Questioning the Answers: Modernizing Public History to Serve the Citizens
THREE YEARS OF CONFLICT and public discussion about the President’s House on Independence Mall has clarified the history of the house and handed an enormous challenge to public historians and scholars. People who have taken even a small part in the discussion agree that much happened at the house of great significance to the nation. However, we have also learned about how we and our predecessors worked to keep much of the house’s important history silenced and sealed away from the public eye. We might even speculate on whether our predecessors were willing to accept the entire loss of the house itself to avoid facing the nested stories of American liberty and American slavery that unfolded within its walls and grounds. Though we too might prefer to turn away, at hand is our opportunity to use this history to change the future, for the sake of public history, scholarship, and indeed humanity. This site asserts powerfully that slavery and freedom were two aspects of the same project, that the meanings of slavery, not to mention the lives, work, and ideas of enslaved people, were and are the warp of our national fabric. The site indicts our decisions not to tell the history this way, implicating us directly in the continuing failure of the nation’s founding ideals. Consider a simple list of important dates related to the house’s history.