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Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History
The rapid expansion of the field of public history since the 1970s has led many to believe that it is a relatively new profession. In this book, Denise D. Meringolo shows that the roots of public history actually reach back to the nineteenth century, when the federal government entered into the work of collecting and preserving the nation's natural and cultural resources. Scientists conducting research and gathering specimens became key figures in a broader effort to protect and interpret the nation's landscape. Their collaboration with entrepreneurs, academics, curators, and bureaucrats alike helped pave the way for other governmental initiatives, from the Smithsonian Institution to the parks and monuments today managed by the National Park Service.
All of these developments included interpretive activities that shaped public understanding of the past. Yet it was not until the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s that public history found an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service. Even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, according to Meringolo, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.
All of these developments included interpretive activities that shaped public understanding of the past. Yet it was not until the emergence of the education-oriented National Park Service history program in the 1920s and 1930s that public history found an institutional home that grounded professional practice simultaneously in the values of the emerging discipline and in government service. Even thereafter, tensions between administrators in Washington and practitioners on the ground at National Parks, monuments, and museums continued to define and redefine the scope and substance of the field. The process of definition persists to this day, according to Meringolo, as public historians establish a growing presence in major universities throughout the United States and abroad.
256 pages, Paperback
First published June 30, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 7, 2023
An ambitious, sprawling attempt to explain the origins of public history. There were a number of parts included in this book that left me wondering “why?”. Still an interesting read but I think it could have been tightened down some more to be more direct and to the point
January 27, 2020
My family lived in Calgary, Alberta when I was a little girl. We moved there when I was seven and left when I was twelve after my dad found new employment in Eastern Canada. Our home in Calgary was about an hour away from the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, and they are indeed majestic. My parents frequently drove my brother and I to the mountains on the weekends for hikes, camping, and ranger programs at the interpretive center in Banff National Park. https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/pn-np/ab/banff
As an adult, I now feel a deep sense of peace and tranquility when I am in a stretch of wilderness, or even simple nature, such as a wooded city trail. My eyes scan the sky and land for wildlife, flowers, trees that shiver with life. I prefer not to listen to music when I’m surrounded by the outdoors, so I can be part of the deeply restorative world around me. In nature time shifts, ebbs, lurches forward, making us everything and nothing all at once. The land silently marks the folly of humanity. Presidents die, wars start and end, borders shift, people wear saddle shoes then sneakers then Crocs made of a foam resin, but still the mountains stand and the oceans heave.
When I was a teenager, I didn’t understand how profoundly my early years in the Rocky Mountains influenced me. As an adult, I know now that those years hiking and exploring mountain trails and participating in national park activities cemented a deeper connection to how I would go on to experience the world for the remaining decades of my life.
When I was twelve, we took a driving vacation south into the United States from Calgary. I clearly remember being astonished by Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park https://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm as the geyser erupted with jaw dropping precision from a deceptively calm earth. I also walked through a trail in the park where water pooled in shades of cerulean blue and lime green, bubbling with heat and some unknown mystery of existence. The trip culminated in a visit to the Grand Canyon National Park https://www.nps.gov/grca/index.htm. My twelve-year-old self was dazed. Who knew the world could be so vast? How could the land cleave in such a dramatic way to create what I was seeing? What else would I see if I travelled far and wide?
I have now lived in the United States for eleven years and been a US citizen for two years. I’m a supporter of the national parks and frequently donate financially to help protect them, so that the mountains can still stand without being abused, and the oceans can continue to heave without being choked with pollution and plastics, or at least less than without guardianship. I had known nothing, however, about the history of the national parks and their evolution across the US.
In Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2012, UMBC professor Denise D. Meringolo illustrates the journey of how US national parks evolved in tandem with large cultural museums such as the Smithsonian. (Although Meringolo’s book deftly explores the expansion of the field of public history since the 19th century, for me, the history of the national parks was especially fascinating.)
In the beginning, writes Meringolo, it was scientists who began selecting nationally significant places (p. xxix), and saw the need to protect landscapes and artifacts for future generations. This resulted in contentious relationships in the 19th century between the museums of the Smithsonian and the Park Services museums (p. xxx) as the parks strove to prove that their museums were just as culturally and materially valuable as those in Washington and other urban think tank centers. These disputes and the resulting questions “laid the philosophical foundation for defining history as an arena of public service” (p.xxxi) in the years to come.
Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872. In 1906, President Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act, which gave presidents the authority to create national monuments to preserve areas of natural or historic interest on public lands. Then in 1916, President Wilson established the National Park Service to consolidate management of America’s (at the time) 34 federal parks under a single agency. In 1931, Verne Chatelain became the first chief historian of the National Park Service. (I found this interesting oral history with Mr. Chatelain online at http://npshistory.com/publications/ch...)
It was Chatelain’s job, writes Meringolo, to “‘breathe the breath of life into American history for those to whom it has heretofore been a dull recital of meaningless facts to recreate for the average citizen something of the color, the pageantry, and the dignity of our national past.’” (p.106)
America’s national parks were given their modern shape by the huge programs enabled and powered by FDR’s New Deal during the depression years. In addition to roads and physical infrastructure, parks received status as educational centers and museums of nature. More specifically, Congress embraced and cemented the fact that “exposure to nature would inspire visitors to relent in their undignified search for recreation and accept nature conservation as a more important national value.” (p. 87)
The US now has 61 national parks stretching from Alaska to Key West, Florida. To see them all you would have to visit 29 states. From the time I myself first visited national parks, both American and Canadian, to now with my own children, I am firmly onboard with the understanding that national parks and monuments are important museums of nature. We owe it to future generations to fund, protect, and invest in these natural museums.
As an adult, I now feel a deep sense of peace and tranquility when I am in a stretch of wilderness, or even simple nature, such as a wooded city trail. My eyes scan the sky and land for wildlife, flowers, trees that shiver with life. I prefer not to listen to music when I’m surrounded by the outdoors, so I can be part of the deeply restorative world around me. In nature time shifts, ebbs, lurches forward, making us everything and nothing all at once. The land silently marks the folly of humanity. Presidents die, wars start and end, borders shift, people wear saddle shoes then sneakers then Crocs made of a foam resin, but still the mountains stand and the oceans heave.
When I was a teenager, I didn’t understand how profoundly my early years in the Rocky Mountains influenced me. As an adult, I know now that those years hiking and exploring mountain trails and participating in national park activities cemented a deeper connection to how I would go on to experience the world for the remaining decades of my life.
When I was twelve, we took a driving vacation south into the United States from Calgary. I clearly remember being astonished by Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park https://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm as the geyser erupted with jaw dropping precision from a deceptively calm earth. I also walked through a trail in the park where water pooled in shades of cerulean blue and lime green, bubbling with heat and some unknown mystery of existence. The trip culminated in a visit to the Grand Canyon National Park https://www.nps.gov/grca/index.htm. My twelve-year-old self was dazed. Who knew the world could be so vast? How could the land cleave in such a dramatic way to create what I was seeing? What else would I see if I travelled far and wide?
I have now lived in the United States for eleven years and been a US citizen for two years. I’m a supporter of the national parks and frequently donate financially to help protect them, so that the mountains can still stand without being abused, and the oceans can continue to heave without being choked with pollution and plastics, or at least less than without guardianship. I had known nothing, however, about the history of the national parks and their evolution across the US.
In Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2012, UMBC professor Denise D. Meringolo illustrates the journey of how US national parks evolved in tandem with large cultural museums such as the Smithsonian. (Although Meringolo’s book deftly explores the expansion of the field of public history since the 19th century, for me, the history of the national parks was especially fascinating.)
In the beginning, writes Meringolo, it was scientists who began selecting nationally significant places (p. xxix), and saw the need to protect landscapes and artifacts for future generations. This resulted in contentious relationships in the 19th century between the museums of the Smithsonian and the Park Services museums (p. xxx) as the parks strove to prove that their museums were just as culturally and materially valuable as those in Washington and other urban think tank centers. These disputes and the resulting questions “laid the philosophical foundation for defining history as an arena of public service” (p.xxxi) in the years to come.
Yellowstone became America’s first national park in 1872. In 1906, President Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act, which gave presidents the authority to create national monuments to preserve areas of natural or historic interest on public lands. Then in 1916, President Wilson established the National Park Service to consolidate management of America’s (at the time) 34 federal parks under a single agency. In 1931, Verne Chatelain became the first chief historian of the National Park Service. (I found this interesting oral history with Mr. Chatelain online at http://npshistory.com/publications/ch...)
It was Chatelain’s job, writes Meringolo, to “‘breathe the breath of life into American history for those to whom it has heretofore been a dull recital of meaningless facts to recreate for the average citizen something of the color, the pageantry, and the dignity of our national past.’” (p.106)
America’s national parks were given their modern shape by the huge programs enabled and powered by FDR’s New Deal during the depression years. In addition to roads and physical infrastructure, parks received status as educational centers and museums of nature. More specifically, Congress embraced and cemented the fact that “exposure to nature would inspire visitors to relent in their undignified search for recreation and accept nature conservation as a more important national value.” (p. 87)
The US now has 61 national parks stretching from Alaska to Key West, Florida. To see them all you would have to visit 29 states. From the time I myself first visited national parks, both American and Canadian, to now with my own children, I am firmly onboard with the understanding that national parks and monuments are important museums of nature. We owe it to future generations to fund, protect, and invest in these natural museums.
June 3, 2025
Denise D. Meringolo’s Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History seeks to tell the history of public history as a field of history. Using oral histories of early public historians and federal documents surrounding the National Park Service and the Smithsonian Museums, Meringolo argues that the history of public history remains interlinked with the expansion of federal authority following the American Civil War. Arguing that practices of public history lacked authority because of gendered associations with women’s organizations. Chapters discussing the development of the National Park Service, Meringolo convincingly contends that federal demand for historians to work within National Parks provided the field of public history that it lacked from academia. The concluding chapters focus on the creation of public history programs in American universities beginning in the 1970s, in response to growing concerns over the scarcity of jobs within academia. While a top-down history of public history, Museums, Monuments, and National Park presents an insightful timeline for the development of public history’s origins in nineteenth century women’s societies to a field with programs in universities across the United States.
November 8, 2018
In Museums, Monuments, and National Parks, Meringolo traces the beginnings of public history to the creation of national parks beginning in the late 19th century. In the prologue, Meringolo argues, “The goal of this book is to illuminate the cultural roots of the work we now call ‘public history’ so that we may more fairly and more accurately define and critique it” (p. xxix). Debunking the myth that public history was began in the 1970s, Meringolo argues that public history as a practice and profession grew out of the government’s development of national monuments and parks in the 1890s through the 1920s. Of particular delight to me was Meringolo's narrative of the development of the national parks in the east - the debate over whether or not there was nature worth preserving in comparison to the grandeur of the west.
March 17, 2017
The introduction and conclusion of Meringolo's book do a beautiful job of outlining the elements that comprise public history and how they came together. Perhaps even more importantly in today's political climate, the book traces the evolution of the understanding of the "public good" by the federal government (and thus by the people of the nation). Scientific and historical research and education are undoubtedly in the public interest. Our civilization has developed based on a common belief that there is a public interest worth protecting. Without that belief, what good is defense? What are we defending if we're all on our own in a "Wild West" without common goals for the betterment of society?
April 27, 2020
Interesting and useful but sometimes muddled...Glad I finally finished it. (took me forever as I've had trouble concentrating) and with this I'm still 4 books behind on my 2020 reading challenge.. (haven't been able to relax to read anything for pleasure, let alone work on my coursework/ research stuff).
This is a bad year. 😕
This is a bad year. 😕
February 7, 2019
Emphasis throughout is on political turf-building: which agency is in charge of, responsible for, the particular site being discussed? If you love reading about administrative squabbles, this is the book for you.
December 23, 2020
A fascinating study of public history in the United States, especially for people interested in public policy or federal affairs.
March 24, 2021
A lot of info in this one.
June 20, 2021
I’m a history theory wonk, and this book scratches that itch. This book discusses a lot of academic philosophy about the practices of public history, so be prepared for some deep thinking
October 24, 2024
I did not like this probably because it needed to be more diverse but it still seems useful
January 19, 2013
Great analysis of the roots of public history in the federal government, particularly the National Parks System, through the consolidation of public history as a field in the 1970s. I really enjoyed the chapter on the New Deal and using park jobs as an alternative history education for young men, but the last chapter is the best--a cogent, concise explanation of why understanding where public history comes from matters.
August 8, 2016
This book really helped me to understand the roots of a field I am passionate about. As someone who hopes to work in Public History one day, I was very drawn to this book when I saw it listed as a required reader for one of my courses. Dr. Meringolo does a nice job of tracing the roots of public history through the National Parks Service and how both History and NPS have changed over time to include, or exclude, Public Historians.
June 1, 2014
A measured look at the forces that created the public history profession and how the Federal Government and the National Park Service in particular played a critical role.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews