Performing (Midwestern) History on Site

Session Chair: Lisa West Norwood
Drake University
lisa.norwood@drake.edu

Lincoln-Douglas and the Radium Girls: (Re) Enacting and (Re) Dressing Up Local Histories

In 1994, the rural township of Ottawa, IL assembled in the former town square to reenact the first Lincoln-Douglas debate, which occurred onsite in 1858. The community went to great pains reconstructing precise texts from primary sources, and dutifully assigned individual crowd reactions to community members. CSPAN descended upon the town with cameras and reporters to chronicle the event. In the ten years since, the town has abandoned its historical roots, showing no further interest in reenactments or local history.

Ottawa’s second claim to fame is that fifty years after Lincoln left the stage, the same downtown area hosted Radium Dial, a factory which decimated the town’s population by contaminating dozens of its young women with fatal doses of radium from iridescent paint used to cover dials on clock faces. Much of the radium still remains buried, and the town suffers 300% higher cancer rates than its neighbors. Several books and a documentary film on the subject met great resistance from the town, which rejected ideas of a docudrama on the matter. Those few residents who were willing to help the documentary crew reconstruct the past, walking them by the factories and radioactive dumps down to the cemeteries, telling their family histories, faced ostracism.

This paper examines the professed purposes and benefits of historical reenactments. It focuses specifically on dramaturgy and the community, and examines the ways in which a people choose whether to draw currency from a series of events in a town’s past. It also explores the ability of a group to align hegemonically to interpret and respond to disparate portions of their shared history, and questions to what extent a group’s collective social psychology is determined by regionalism.

Gregory Carter Mitchell
Chicago Board of Education

Hannibal: The Town That Never Was

Born and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, I was surprised when I first discovered that Mark Twain’s literature ranged beyond the narrow scope of Tom and Becky, the infamous cave, and jumping frogs. In fact, while adolescent locals dressed as Huck Finn make regular appearances at everything from the community theatre to regional fairs, rarely is the character contextualized. Further, in what Shelley Fisher Fishkin aptly describes as a peculiar version of “whitewashing,” many Hannibal residents attempt to completely deny the racial implications of Twain’s themes. According to the scope of Hannibal tourism, Twain’s work begins with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, includes a few harmless short stories, and ends with some clever aphorisms. Nevertheless, literary scholars do visit Hannibal, as Fishkin’s personal narrative in Lighting Out for the Territory testifies, and Twain’s Hannibal continues to hold a powerful place in the Americanist imagination. For many literary scholars, a visit to Hannibal unsettles, for Hannibal’s image of Twain’s life and literature remains distorted at best. However, Fishkin and others may have overlooked the way that the place called Hannibal has been shaped by this narrow reading of Twain’s corpus. While it surprises Fishkin that a Hannibal historic marker reads, “HERE STOOD THE BOARD WHICH TOM SAWYER PERSUADED HIS GANG TO PAY HIM FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF WHITEWASHING” (17), the apparently seamless absorption of Twain’s fiction into the fabric of the town’s history is precisely what makes Hannibal an example of nostalgia par excellence, a place that never was. This dis-placed quality is also what keeps droves of tourists returning, year after year, to experience what Life termed “‘an orgy of wholesomeness’” (qtd. in Fishkin 33). My paper explores the intersections between the literary and historic Hannibal, emphasizing the performative nature of historic downtown Hannibal.

Cammie M. Sublette
University of Arkansas – Fort Smith
csublett@uafortsmith.edu

Cahokia Mounds Display and Nineteenth Century Illustrations of the Mound-Builders

This paper will explore how the current exhibitions of the Cahokia Mounds site perform the unknown history of the “mound-builders” who once lived in the Mississippi River valley and other riparian areas of the Midwest. The presentation will focus on visual representation and historical narrative. I will not try to “read” the exhibition as a cultural statement so much as try to see how the current exhibitions are responding to previous representations of this mysterious past as well as to “new” findings. It is so easy to mock 19 th century speculations about the mound-builders and their past, but it makes a viewer uneasy to see how much the visual reconstruction of these sites owes to the “pseudo-scientific” efforts we so easily dismiss.

A formal paper will be distributed ahead of time and time during the panel itself will be devoted to visual images, such as slides, and educational/promotional literature. I may use material from additional sites as well, depending on research opportunities in the next several months.

Questions I want to raise are the ways in which history is performed in public venues and how that performance inter-relates to academic work in reconstructing the past, whether archaeological, historical, or literary. The immediate inspiration for this version of my research is the alarming way in which the large panel in the display center in the 1990s echoed the clearly mythical, speculative illustrations of the 19 th century. Either 19 th century local researchers were more brilliant in their imaginative reconstruction than we give them credit for, or contemporary academic work is influenced in subjective ways by the imaginative strivings of the past. Either way, although we now have very different sociological and anthropological understandings of the “mound-builders,” calling them the Mississippian Culture, or dating them to the Woodland Era, and linking them ethnically to various tribes, like the Natchez, the way museums visually represent them and their sites seems very similar to the ways the “Welsh Indians,” “lost tribe of Israel” and other “crazy” epithets were depicted.

Lisa West Norwood
Drake University
lisa.norwood@drake.edu