The following book review was recently posted on H-South and will
certainly be of interest to many Va-Hist subscribers:
 
Seth C. Bruggeman. Here, George Washington Was Born: Memory, Material
Culture, and the Public History of a National Monument.
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0820331783>  Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2008. xi + 260 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN
978-0-8203-3177-5; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8203-3178-2. 

Reviewed by Alexandra Lord (National Park Service)
Published on H-South (October, 2011)
Commissioned by Catherine A. Cardno


In the wake of the War of 1812, Americans came to accept both a
collective identity and a shared past. Reflecting the desire to
celebrate and commemorate this shared past, George Washington Parke
Custis traveled with two friends to Popes Creek, the birthplace of
Custis's stepgrandfather, George Washington. Although the Washingtons'
family house no longer existed, Custis and his friends marked the spot
they believed to be Washington's birthplace with a stone marker. In the
nearly two centuries that followed Custis's trip, additional layers of
interpretation and markers replaced that first stone as the site grew in
importance to the nation.

Seth C. Bruggeman's engrossing study of the George Washington Birthplace
National Monument unpeels these layers, providing a provocative look at
how and why Americans care about birthplaces and commemorative sites.
Although Here, George Washington Was Born began life as an
administrative history of the 550-acre National Park Service Washington
Birthplace, Bruggeman has rejected the heavily rigid structure common in
most administrative park histories, presenting instead a lively
narrative that explores the conflicts inherent in the development and
interpretation of commemorative sites, particularly birthplaces. In the
process, Bruggeman also provides insights into how shifting views of
race and gender have shaped Americans' understanding of this and other
important historic sites. 

Sites, such as the George Washington Birthplace, have always made
historians uneasy. Not only has it been difficult, given Washington's
own reticence about his personal life, to sort fact from fiction when
interpreting the story of Washington here or at Mount Vernon, it has
also been difficult to determine the significance of birthplaces
overall. After all, Washington spent only the first three years of his
life at Popes Creek and there is no indication that the site held any
special meaning for him. Bruggeman points out, however, that, as early
as the seventeenth century, commemorations of birthplaces were fostering
the development of heritage tourism in Europe. In America, commemoration
of these sites "has been particularly useful toward sustaining the
long-standing notion ... that the nation's unique environment has
fostered a similarly unique citizenry" (p. 14).

Tourists and site visitors have flocked to the George Washington
Birthplace and other similar sites out of the belief that these places
provide an opportunity to learn about or venerate an individual.
However, as historians know, such sites as this one have the potential
to reflect a much more complicated past, one that may tell us less about
the life of Washington and more about our attempts to define and
understand ourselves through history. Popes Creek is an especially
important place to tell this type of layered history as Washington's
significant role has made the site a place of unofficial and official
veneration for over a hundred years. Given its status as a birthplace,
the Washington Birthplace also provides insights into shifting
perceptions of motherhood and women's status. And, of course, the site
forces an investigation of Washington's relationship with slavery as
well as the National Park Service's reluctance to confront the ugly
realties of slavery in telling Washington's story and the almost
constant exclusion of African Americans from participation in the public
commemoration of Washington. Bruggeman illustrates the depth and
complexity of this racism through stories in which African American
visitors were turned away from fear of "complaints from white visitors"
to the heavily paternalistic relationship between the park's
superintendent and "Uncle Annanias," an African American farmer who
provided "local color and interest" at the site (pp. 153, 157). 

Bruggeman's book is divided into six chapters. The first chapter
explores the informal attempts to commemorate Washington. Dominated by
the actions of Custis, a reenactor and a fervent admirer of Washington,
these efforts reflected both the romanticism of the period as well as an
early attempt to create and establish American memory. Chapter 2, which
focuses on the emergence of the colonial revival, explores the tensions
between the female-dominated Wakefield National Memorial Association
(the organization created to preserve and promote Popes Creek) and the
male-dominated National Park Service. Chapter 3 focuses on the
discovery, excavation, and backfilling of the foundations of the
Washington house. This chapter highlights the fledgling development of
the field of historic archeology and the contested meaning of the
Memorial House (a house that was built in 1930 and that adherents
embraced as a replica of the Washington house--although no one involved
in its construction had ever seen the original). In chapter 4, Bruggeman
expands on his analysis of the debates surrounding the Memorial House.
Chapter 5 places this Birthplace National Monument within the context of
the socioeconomic upheaval of the 1950s and 1960s, exploring the
complexity of the National Park Service's often racist approach to the
site, which entailed recognizing and following "local laws and customs
regarding segregation" (p. 154). In his final chapter, Bruggeman
documents how the complexity of these overlapping and often confused
approaches has caused problems for both site visitors and the National
Park Service.

Pointing out that "no other organization, the academy included, plays a
more important role in shaping how our nation's history is understood"
than the National Park Service, Bruggeman places the efforts of the
National Park Service front and center in his work (p. 6). But Bruggeman
also highlights and discusses the important roles that women's
organizations played in promoting historic sites and historic house
museums. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, historic
organizations, such as the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and the
Wakefield National Memorial Association, were composed of prominent and
politically active women who fostered and promoted a specific vision of
the nation's past. While these women's organizations were pushed to the
side by professional male historians and preservationists during the
1920s, the emphasis these women had placed on telling domestic stories
and stories that promoted the ideal of motherhood lingered and continued
to shape many of the nation's most prominent historic sites throughout
much of the twentieth century in both direct and indirect ways. 

Here, George Washington was Born is a must read for historians of
preservation as well as curators, but it is also a work that should be
read by historians within the academy. Bruggeman provides important
insights into the difficulties in preserving and interpreting sites for
nonhistorians, and, more important, in ensuring that the history which
reaches the general public is complex and reflects the nuances we have
come to expect in academic history.


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