and history?

I’m a bad historian and that might make bad history

Had the great pleasure today to spend several hours reading other people’s correspondence from forty years ago. I’m not sure what I was looking for, just that I found some bits that definitely weren’t it and possibly mean that what I was looking for doesn’t exist.

What?

About two years ago a group of international cultural folks came through my museum, very purposefully looking for and taking photographs with the portrait of our long-dead founding director. Turns out, even though these museum and heritage professionals were separated from that director by a generation and about 7000 miles, he had some sort of effect on they way that they understood their work and its place in the world. They came up the hill to see our place, to revere our baroque portrait. Presumably John said something important, right?

That’s what I was looking for today. Not what he said, I’ve read all of that and am pretty hep to it. I was looking for the threads that maybe showed he knew what he was up to. The strings that tied a preacher in a storefront museum to the national museums of the developing world. I found some stuff, though most of it seemed pretty superficial, really thin, and only over a very brief period of time. This guy had a hot product for about three years and, boy howdy, did he know it. But after that, almost nothing for a decade (that’s when I ran out of time). A letter here and there, a couple of tours for students, but nothing bigger. Nothing that would seem to bring a minister of culture to a place ministers of culture rarely go.

What was interesting was what he _was_ working on. Local stuff, teachy stuff, power stuff. Nothing that I’m really interested in, but he was interested, so should I be?

Elaine Gurian once told me that once the founding directors of real museums go away, the places die a little (or a lot) because they’ve lost more than a boss, they’ve lost the sense that the way they were going could best be solved by a museum. That is and is not the case here (very much in both respects) though in ways I suspect I don’t understand. What I did see in the gaps between what I was looking for today was a profound engagement with his local that was almost in spite of his role at the museum. He was advocating for things that were to his professional detriment (maybe?) — he was a voice because of his gig, but had a role much larger than that. Maybe I’m looking for the wrong thing. Is there a thing here to think about? Is this what good historians, real historians do?