Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service

Mitchell Whisnant, Anne; Miller, Marla; Nash, Gary; Thelen, David

The National Park Service (NPS) takes care of and interprets some of the most powerful and instructive historic places in the nation. Millions of Americans each year cultivate a deeper appreciation of the nation’s past through encounters with historic buildings, landscapes, and narratives preserved by the NPS and its constituent agencies and programs. At two-thirds of the nearly four hundred national park units, history is at the heart of the visitor experience, and human activity has profoundly shaped them all. History is central to the work of the Park Service. In 2008, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) agreed, at the behest of the NPS chief historian’s office, to undertake a study of “the State of History in the National Park Service.” Four historians—Anne Mitchell Whisnant (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Marla Miller (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Gary Nash (University of California, Los Angeles), and David Thelen (Indiana University)—were charged with carrying out this assessment. Although only about 182 NPS employees carry the job title of “historian” (0170 series), many more are engaged in the agency’s vast history-related preservation, research, compliance, and interpretive work. Therefore, this study focuses both on what historians do within NPS, and the larger question of who does history in and for the Park Service. The centerpiece of our work was an electronic questionnaire sent to over 1,500 members of NPS’s permanent staff who have some responsibility for history. We received 544 responses, generating more than 800 single-spaced pages of discursive replies. We also solicited perspectives and advice from numerous retired and current NPS historians and administrators, including key leaders at the regional and national levels. We consulted a set of external stakeholders— historians generally based in colleges and universities who have worked closely with the agency. Team members visited dozens of parks and conducted seven large-group listening sessions at annual meetings of the OAH, National Council on Public History (NCPH), and National Association for Interpretation (NAI). Finally, we combed through OAH-sponsored site-visit reports, NPS administrative histories, and of other previous studies. These strategies yielded a broad view of the fortunes of NPS history practice in recent decades. We found that much is going well. Our study identified nearly 150 examples of historical projects and programs that NPS personnel regard as effective, inspiring models. We ourselves observed many instances of high-quality scholarship and creative interpretation. More than a dozen of these successes are profiled herein, as lamps lighting the path ahead. But we also found that the agency’s ability to manage its sites “unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations”—let alone achieve its highest aspirations to become the nation’s largest outdoor history classroom—has been imperiled by the agency’s weak support for its history workforce, by agency structures that confine history in isolated silos, by longstanding funding deficiencies, by often narrow and static conceptions of history’s scope, and by timid interpretation. As a consequence, one of our survey respondents wrote, history in the NPS is “sporadic, interrupted, superbly excellent in some instances and vacant in others.”1 Our findings describe many specific aspects of the state of history practice today—an uneven landscape of inspiration and success amid policies and practices that sometimes inhibit high-quality work.

Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service

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