Is history, like love, a battlefield?

Why History and Pop Culture Are More Connected Than You Think

First, Happy Women’s History Month! Like another woman invited into an inaugural that was not explicitly about her, I too want to begin this newsletter by putting my own stamp on things. For me, that means an introduction and some stories about how I got here. 

I grew up in a family where every vacation included a stop at a historic site of some kind. I’ve been to Fort Ticonderoga, Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Gettysburg (and probably some other battlefields I’ve blocked out). If you’d known me as a kid, you would have seen a slightly shorter version of me with uneven bangs rolling her eyes while standing next to a cannon. Military history did not impress me. My dad continues to be enamored of any moment in the past when mostly white guys fought for America, Ireland, or some other cause, nation-state related, or not. I guess under the surface I was always skeptical of these narratives, or of what it had to do with me. I was also deeply curious about what these kinds of histories did for the people interested in them. I still am. Standing before a diorama of some fort recreating troop positions of some battle, I would always see the real look of wonder on my dad's face and internally think, “Really?” Initially, this made me think history was not for me. That felt true at a museum I once visited as a kid that featured a fort prominent in the Seven Years’ War. “This is history!!” the banner said, excitedly, as I attempted to retreat into the AC of the gift shop, dreaming of the TCBY yogurt we were promised afterwards. 

I set out to find my sources of wonder, or what librarians I dealt with would retroactively describe as “strange interests.” I went through a Titanic phase. I got too invested in Ancient Egypt. I watched Animaniacs and loved their forays into “great figures in history” (mostly men). I loved watching Casper and dreamed of living in a house haunted by Christina Ricci and ghosts of past residents who may return to visit me. It felt like I was constantly collecting information and tidbits for a trivia team that never came calling. I was invested in things like Brain Quest which fed me trivia I would never use, but deeply needed to know, like a gentle reminder that Prohibition and Reconstruction were . . . not the same thing. 

I loved learning strange facts, like presidential trivia about the first president to own a car (Taft), or that John Tyler’s grandson is still alive. None of this mattered, but it mattered to me. 

My obsession with trivia is an offshoot of this childhood investigatory impulse. I didn’t like learning tidbits about history because I wanted to feel smart. Mainly, I just loved gossip and a good story. For example, I can’t express the glee I felt when I learned FDR and Eleanor had a rocky marriage, made so in part by the revelation of his affair with her former social secretary. Eleanor, unpacking her husband’s suitcase upon his return from a business trip, discovered love letters from his mistress. Their marriage was never the same, but she stayed with him and helped nurse him when he contracted polio just a few years later. The tea! I didn’t delight in other people’s misfortune, but was relieved to learn that notable people were also . . . people, who lived and had their issues.  What was she thinking? What was he thinking? I had learned about her in a Smithsonian exhibit on First Ladies that Aretha Franklin may call “Beautiful gowns, beautiful dresses,” and couldn’t believe the intrigue I discovered from a biography I stumbled upon in the library. I spent a lot of time with my grandmother growing up and had to call her right away to let her know about this news bulletin (that happened in 1918). Her response? Smoking a cigarette on the other end of the phone, a vice she would deny her entire life because she didn’t want us all to start smoking due to “peer pressure,” she took a long drag and said, “now, that’s why I didn’t vote for him.” 

My grandmother Mary aka Fluffy, was a lot. She allegedly majored in History at a small Catholic women’s college but claimed to hate the entire subject. She’d had been admitted on the largesse of a relative who was a nun at the school, and helped her afford attendance that would have been otherwise impossible. She was housed in an open room cordoned off by curtains that designated “dorm rooms” for girls there on the cheap. Rich girls got their rooms with actual walls. Talking late into the night between the curtains, the noise amongst the cheaper broads would reach the nuns on their floor and suddenly the students would hear the rosary beads worn around the waist of a disciplinarian’s habit clicking together as they stormed down the hall to scold them. Describing her college experience years later, she would jokingly say “Yeah, I did time there.” 

The more I got into presidential trivia and demanded to know my grandmother’s voting history, the more she leaned into a performative dementia about having voted for anyone. If anything, she seemed to believe hiding her voting history would absolve her of any responsibility for whatever her chosen candidate did while in office. “I didn’t put him in there! I wouldn’t have allowed that” she once told me when I described the Cuban Missile Crisis, as if she could have prevented that entire episode by not voting for Kennedy. This comedic bit made it that much harder to measure her forgetfulness when she did start to develop dementia years later. One of the questions doctors used to evaluate her was “Who is the president?” Rolling her eyes, she’d huff “You won’t put that on me!” Or, channeling a disappointed WASP mother at a country club mixer, she’d simply say “We don’t talk about him.” 

These conversations fascinated me, even when I was being stonewalled. The only thing better than assembling all kinds of knowledge, anecdotes, and bios of people in the past was talking about it with some unsuspecting relative or friend. I have visceral memories of sitting with my mom at a KFC as a small child, describing in great detail the reign of Pharaoh Ramses II. Why? Who can say? Alternately, I made my grandmother discuss Watergate with me and try to retroactively understand how it all went down. (She would want me to remind you she was not involved and did not vote for Nixon). 

This could read like the origin story of Harriet the Spy, but the thing that tipped me from pursuing being a PI toward being a historian was a book series and a vacation. When I was 9, I got my first American Girl doll and books. Meeting Molly McIntire felt like looking into a self-involved bespeckled mirror. I loved her saddle shoes, her spunk (a very 90s buzzword for girls with self-possession), and her passion. Yes, her history helped me bridge my own experiences to people in my life who remembered life during the War (my grandmother, great-aunts, and apparently, Tom Hanks?) It also helped me understand what history could do. 

To that point, I thought history was trivia to memorize for fun, textbooks to be bored by at school, or an empty battlefield brought to life only in my dad’s imagination. What reading Molly’s books with my mom taught me was that history was something I could think with. It helped me make sense of the nonsense and served as my personal Clarissa Explains it All. At the same age, I was also deep in preparation for my First Communion, and reading a lot of biblical stories that were meant to assign meaning to my life and teach me right from wrong. Mostly, these stories filled me with fear and made me feel like I was already a bad person. Molly’s stories, by comparison, presented me with another girl’s experiences in a time outside my own. Her challenges (such as they were), her hopes, her friendships, her family relationships, all the things that defined her world and the anxieties she navigated about fitting into it felt both deeply relatable and very different from my own. I never had a victory garden, but I did have real fears about fitting in with my friends. Her life and its history gave me context to understand my feelings, choices, and concerns. Thinking about her world helped me navigate my own. History continues to do that for me. 

Not long after this, I went on a vacation where I was presented with performance art in the form of public history. This is where I started to learn that history isn’t something that can just help me understand my history, but bigger stories as well. Gettysburg in July is probably somebody’s dream, but it isn’t mine. It was hot as hell, I was sweating like me in church, and if Pat Benatar thought love is a battlefield, she had never been to devil’s den after noon when love was the last thing on my mind. It’s hard to go on a trip with someone who is really into the destination when you are mid at best. I was very happy for my dad and brothers who seemed so into it, in no small part due to the 1993 film Gettysburg. However, I was perpetually ready for an ice cream break and wishing I was back in Amish country where life felt weird but fascinating. Sitting on the ground by another canon, I was still trying to understand how Amish culture could condone having breakfast at Denny’s. Before setting out to Gettysburg, we’d dined in a Denny’s at a table near some Amish people where I saw that they could enjoy a grand slam, but not a car ride home, or perplexingly, buttons on their clothes.  

For a respite in air conditioning, we took refuge that afternoon at the American Civil War Wax Museum (later called the Gettysburg Heritage Center). Walking down darkened alleyways between staged scenes of extremely dated wax figures, I was transfixed. This was one of the strangest things I’d ever seen in my life. These tableaus were meant to teach you about major moments in the history of the Civil War. We saw John Brown decrying slavery before his execution, Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address, and the surrender at Appomattox. The figures looked. . . grotesque. Many seemed to have not aged well in the museum, and they looked like melted candles haunting us from beyond the grave. Or, a kind of Lumiere gone wrong (and a kind of racist one at that, in the form of Confederate generals). While gazing at the still scenes, we’d be greeted with cheesy voice-over narrations with basic sound effects and booming voices assigned to Lincoln and others. I was so amazed. What did the people who made this museum want this to do? To make us love the Civil War? I was equal parts creeped out and could not tear my eyes away. 

“Lincoln” at the American Civil War Wax Museum. The look on Mary Todd’s face is such a choice (Flickr)

As we turned the last corner of the exhibit and went through doors marked “exit,” I was sad the strange experience was ending. Little did I know I was just about to see the best part. The exit doors brought us into a small indoor arena, shrouded in darkness but for footlights to guide us to our seats. After a few minutes of silence, a record player began to blast loud patriotic music over the speakers. A voice of God narration started to tell us about the Civil War from the shots at Fort Sumpter forward, with little to no preamble. Spotlights overhead would light up a small portion of the arena where we’d see a scene described by the narrator. Some made sense (like Lincoln reading the Gettysburg Address), while others felt like a choice. At one point, a spotlight focused on a man on an operating table having his leg amputated. “Donate it to the museum!”* Major Gen. Daniel Sickles yelled, personally sending his amputated leg to the Army Medical Museum where he’d visit it for the rest of his life.  Now, pause and consider a 9-year-old listening to this scene. What in the hell was going on? Consider that not long after this moment, the show transitioned to the end of the war and the national anthem played as all the scenes in the arena were lit up at once. As I was sitting trying to process truly any of this, I noticed a man sitting near us in the otherwise empty arena. As the anthem played, he had his hand on his heart and was crying. I stared at him and wondered sincerely what the tears were about. The war? Some personal war?. . the notion of visiting a former limb at a museum? Was he too feeling similarly in shock? I’d seen Nancy Kerrigan skate just months before at a tour of champions, and that arena scene made me tear up. This? I had no idea what I was seeing. 

I keep thinking about the arena all these years later because it’s camp, it’s insane, and some part of it felt like it was trying to get at something real. Public history has a way of using storytelling to communicate the importance of some moments in the past. Thinking back on that day now, I can also appreciate how much its stories help people navigate larger histories about life today. The Civil War continues to matter for the stories we tell ourselves about race, the weight of memory, and the gap between the freedoms in our founding documents and the lived realities of many people in our country. I don’t know what it did for that man that day, but whatever it was, it felt very real and present for him. 

There’s a poem by Mary Oliver that gets at how I imagine thinking with history. In “Breakage,” the speaker describes standing on the edge of the sea and seeing all its small elements, 

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

    full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Though I left that arena years ago, (and the museum itself closed in 2014, leading to some truly stunning fire sale photography along with the sale of a nearby museum’s wax figures), I can still imagine myself there. At least, that’s what history invites me to do. “History is a conversation and sometimes a shouting match between present and past, though often the voices we most want to hear are barely audible,” Laurel Thatcher Ulrich noted in her 2007 book Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History. Sometimes I feel like I’m having a conversation with the past, with former versions of myself, my ancestors, or the people whose diaries, letters, and stories have survived. I don’t discriminate in where I look for these stories. US Weekly is as real a source to me as any government document for what it can tell us about life today. These sources and stories invite us to imagine what it might mean to be a woman today versus generations ago, how citizenship has changed, or even what it means to be a celebrity today compared to other eras. 

 I sometimes imagine how people will understand our history and times. I wonder, for example, what they’ll make of women on TikTok romanticizing lifestyles of 50’s housewives as well-paid influencers. How does it stack up with our history? What would Lucille Ball think? She, an actor who rose to fame embodying a housewife who refused to settle for quiet domesticity whose ability to make I Love Lucy itself was made possible by her real-life transgression of the housewife ideal.  I am thinking about this all the time! Maybe overthinking it! Too soon to say. 

Anyone can have a take on this, can sit with me in the imaginary arena, watch the show, and speculate about what it means. It’s not far removed from gossiping with a friend (or grandmother) on the phone. History is not just something made by people with advanced degrees, nepo babies with illustrious (to them) pedigrees, or Nicholas Cage in National Treasure. As Gilder Lerner, considered a formative figure in developing women’s history as a field once said, “All human beings are practicing historians. . . We live our lives; we tell our stories. It is as natural as breathing.” 

For me, history was never a battlefield, but an arena where I’m still watching the show. I am looking forward to taking on pop culture and history topics in this newsletter. Watching what’s happening online, on TV, in movies, in music, in celeb culture, etc. can tell us so much about our lives today (as can events in the past).

It’s also just fun! I’m so glad you’re here.