used to make someone feel warm and fuzzy over. Our job with exhibits should be to voice the multiple perspectives of history to the public, not a single voice that means to provide no contrasting points of views- such as this War of 1812 exhibit seems to do. It’s simply unprofessional, disrespectful to the public, and disrespectful to the past. We live in a time when scholarship abounds to present the multiple perspectives of events such as the War of 1812, therefore we should use it. To conclude, I believe the author sums it up the best when he states, “History is a practice by which we continuously seek to depict the world from different perspectives than those of previous generations, give voice to those largely unrecorded in the standard narratives, and discomfort our simple notions that history is a ‘lesson’ which merely exists to teach us X or Y. It is not a fungible commodity to be used as a corporate-style national branding exercise.”