When I worked as a historical interpreter at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, in the early 2000s, there was a bit of controversy among my colleagues over the launch of an online virtual tour of Monticello, which included 360 degree views of the various rooms in the house. Several of my fellow interpreters were concerned that this initiative was misguided, that given the ability to have a look around Monticello for free at home, many potential visitors would be unlikely to make their way to Charlottesville and pay to visit the site, putting our jobs at risk. This never really struck me as likely but it does raise the question of why people visit museums and formally recognized historic sites such as battlefields, when they can gain much of the information presented there on the internet. For me, they are places that evoke in a concrete way the people of the past, who inhabited the same ground or buildings that I am walking through.

Monticello, Photo from Wikimedia Commons

I have recently been thinking about the relationship between physical space and history, as many of my recent posts on History Compass Exchanges indicate. Whether writing about the rare experience of seeing the physical embodiment of nineteenth-century science while visiting the dinosaurs at Chrystal Palace Park, highlighting the historical possibilities of the digital historical maps of Hypercities, or the immediacy of looking at the Guardian’s interactive map of the first night of the Blitz, the way that physical space can evoke history has been on my mind. I was recently struck by a story on NPR about Craig Childs attempts to map the Hohokam civilization of thousands of years ago onto the landscape of modern Phoenix. Childs, the author of the book Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession, helped to explain why the physicality of historical markers is so compelling, “We never live in just one time. A well of history rests in the ground beneath us. And sometimes, when the light is just right, you can see through to the other side.” (more…)