Professional Ethics: The Smithsonian and Bill Cosby

The Smithsonian is including two items featuring Bill Cosby in their new African-American history museum but now is not the time to display these items when he has been accused by more than fifty women of sexual assault and the cases are pending. Instead of defending the fact that there are only two items out of 3,000 that they are utilizing, they should have simply stated that they have opted to withdraw the items. Why? There are several reasons, the first of which is that Cosby, despite his past television and comedian celebrity status, is current and controversial news. His story isn’t history. Yet. Still, attorney Lisa Bloom missed the point when she wrote that the Smithsonian and “its silence on the dozens of rape allegations against Bill Cosby only perpetuates ignorance” (New York Times). It would be inappropriate for the museum to comment on the rape allegations. Again, these allegations are ongoing news, not history.

Granted, museum management of controversy doesn’t follow these precepts. The typical response is, and should be, in favor of free speech and curatorial freedom. Allowing the display to remain and defending  your ground, while carefully collecting public comment, is the preferred stance. The problem is that the Smithsonian muddied the water. They first displayed a private art collection of the Cosbys’ and didn’t disclaim that they had received a $716,000 grant from the Cosbys’ until the collection had closed under pressure (New York Times). With this second inclusion in a different museum, the curator noted that it was the decision of one person to add the two pieces and that it wasn’t the decision of any high-level meetings. This makes it appear that they didn’t properly curate the exhibit if the curator was either oblivious or worse yet, wanted to promote an agenda.

This shouldn’t be attributed to taking an apolitical or non-confrontational position on our part. We know museums have a long history of gut-wrenching displays. The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles is focused on the holocaust, not only because it is history that shouldn’t be forgotten, but in part to point out the consequences of prejudice and discrimination. Madame Tussauds may be a favorite for wax figures of celebrities and historical figures, but we remember that Marie Tussaud’s original work during the French Revolution included searching through corpses for severed heads to make their death masks. Grim and horrific realities are not something that we as directors, historians, curators and conservators pretend didn’t happen. What we can’t forget in this ‘era of instant’ and the desire to be the forerunner in communication is the delicate balance that we must retain: the respect and trust of not only our peers but of the public. This trust was damaged when the Smithsonian failed to acknowledge that anything related to Bill Cosby is a current event.

In the interim, the Smithsonian can carefully conserve those two pieces, and any other Cosby memorabilia. There are 2,998 pieces significantly representing the African-American story in eleven separate exhibits, and for now, that will be enough. The governing authority of the Smithsonian, under the ideals of the ethical governance of museums, needs to restore its image that “it is responsive to and represents the interests of society” (aam-us.org). Baldly stated, a museum isn’t anything without the trust of the public.

Works Referenced

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/03/29/us/politics/ap-us-smithsonian-bill-cosby.html?_r=1

http://ncac.org/resource/museum-best-practices-for-managing-controversy

http://www.aam-us.org/resources/ethics-standards-and-best-practices/code-of-ethics

News Analysis: Cuba in Context

AN ABBREVIATED HISTORY

For geographical reference, the island of Cuba is 42,803 square miles, closest in size to the U.S. state of Virginia, and the distance between the southern tip of Florida and Cuba is 90 miles. Cuba was a Spanish territory until December 10, 1898, and three years later the Platt Amendment was incorporated into their constitution. This amendment gave the U.S. intervention rights into Cuba’s internal affairs, disallowed them financial relationships or treaties with other countries, and allowed the U.S. to have a piece of the southern portion of the island for the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

In 1934, the Platt Amendment was repealed with the exception that the U.S. retained the leased naval base. General Fulgencia Batista gained the reins of power as president and eventually as dictator. In 1953, Fidel Castro led a failed rebellion against Batista and was imprisoned. Two years later, Castro was released. In 1958, Castro, Che Guevara (a Marxist guerilla leader and physician from Argentina) along with Mexican revolutionaries, forced Batista to flee the country.

On the world stage at this time, the Cold War was in full force between the democratic Western bloc, where the United States was a large participant, and the Communist Eastern bloc with the USSR leading the way. Everyone lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. An escalation of tensions occurred when in 1960, Cuba nationalized all U.S. assets on the island after American company executives refused to process Russian oil. The U.S. responded with sanctions and a limited embargo. In 1961, the U.S. cut diplomatic ties with Cuba preceding the Bay of Pigs – a U.S. government-sanctioned action with CIA-trained Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro’s Communist rule. It failed. Badly. Castro declared his political philosophy to be Marxist-Leninist, and a U.S. embargo of Cuba was put into place.

In a televised speech on October 22, 1962, President John Kennedy announced of the presence of nuclear Soviet missiles on Cuba, that a naval blockade would be put around the island and force would be used if necessary. The Cuban Missile Crisis continued for days while many were convinced that this was the end of the world. A last-minute agreement between Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, and President Kennedy resolved this crisis, but the Cold War would continue nearly 30 more years.

For Cuba, the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s meant the end of Soviet subsidies, throwing the country into a severe economic depression. Cuba then became an integral part of illicit cocaine trade into the U.S. Recently, President Obama visited Cuba where Fidel Castro’s younger brother, Raúl, is the current president. Fidel, now 89, criticized Obama after the visit by claiming the Bay of Pigs and history between the Cold War belligerents would not be forgotten. Obama made clear that the tensions should be left behind, and that the U.S. could bolster Cuba’s economy and political reform.


THE ANALYSIS

Perhaps the tensions can be left behind, we can’t forget the lessons of the past fifty years. In some measure, we want to emulate President Franklin Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy of non-interference when the Platt Amendment was repealed. We can’t, however, set them adrift again. Mark Erwin, former US Ambassador to Seychelles, noted that “their economy will blow up if you release too much economic freedom at one time”. Our efforts should be focused on assisting Cuba with public policy development to protect their assets and to establish a viable economy for their benefit of all their citizens.

A case in point is tourism. Of the many American industries that are eagerly looking for opportunities in Cuba, this is the one that immediately comes to mind. Some amount of tourism would be wonderful, but the consequences of uncontrolled growth could mean Cubans lose their homes, livelihoods and access to resources in favor of new hotels and tourist services. In many of these scenarios, the financial benefits have gone to a few well-off corporations while poverty levels of locals rise. Conversely, tourism can alleviate poverty when policy requires that it insure that tourism will benefit residents by offering viable, permanent, contracted employment while protecting cultural and natural resources. This is not an altruistic dream, but instead, the only answer to avoiding a repeat of history where an injured and affronted Cuba gives a warm welcome to our greatest enemy. It was the nuclear-armed USSR then, and without careful assistance, it could be ISIS or our next great enemy in the coming years.


Works Referenced

Acosta, Jim and Richard Quest. “Future of US-Cuba Relations with Guest Mark Erwin”. CNN International. EBSCO Database. Accessed 3 April 2016.

Ahmed, Azam. “Fidel Castro Criticizes Barack Obama’s Efforts to Change Cuba.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 28 Mar. 2016. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

“The Bay of Pigs Invasion Begins.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

Central Intelligence Agency Staff. The 2007 World Fact Book. Potomac Books. Dulles, VA. 2006. Print.

“Cuba Timeline.” Public Broadcasting System. PBS, n.d. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

History.com Staff. “Cuban Missile Crisis.” History.com. A&E Television Networks, 01 Jan. 2010. Web. 03 Apr. 2016.

Kearns, Myra. “Cuban Missile Crisis Citizen Response.” Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum. National Archives and Records Administration, n.d. Web. 3 Apr. 2016.

ArcGIS 10 Review: One new feature is a siren’s song for historians

Single User Purchase: $1500 or Basic Annual Subscription: $800

Check the www.esri.com website for multi-user and multiple extension pricing.

Advantages: If you have the data, you can map any temporal event.

Disadvantages: The software is complex and training is needed.
 

If you’ve considered learning ArcGIS but dismissed it because of the learning curve, version 10 could change all of that with one new feature: the ability to display temporal data. If London doctor John Snow had ArcGIS when he was mapping the cholera outbreak in his seminal 1854 work, he could have not only mapped the number of dead and their locations, but when they died.

 

For those of you who haven’t used the software before, here are some basics. If you want to map the pandemic of 1918, for example, using the Midwest as a point of focus, you first need data in either Excel or as comma-separated value (CSV) files to import into the software. The typical data will be based on death records that include name, age, sex, location, cause of death and date. In this instance, the pandemic swept through the region twice (1918 and 1919) and there may have been early indicators in 1917. As influenza was not a reportable disease prior to the pandemic, you may wish to expand your records to include the deaths listed as pneumonia in 1917. As this point, you can likely visualize three layers of information: 1917 pneumonia deaths, and 1918 and 1919 influenza deaths, displayed over the “basemap”. Basemaps are professionally drawn maps that come with the software. As the user, you are not redrawing the Midwestern section of the United States, you are adding data to a map that you select to best fit your needs.

 

Still, there is more that ArcGIS will allow you to include. Many of the deaths that occurred were soldiers at World War I training camps, so indicating the size and location of Army and National Guard cantonments is important as is the general population distribution. The result is a valuable and instructive map, but honestly, this could just be the starting point. Should you want to explore the possibility that ecosystem disruption may have led to the emergence of this infectious disease, you could overlay the path of the 1917 tornado that stayed on the ground for seven hours and ripped up over 310 linear miles of earth. Or what about the black dust storms? Many Camp Funston (Kansas) soldiers tied the influenza to horrific dust storms made worse by the fact that this one camp burned 9,000 tons of animal manure a month, leaving the unburied result to picked up by the winds. If you have the data, you can map it and conduct a thorough analysis.

 

Once complete, maps can be explored in layers via ArcReader, an ArcGIS product, but they can also be shared as finished images for classrooms, grant proposals, peer reviews or for press-quality printing. Additionally, animations can be created illustrating changes with virtual flybys, visually moving through study areas. 

 

Now that you are excited about the possibilities, we return to the learning curve. This is not a piece of intuitive, easy-to-use software. It is high-powered, professional software that requires training. The prerequisites that ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute) states for their ArcGIS software are “knowledge of Windows-based software for basic file management and browsing is required”. Yes, you do need that, and an online tutorial plus a book or maybe two. The good news is that you don’t need to learn every aspect of ArcGIS to functionally produce a map. The software is intended to meet the needs of many industries, and unless you also plan roads, conserve view sheds or calculate delivery routes, you don’t need to purchase or utilize all the extensions.

 

According to the ARC Advisory Group, ESRI was started in 1969 as company of land-use consultants and now has 43% of the global GIS market, so you are likely to find other users to collaborate with and software that has relevance for the long-term. Allow yourself the time to learn the software and the cartographic jargon and techniques, and you likely will be well-pleased with the results. As historians, we are nothing without dates. Now there is a desktop program to visually display that temporal data that is both captivating and instructive.

 

An Explanation of My Field: The Historian

History majors often go into the field of teaching, but there are also historian positions with museums, corporations and the government. Historians, as a profession, contribute to the overall knowledge base by archiving and/or chronicling past events to share with and educate others. They can focus on big questions such as: Was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand truly the match to the straw that started World War I? But historians can also focus on the small questions: What was an aspic and why was it a popular food in America during this same time period? (An aspic is a molded dish made from gelatin, and likely you’ve had the sweet version: a jello fruit salad. Another gelatin version was savory, often spiced and containing bits of meat or fish.) This leads to questions of societal preferences as well as food availability and storage. Within the U.S., food access at that time was greatly dependent on location. Philadelphia had refrigerated warehouses while a town in midwest would likely only have had the same dry grocer as it did for the previous decades. This type of narrow history focus, and my preference, is often referred to as history from below, meaning the research is dedicated to the average person and what they experienced in their time, in a specific geographical and social setting.

A considerable part of being a historian is to analyze historical data without judgment (no matter what your or my personal feelings on the idea of ingesting fish-infused gelatin may be). The historian must not be tempted to reshape the past to the fit modern sensibilities. An excellent example of this is the book The United States in the Great War by Willis J. Abbot. Published in 1919, months after the end of World War I, it is a treasure of information. A case in point is this photo caption:

“This German submarine was caught napping and found herself at the mercy of the American destroyer Fanning. The officers and crew are on deck eager to save their lives by surrendering to a chivalrous foe. The Germans instinctively realized that their enemies were not as base and cruel as they were.”

In our politically correct world of 100 years later, uttering this today would cause a controversy, but historians don’t get to rewrite it. Analysis while carefully considering the time and context, however, is theirs for the taking. For example, one point may be that German is the number one self-identified ancestry in the United States, then and today. That makes the standard “they’re-different-so-they-must-be-a-threat” rhetoric an impossible sell when getting a country to support a war, so the media strategies were intense. A second point of consideration might be details such as the preferred journalistic stylings of the period. The words “chivalrous” and “base” (lacking morals) are generally associated with the Middle Ages, a time period that was highly idealized during the Victorian era preceding World War I. Medieval ideals weren’t just a subject of discussion – the Victorian view of them permeated philosophy, politics, art and, importantly in this instance, literature.

A third point of illumination could be the Sedition Act of 1918, which meant all Americans risked prosecution for saying the wrong thing. This included up to 20 years of imprisonment for “whoever, when the United States is at war, shall wilfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States, or the Constitution of the United States, or the military or naval forces of the United States, or the flag...” (firstworldwar.com). The response to this act meant that many writers went to the other extreme in effuse praise of the government. The act was in full effect when this textbook was published, and it wasn’t repealed until December of 1920. The end result is that the historian doesn’t rewrite the content but provides the background information to understand the context of the statement.

To me, the initial requirements to be a historian are imagination and a love of stories. Can you put yourself in the other person's shoes? Perhaps, more importantly, can you put yourself in their shoes while making every attempt to respect and honor their stories, their culture, and their religion? If so, then working on writing, archiving, researching and analytical skills plus studying the past are likely the next best steps to becoming a historian. This is not a get-rich career track, but to me, it is a fascinating one.

Works Cited
Duffy, Michael. "Firstworldwar.com." First World War.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Mar. 2016.