jefferson's mont cello -- and james madison's montpelier talk about how they present and pre -- 9 challenges questions they get from the public. this discussion was held at the american historical association's annual meeting. it's about 90 minutes. >> all right. good afternoon, everybody. i want to welcome everyone to this afternoon's panel. public history and public memory, talking about slavery at presidential plantations. i'm jennifer morgan. i'm a professor of history at new york university where i work on colonial histories of enslaved people. i'm very excited to be part of this afternoon's conversation. though my role here is primarily to facilitate and to learn, the presenters here have all spent their careers working in public history and have been at the front lines of important efforts

to situate the presidential plantations back into the history of slavery or to situate slavery back into the history of the presidential plantations. i'm not entirely sure, i went back and forth on how to say that, i'm not entirely sure which is the right way to say it, but i think what the crucial thing to say is that we are considering the processes that have erased the obvious location of the enslaved in the histories of the presidencies. and everyone here on this panel and many of you in the audience are involved in efforts that precisely do not assume that slavery is some sort of addition or add-on to the presidential histories but, rather, that the two are connected. to that end, i'm really excited to hear each of this afternoon's speakers talk about the work that they are undergoing at the presidential plantations. so i'm going to introduce all of them to you now in the order in which they will speak. we have planned the presentations to allow for

significant time at the end for the panelists to both engage each other and audience to ask questions. so first we're going to hear -- oh, we switched it around so many times. okay. first, we're going to hear from nancy stetts, who has been education programs manage at james monroe's highland since 2014. in this role, she hires and trains new interpreters, coordinates school and group tours and manages public programming. she created a slavery at highland program and provides training to equip staff with the ability to interpret slavery at highland through primary resources and individual biographies. prior to her work there, she served as volunteer coordinator at the imperial center for the arts and sciences and as a tour support sizer. she has an m.a. in public history of appalachian state

university. next, we're going to hear from brandon dillard. brandon is manager of special programs at mont cello. he's been with the thomas jefferson foundation since 2010. he spent most of his time in front line interpretation. -- as places of memory, identity and power. i believe he's also a bartender of some renowned. has a bit of a cult following according to my sources. christian coates is director of education and individual -- at james madison's montpelier where he began in 2000 as the student coordinator. he oversees 50 interpreters and has been at the forefront of montpelier's efforts to maintain relationships with families from montpelier's enslaved community. most recently, he was the project director for the mere distinction of color exhibition, which uses descendants' voices

to convey the spirits of their ancestors and which connects the dots between 1787 and today to shine a light on the legacy of slavery that still exists in the 21st century. please join me in welcoming them. we'll start with nancy. thank you. >> all right. well, i'm really glad to be here with you all today. it's my first a.h.a. conference, but i wanted to give you a sense of where we are at highland. i had the good fortune of starting my position four years ago when our executive director was at the beginning phases of her research, which would eventually reveal a whole different house the monroes lived in and help us reinterpret the structure we thought was their house. i've had a front row seat for that whole process. when we first started, we thought we had monroe's original house, now highland, monroe's original name and a presidential era guest house and a lot more

archaeology to do, which is really fun. but just to give you a sense of how do we interpret slavery at highland, it is required on the guided tour that guides mention slavery both on a national context as well as individual slaves by name. we have a slavery at highland drop-in station on fridays and saturdays, where you can see an interpreter in action there. they have a table full of primary resources and guests can come and just engage as long or as short a time as they wish. we attempted to have a formal walking tour and found that guests didn't have that time budgeted. by switching to a drop-in station, we're really able to multiply our engagement, which we were really happy about. we interpret slavery on the property just through the structures that are there. behind me you can see a reconstructed slave quarter done in the 1980s. here is another angel of that, flanked by an original 1821

overseer house on the left and an original monroe-era smokehouse. kind of a service yard area. highland was at its height a 3,500 acre planation right next to thomas jefferson's. montacello. you see a lot of green space there. the line of buildings you saw earlier. i think this is symbolic of everything we still have left to discover at highland. we're very much in the infancy of archeological efforts there. we know from monroe's letters, advertisement, there were a lot more buildings that would have been at highland. we know there was a blackman's building, allots more slave quarters and a cemetery we have not found yet. my boss says that's a opportunity not a challenge for us to find. stay tuned. we hope to be making those discoveries. now, in terms of the slaves who

are at highland, we know from the 1810 census they capture the snapshot where monroe's name is highlighted as 49. guests are coming and a lot of times trying to size up and compare what were the similarities and differences. highland was on the smaller side. but monroe's kind of funny in terms of numbers. when you look at his writing, one thing that really stood out to me is when he writes about how many slaves he has, you see a lot of approximate numbers, about 30, between 30 and 40, a sufficient number, he says. about 60 or 70. so i think some of this comes from the fact he's largely an absentee owner of highland. most of his political career he was living abroad or in different cities in the united states. he's really relying on his overseers for that day-to-day information. another way i think highland is different or unique is that these are not inherited slaves

that are living here. we see when monroe's 16 in his father's will he inherited his first slave, a ngero boy raffle and my colt and saddle. so for the rest of his life he is actively buying and selling slaves, which add very much an uncertainty to being a slave at highland. and one of our colleagues in the field charted among monroe's different properties how many people were there. not only does he own highland, he owns land the university of virginia is eventually built on as well as a property in loudoun county called oak hill. the lines there, back and forth between properties all the time. so we try to give the takeaway of being a slave at highland as uncertainty. the fact monroe's gone, the fact there are multiple properties and he's always buying and selling. now, one thing we did become a lot more certain of with our

2016 announcement that we had found the foundations of the monroe's original house, the tree ring dating informed us the white structure with the porch in front of you was an 1818 guest house built 19 years after monroe's original house, not the original house thought to be. and what's even better and informed our understanding about slavery in terms of this discovery, is when you look at the written record, you can see monroe mentioning that when he's updating his son-in-law in 1818 that that the house is almost built, he says this is done by a carpenter i bought of judge brooks last winter for $450 and george. so now we know who built that, and it was two enslaved men. that's become a new part of our interpretation. a guest house built by peter and george. if you look at the paper records, you can identify who that carpenter was that monroe mentioned, which turned out to be peter. here he is in an oak hill inventory from the loudoun

county property, peter mallory carpenter and then we see a george later on down in the inventory. so we can kind of piece together that monroe has brought these two men from loudoun county down to build this guest house structure for him. so one way we would really like to -- and are excited about interpreting slavery at highland is through augmented reality, which will be coming soon. and we wanted to really people visually the landscape through this tour. to give you a sense, it's kind of split. part of it is centered in the year 1819, which was during monroe's presidency. since that 1818 guest house is part of the scenery, we wanted to make sure it was a year after it was built so it made sense on the landscape, but we wanted to make sure that it was revealed how that guest house was built through the enslaved, since we knew it was through enslaved

carpenters. several of the scenes set in 1819 do involve conversations between the slaves on the property. so that became a really interesting process through our team of working to create this, of who do you select to be slaves and what should they be talking about? so when we looked at the historic record, we wanted to choose people that would have been in that historic core, would have probably seen the guest house being built and been aware of it, so we found that monroe had a cook named hannah and so 1796, she's a young mother with three small boys. fast forward 20 years, she's probably approaching 50 by 1819 when the tour is set. we selected her to speak to a blacksmith named nelson because he potentially could have had a role in that house, accessories for the shutters or something. you see his name highlighted nelson, a blacksmith, he's a young man at that point. i also wanted to point out with

hannah, we recently found a document, inventory of items monroe is hoping madison will buy from him and mentioning a soup spoon currently in albermarle of hannah. so that expressed she would be a person of importance around the property. before you press play, i'm going to give you two sneak peek previews of our augmented reality tour of these conversations between the enslaved. the first is going to between nelson and hannah, where they'll be talking about how they remember peter and george being down here and kind of wondering what was going on with them. >> i wonder how peter and george are doing back at oak hill. >> when mr. monroe brought them down from loudoun county last summer to build this house, all they talked about was missing their lives. it was so hard for them to be apart and never know for when

and how long they could stay in the same place. i know they're glad to be back together. >> so i wanted to really just underscore the fact that separating families would have been something that was no doubt missed by the enslaved community, of noticing that was happening. then there is a second one i'll show you. hannah then will go into a room and have a conversation with an enslaved spinner. we purposely chose not to give her a name just to really represent the many unnamed by their masters slaves in american history and the kind of irony and paradox is that monroe is one of the those classic examples of a plantation in virginia where grain is the primary export. just can't keep up with the cotton revolution that is coming. and that earlier scene, you can see monroe talking with an overseer about how highland is not making the profit it should. we hear hannah and the spinner talk about the fear that monroe

will sell highland. he absolutely does do this. ironically they end up being sold to a cotton plantation in florida. we see that fear actually does become real in what actually happened nine years later. >> you have to move to the next slide. >> all i know is wool. washing, carting, spinning, weaving, here the women and the men have terrible conditions and those cotton fields down south. and it's a lot rougher than here. lord, i hope mr. monroe does not sell us out. it's worry enough not knowing when he's going to wrench you out or send you to work at oak hill on one of his projects. >> hush. i hear someone coming. >> just in case it's not obvious, when you do take the tour, you'll see these scenes on an actual background. it won't be black like that. but we chose intentionally to do

illustrations instead of live actors. we thought that really allowed for more scope for the imagines, whereas when you see an actor, you know you're looking at an actor but we thought your mind could explore more with the illustrations. we very much hope you will come see us at highland this year. i'm eager to take your questions following all the presentations. >> something that i omitted from my bio notes, i also have a degree in philosophy, which is why i was a bartender for 20 years. i don't know how jennifer heard i was a ban tender. >> i have sources. >> y'all know what i'm talking about, the philosophy firm is never hiring. but i found myself at monticello

eight years ago. and i spent many of those years interpreting talking about slavery. i was bartending in the evenings and working as a tour guide throughout the day. i've talked to thousands of people about the institution of slavery, and the vast majority of these people are museum goers. it's not a diverse group of people. middle aged, affluent white pile. their ideas about what slavery is and why they're visiting the historic site that they're visiting are often pretty different. and i know that everyone in this room has a clear understanding of what academic history means and what the difference is between public history and academic history and what the difference between memory and history are. they're not the same thing, but the average visitor to monticello is not thinking about that difference, right? it says nothing about their intelect. if you're trained in engineering, the last time you took a social sciences course

may have been in high school. think about your high school history class. i'm sure most of y'all were really good at that class, right? that probably isn't the case for mathematically-minded people. it's just another class to go through. monticello is a beautiful place. operating tours for the public since 1923, which is a long time. in the centuries since offering tours, we have changed a lot, the message has changed a lot and the tour has changed. i think something that jen said early in the introduction here in terms of the processes that erased slavery, you know, when people do individuals a presidential home, they're there for a very specific reason often, which about this idea of heritage. it's this idea of memory and what that means as our identity as americans. i like to show this picture as a way to talk about thomas jefferson because i think it really underscores the point. we talk about not putting historical figures up on a pedestal at our historic sites. instead of celebrating memory, we really want to talk about

history as a nuanced idea. but that's the biggest pedestal i've ever seen, right? and we can get into a conversation about how we've blasted four dead white guys on the most sacred site for several indian american nations in the west, which is also something that we should probably recognize, but when you're having a at monti ks cello about how great thomas jefferson was, it's hard to move into the conversation of slavery. this is a memorial in tanzania because there isn't a national memorial to slavery in the united states of america. there are many memorials, but in terms of recognizing that institution as a people, we're pretty far off from that. having conversations with folks day in and day out, it leads to a lot of very interesting conversations that are illuminated in a lot of ways. some people really do understand the institution and want to get into the depth of jenniffferson involvement. and some people don't know if

they're at thomas jefferson's house or thomas edison's house. i'm serious. they want to talk about how he wrote the constitution. sorry, christian. they haven't studdied it in a long time. they see this beautiful botanical garden on this beautiful landscape and it's hard to imagine that as a living, wreathing plantation where people were held in bondage by jefferson and randolph families. so over the last few years, we have been working to talk about slavery more. we started offering slavery at monticello tours in 1993. theis is the 25th commemorative year offering those tours. it's been an ongoing process for a very long time. in the 1980s, slavery became part of the exhibitions and in the '90s as part of that interpretation. that interpretation has changed a lot over the years as well. several people in this room

worked hard on how that interpretation came to the foreand helping us understand thomas jefferson better as a person means we have to understand the institution of slavery and the people he held in bondage, which he was so entangled. this is a road that runs down monticello. this image was taken maybe five years ago. you can see the beauty of the mulberry trees, but this was a vibrant street. many buildings up and down it. it was dynamic in jefferson's life. a lot of it changed throughout those years, but he held 607 people in bondage, over 400 them at monticello. buildings up and down this row primarily serve as industrial centers so there was a blacksmith's shop, a nailery, and one of the first restorations took place in 2014. this building is a storehouse for iron. just beyond it there will have been a nail-making shop, but it

was only there for a couple of years. there have been lots of conversations about what to build and how. as it changed so much over time, you can't build every building. which buildings are going to be most representative of what life was like? we've learned a little bit about that as we go. this is the inside of a building that is a little farther up and this is interpreted as a home for john and person cilla hemmi. john hemmings was the master carpenter at monticello and his wife was the head nursemaid. they lived in a small house, not unlike what most small cabins would be like for anyone living in the early republic, white or black. that's what it looked like. we noticed after building this that lots and lots of people had an interesting reaction. we'd hear this with our guests, they'd come out and say, that's not so bad. on tours, we would have guests

say, my great grandfather lived in something way worse than that. and the implication there is the obvious one, which is thomas jefferson took care of his slaves, which is sometimes stated directly to you. so we had conversations about this, you know, we can't get every single visitor on tour to engage in a dialogue with us. i have another sign that says, not so bad? and then it talks about it the realities of slavery have very little to do with material conditions. when your children can be sold from you, it doesn't really matter what kind of house you live in. helping people engage in that conversation is something we've worked on for years. in my role as manager of eventual programs, i wear a lot of hats, but the primary role i engage is to help our guides work on ways to talk to visitors about these ideas of slavery and what it means for people who are really processing through this stuff, sometimes for the first time. they'll be on the same tour with someone who knows more about it than i will ever raid and

others, again, who think they're at thomas edison's house. the best one is when they talk to each other and the guide gets to stand there and say, that's interesting. so the big thing that we're about to engage in, and we've been on this multiyear project of restoring the landscape of slavery at monticello. we're on the final push. one of the wings off the main house at monticello and shows the way it has been discussed to many years. these are small rooms. a kitchen, a smokehouse and two rooms that were servant's quarters. that's what jefferson called them, right? when the thomas jefferson foundation opened in 1923, when virginia was still a segregated state, it should surprise no one in this room that conversations about race and slavery were not paramount.

so the removal of that began just this past year. you can see the restoration of some of those sites here, and this is again the 1940s when there is original structure.than building you see standing is the oldest standing structure on the monticello mountain. it's where thomas jefferson moved with his young wife after they got married and just below it was the slave quarter. that was the men's room for years and years. now it's not. it's an empty space. we are hoping to open in june of this year. fully restored with more of a conversation about slavery. one of the things that we found that was most surprising, that is the base of a stew stove. when jefferson had this area rebuilded, he had it backfilled, about this much dirt from the 1770s piled on a base that we

didn't know existed. thawed we don't have haan -- to returned to the united states as a french chef. that was a big find and changed the way we're going to interpret the space. we're going to leave that exposed to talk about james hemmings. he had a fascinating life. he could read and write in french and english. invited to be the chef at the white house bud declined because thomas jefferson would not ask him himself. a man who took his own life. we don't know why. but whose life really shows us what it was like for people enslaved to try to operate in the worlds of white and black. jefferson's original diagram for that wing, and you can see here our plan for what it's going to look like when it's open. and the two rooms i want to talk about the two in the center there, you see getting word is a space. in 1993, we also began an oral history project. that oral history project has over the past 25 years interviewed over 200 descendants to people enslaved at

monticello. those interviews are collected and available online. google getting word and you can hear from those descendants who were enslaved by thomas jefferson and his family. it's something that helps us engage with a very important and invested community into how we talk about slavery and we are in constant communication with descendants of the enslaved community at monticello to how best work on these things. it will be a pretty standard museum exhibit space with panels and probably some digital stuff to go in and learn. the room next door is going to be sally hemmings room. the thomas jefferson found sa-- there are a lot of reasons that is the case. a lot of things built up to it. a whole lot of research. as the research became deeper and deeper, it eventually came

to a point where it's fairly difficult to deny that he was the father. note i do not say impossible because people still do, but most academic historians do not. one of the lines i use most often to talk about this, there is more evidence that thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings children than he was the father of his wife's children, which is true. we're going to have a conversation about that. we're going to have a conversation about her living in this small quarter with her children with thomas jefferson. and, of course, people now, they don't really want to argue so much about whether the relationship happened, they want to know what it was like. did they love each other? was it rape? did they love each other and was it rape? and so we're hoping to allow for that conversation and to provide a space where people can really think about those things and talk with each other and with us about them. we're probably not going to provide answers. we can't do that.

and saying specifically that we know it was one way or the other, that denies sally hemmings the exact same agency she was denied in life. we don't know how she felt. so the entire plantation is a big place. and it was 5,000 acres, almost 8 square miles. today we own about half of that. a lot of it has opened up to the public for various reasons. but this big effort is to restore the idea of what monticello was as a plantation so people don't come in and have this re-enforcement that -- that you see whenever hollywood portrays slavery. there is this cotton slavery of the deep south. which is something that existed but very, very different from what earlier public virginia slavery looked like. in both cases, the people were not segregated and separated from each others in the ways we've developed in our minds through public memory. our goal is to make sure if you come to monticello, no matter

what tour you're take, you're going to have a conversation about slavery and what the lives were like for the people who lived there and how they intwined with each other. one of the things that nancy said monroe's numbers were approximate. with thomas jefferson, we have the opposite, right? thomas jefferson counting the shuffle fulls of dirt it took to bury his best friend's body. come on, y'all, that's creepy, right? that's real specific, right? thomas jefferson is a man really focused on precision. so we know a lot about the people who were enslaved there. we know it not only from his records, but their own oral histories, their records, archaeology and ongoing history that teaches us more and more about it. we want to focus on those stories. we want to tell about the lives of the people who suffered most here at monticello, but whose lives really impacted american history and help us understand who we are as a people.

i'm going to close with one last thing. everybody know what that is? this has been a very strange year to live in charlottesville, virginia, and i will say that, yes, our focus is on individual agency, and, yes, we are committed to telling the stories, to recognize the agency of those who were denied it, but we're also committed to understanding the legacies of slavery and helping our guests understand that as well. one of the things i hear most often from people, we didn't invent slavery in america. that's true. we didn't. slavery didn't end with the emancipation proclamation. that's also true. but slavery in america was different from slavery everywhere else in the world because of the way it was intertwined with the concept of race that was created at the same time. you want to talk about having a difficult nuanced conversation in 36 minutes? where you have to talk about the declaration of independent, the beauty of the architecture and

help your guests understand that race is a construct and that our ideas are about systemically re-enforcing hire arcies. i just did in in 30 seconds. it can be done. but these guys don't hear it. they don't hear it and they have no idea. and, frankly, for some of them, it's not really their fault. i would ask us this in closing, what can we do? as sites, as historians, what can we do to help challenge that? and i think that what we're doing is important. and i think that telling these stories and remembering slavery as something that is so integral to american history and understanding how that re-enforces systemic racism today, that's our challenge and hopefully we can make things line that become part of history as well. thanks.

hopefully we all know that montpelier is the home of our fourth president. the father of the constitution architect of the bill of rights, co-author of the federalist papers. it was also home to his parents, his siblings, his grandparents, his beautiful bride dolly, but more importantly, for our conversations today, it was home to over six generations of

enslaved african-americans that lived at mont pellipelier of th madison ten you're. mo montpelier is unique today because we have the ability to interpret three centuries of african-american history. we have sites of enslavement that start in the 1720s and return through the 1840s. we have the reconstructed or the restored home of george gilmore, a montpelier slave who built this cabin in the reconstruction era. the restored montpelier chain depot. we have an exhibit on segregation with the white and colored waiting rooms. and an active community that works and advises us on our interpretation today. throughout those centuries, it's really been the african-american community that has been the

constant presence at montpelier, much more so than the madison family, right? the madison family, dolly sells the place in the 1840s. they have no kids and the madison family has really ever come back in a meaningful way back to montpelier, where the african-american community that lived in enslavement and semi forms of freedom are still around and still active at montpelier today. so i want to tell you aww a little bit about what we've done over the last 20 years. which gets us to the big project we just opened in june. and the point here is that what by did -- the exhibit that we opened in june would not have been possible without the 20 years that proceeded it, okay? and this is really important for historians to think about. you can't just get a chunk of money and then, you know, have this big meaningful exhibit. you have to have the -- you have

to have put in your time with the community. so in 2000, 1999, rebecca gilmore goldman, who is the far right approached us about the falling down cabin across the street from our main gate. in the 1980s when the national trust acquired montpelier, there were over 160 structures on the property and the only ones we knew about were the montpelier main house, 25,000 square feet added the to it by the dupont family and the temple which sits right next to it and the madison construction. everything else was late 19th century or 20th century buildings. we didn't much care about them or have the funds to take care of them. this was one more of those 158 buildings falling down on the property. rebecca says that was my great grandfather's home, he was a montpelier slave and built that during reconstruction and i think you should restore it.

i agree with you. that's really cool. we did the research and figured it out. that restoration took five years because we had no money to do it. it was start and stop and start and stop. right after this opened, we started the reconstruction of the main house of montpelier, that took five years, but we had $25 million to do it. and that really started this engagement with the descendant community. her family came out and participated in the archaeology under the cabin. and she opened doors for us into the orange county community. so we were meeting all of these descendants who were coming to us with their stories and who wanted to be involved at montpelier. and we had descendant reunions in 2001 and 2007. i don't have pictures of those because nobody had digital cameras back then. but in 2009, we had met the family of paul jennings. paul was madison's enslaved man servant.

and paul was the guy who saved that picture of george washington when the british came with the torch. -- to the white house. they met obama and they got their photograph taken in front of the painting, which is really pretty cool. i did not get invited on that trip, unfortunately. we all started public archaeology programs and we had those going for awhile, but we really started making a concerted effort to bring the descendant community into the programs. you have descendants of enslaved people digging on the sites where their ancestors lived, pulling objects out of the ground. the last people who touched those objects were their ancestors, right? i mean, that's really cool, meaningful stuff. in 2014, the picture of everybody on the porch was an advisory committee meeting i put together to ask the descendant community to ask what else we should be doing in the current interpretation of montpelier? what else would they like to

see? we were at a turning point where we completed a few projects and didn't know where we were going next and wanted their opinions on that. the big thing that came out of that meeting was you have to restore the south yard. the south yard is the buildings we're going to see off the side of the mansion where the slaves who worked in the mansion for the madisons lived, kitchen, smokehouses and three quarters. we had done archaeology in those spaces between 2008 and 2011, these sort of exploratory excavations because we didn't have the money to do complete excavations. and our director of archaeology matt reeves said let's frame out the structures. i said, matt, that's a dumb idea, right? these are going to look like jungle gyms and the kids are going to be climbing all over them. that's exactly what happened. he said some district attorney is going to see this and say why didn't you finish those and we're going to say because we need the money to do the archaeology and build the cabsens the way they should be.

i said it's never going to happen. lo and behold, in november of 2014, david rubenstein came through with a so million gift to do just that, which was pretty amazing. i got to stand on the terrace of the mansion looking down at the south yard explaining matt's idea to him. i left about the part of giving us money to do it, but it must have -- it must have been a good idea. so we took down all of those six structures that we had built and started doing the archaeology. as we did the archaeology, it sort of moved slowly, right? so as we did archaeology and restored buildings, while these buildings were being restored, archaeology is being done on smaller buildings in the middle and on and on. right now there are four buildings that have been restored and two left to go but the archaeology is done. his gift was to finish the archaeology, restore the six structures and then return furnish all the spaces in the

mansion that had yet to be refurnished. that included about a third of the rooms above stairs and the entire cellar, and the six buildings. my job was to furnish the six cellar spaces and the six new buildings in the south yard. what we decided immediately is we could do a better job of telling more meaningful stories by not refurnishing those spaces in the traditional way, right? we knew we didn't want to have that exhibit about slavery that you see at so many plantations that revolves around hard labor and poor living conditions, right? we wanted to tell more meaningful stories that pushed things into the present tense. so we came up with this idea, the exhibit title is "the mere distinction of color." it comes from a quote from james madison. i love this quote. madison does not talk in sound bites like other people. [ laughter ]

but he's -- at the constitutional convention she said, we've seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. if you take the constitutional convention away and the date away and james madison's name away, you could really stop and ask yourself, when was that quotation spoken, right? we've seen the mere distinction of colour made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. through our work with the descendant community, we knew that we needed to treat the stories of the enslaved with humanity and dignity. we wanted to attack it from a point of empathy, right?

we wanted -- we wanted our visitors to think about shared universal experiences rather than hard work, right? none of us will ever know what it feels like to plow a 40-acre field, right? none of you are ever going to stand behind a mule and do that, unless you're really strange. but you know what it's like to be a mother or a father or a child or a grandchild. you can imagine what it would be like to have those people taken away from you, right? and those are more -- those are -- those are concepts and characterizations and experiences that people can relate to. so we took photographs from the library of congress and sort of ghosted them on these glass panels and we use projections of shadows on the walls that faded in and out that lent some idea of these universal experiences

that we wanted people to think about. there are little text blurbs with them that don't try to share somebody's biography, right? these aren't historic individuals we're talking about in particular, right? but, rather, again, the universal concepts that people can relate to. the woman in the middle who is nursing a child in the photo, i don't know if you can see it, it says i was a wife, i was separated, i was raped, i was afraid, i was hopeful, i was a survivor, i was property, right? and all seven of these glass panels end with that phrase, "i was property." you'll also notice there is no punctuation, which was a rale long conversation. that's how museum people are, right? [ laughter ] so these images share these emotions, right? the shadows share the emotions. and we also have these listening

stationed spread out throughout the exhibit where you can sit down and listen to the voices of the descendants. because we had this great community, we thought why should we tell these stories in an academic or institutional voice that will feel cold and removed? why don't we let the descendants tell the stories of their ancestors. we have this beautiful black and white photography that scrolls behind the words of people talking. i'll play a short clip of that. >> i think with montpelier, we're trying to look at addressing the people who were here and providing as much dignity to their spirits and to their history as we can. it won't be fully restored, we know that, but this is a step in the right direction to tell their story. their story needs to be told. they weren't invisible. they were someone's great, great grandmother, great, great grandfather. it's etched in our dna. we are them and they are us.

>> she does talk in sound bites. she is a gold mine. and as we recorded these people, right, these were not -- these were not narrations, they responded and we edited their answers to make these recordings, which are really pretty cool. we stencilled the 281 names of the known people enslaved at montpelier on the wall. this is going along with the same idea of the vietnam war memorial. why is that so moving? because when you start thinking about the enslaved as individuals, right, it's much more meaningful than it is when you're looking at them as a monolith, right? this happened to one person at a time, right? everybody person is somebody's child or somebody's parent. it makes a real difference. we also used photographs of our living descendant community in the south yard structures, in the living quarters where their

ancestors live. so you walk into this quarter and see a full size picture here. there are others. you see a text blurb about the historic family that may have lived there. you press the button and you hear rebecca talking about the artifact in the little glass case, which in this case is a piece of pencil and writing slate. she talks about how important literacy was to this enslaved family who lived there but also to her ancestors, right? her great grandfather was written -- was recorded in the freedom's bureau records as one of only six african-americans in orange county who were literate, okay? there is hugh paul jenning's descendants and the type of paul jennings that they have in their family. joe mcgill, founder of the slave dwelling project, is part of our community as well. next to joe is this mosaic made of up fragments of excavated

brick shards excavated in slave living quarters around the property. there underneath the kid is a full-size brick that was excavated that that has the fingerprint in it of an enslaved child who would have made that brick. in part of this we decided to start telling the national story about slavery. how does montpelier fit into the nation's history. how does the plantation fit into the economic world? how does slavery fund the estates? how does the wealth ascend to the presidency or translate to the presidency? how does that wealth and the people who are spouting ideology around slavery sort of get the stage in the 18th century. how do those ideas reach the national stage. and how do those ideas eventually translate into the constitution that madison created. our guy is the guy who created the constitution, and it

protects slavery in like a half dozen different ways. we needed to call that out. we needed to acknowledge that. and then we needed to acknowledge that slavery, even though it ends in 1865, the story doesn't end in 1865. it doesn't end when madison dice. it doesn't end when dolly sells everybody. it doesn't end with abe lincoln, but this legacy of slavery continues today. brandon was saying, what are we going to do about what happened in charlottesville this summer? i think this kind of tells you a little bit about what we're trying to do. we did this before charlottesville happened. >> i think our problem as americans is that we actually hate history so we can't really connect the dots. what we love is nostalgia. we love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. and history itself is an indictment often.

and people, we hate to be indicted. >> don't shoot him. don't shoot him. he has no weapon. he has no weapon. >> four black heads inside of one car, pumping one hip hop album, ten decibels too loud, driving 10 miles above the split, through one residential area, always equal, one guaranteed pulled over by two racist cops. >> when you're living constantly with the fear of going to jail because you fit the description, or because you can't afford a lawyer. if i'm walking down the street going to pick up milk, i can be

accosted, you know. that fills one with an intense amount of dread. >> the negro is still languished in the corners of american society, and primes himself in exile in his own land. >> don't you put none of my boys in jail and charge them with treason because you deserve to be charged with treason, because anytime you force people to live that way, you deserve to be charged with treason. you are guilty, not us. >> there are days when you wonder what your role is in this country, what your future is in it. >> amazing grace, amazing grace.

may god continue to shed his grace on the united states of america. >> id show you more. when it goes into the ray charles music. we have to pay a lot of money for that and not allowed to show it on the screen. that video piece is about the legacies of slavery. i showed you the middle. it starts with madison and the constitution and it goes through the 19th century and how slavery was so important to the economy of the nation. and then after this bit it goes into a piece with rebecca gilmore coleman who talks about being three generations removed from slavery at montpelier and what that means to her. she gets into conversations about rape in that monologue she has. anyway, we use that as the sort of centerpiece of our opening in june of 2017 where there were

over 900 mostly african-american faces under the tent in the backyard. and i am pretty sure i can guarantee that that's the first time there were ever that many african-american people at montpelier in its history. and i think it speaks volumes about how building relationships and doing, you know, your due diligence really pays off in the end. >> thank you. [ applause ] >> all right, well, thank you very much for these presentations. i guess i want today start by asking if listening to each other you have thoughts or responses or questions for each other. and so that we could start there. we have a little more than a half hour for conversations.

so let's start there, and then i have some questions, and then we'll open it up to the audience so you all get ready. but are there things that occurred to you about the ways in which the projects -- one of the things that occurred to me is that the project of interpreting must be very different based on the kind of the support and the structure of each house and each site in ways that aren't visible to me. but as i'm listening to you all i'm wondering if there are ways that you think your jobs are different because you're at montpelier or you're at another site. >> well, sort of. i think we all benefit from the fact that we have really strong and courageous leadership at our sites that have not only allowed us to go to these places, but pushed us to go to these places, and who haven't backed down when we've been edgy or pushy.

>> i would say the same. just an ongoing effort from the board to the donors to the leadership to, you know, everybody that's at montecello. the relationships we have with each other. so many of us are in a small area in central virginia that we know each other pretty well. we didn't have much of a preliminary conversation before this panel took place. let's do that. >> can you put the mic closer? >> how's that? better? okay. >> and one thing i think is really unique about these three sites is that we also all do a guide training once a year where we get all of our staffs together, and i love that that just keeps the spirit of the friendship between our founders together. >> yeah, there's also a great barbecue place that's kind of centrally located and we all get together there and talk about what's happening at the different sites. >> the best restaurant in

charlottesville is actually in gordonsville. i have another thought. this dektly relates to what christian just said in terms of answering the question i raised. first a comment, which is to say that i've had the opportunity to see the distinctions of color twice now. i can't commend montpelier enough for what this has done to raise the bar in terms of this conversation. that exhibit is incredible, and it really does engage with what we're trying to talk about in a way that is undeniable, and in a way that's not cold or sterile. people really do respond to it. and maybe not always positively, right, but they definitely to it. so my question, christian, is if you would just talk us through the process of the creation of the video, how that happened, and just thoughts that went into that. >> sure, yeah. the video, we knew we wanted to do something about the legacy of slavery, and in the concept design, that room is going to be the legacy of slavery. we didn't nail down what that

meant. we came up with an idea of doing a multi-screen video show about the legacy of slavery. that could be a six-hour documentary, and we had 10 to 12 minutes that we thought we could realistically work with. how do you boil down the legacy of slavery into ten minutes? that was pretty challenging. we beat our head against the wall about that for over a year. we came up with ideas that we threw away. and we finally decided to bring in about 20 people from all across the country, to a think tank, a three-day weekend, martin luther king weekend last year, actually. and we had academics, activists, artists who came and participated with us in this think tank. we filled a room of white boards with ideas that related to the legacy of slavery. and then the facilitator said, okay, this is great. erase everything but three ideas. which was so painful.

it was like six hours of work just gone. but what it did was it really narrowed it down for the filmmakers to come up with this story line. as the weekend developed, the story -- the filmmakers kind of saw these different people engaging in conversation with us, and four of the participants of the weekend became the talking heads in the film. so you saw reggie talking who recollects a spoken word artist in boston. it also includes rebecca, as i said, ed airs who is the president -- emeritus of the university of virginia, kicks things off talking about the 18th and 19th center. and hasan jeffreys talks about how students today have this notion of slavery and the 18th and 19th century that's very disneyish that he has to combat all the time. did that answer your question?

>> yeah, yeah. >> so one of the things, doug, that you said when you were talking is that you talked about the different ways that visitors think about history and about memory and about why to visit a presidential home, what brings hem there, or to visit edison's home, for example. i wondered if each of you could talk a little bit about moments in which you feel that you had succeeded, or failed to convey this different sense of history, or this different reason for a person to visit a presidential home. and i guess i'd like to hear a little more specificity about your interaction with visitors, or your -- your hopes, like what you -- when you have a moment that says, like, oh, yeah, we got this right. or we're still, you know, struggling with this. >> we have those every day with the new exhibit.

we put a lot of money and time and energy into training our staff because we knew that people would react to this exhibit very differently. it was not going to be what most people expected, and they were going to be very visceral reactions to it, both in a positive way and a negative way. we have people kocoming out of e exhibit bawling. they need a shoulder, they want somebody to hear how moved they've been or how they've begun to think about things in a new light, which is so amazing. that's when you know you nailed it. then there are people who come out who are really pissed, they want somebody to yell at and vent to. how do you train your staff to deal with that? basically the answer is you provide somebody who will listen. not necessarily agree, but listen. anyway, that's really boiling it down. we also feel like we got it

right when we see those reactions because you're making people rethink their notions of history. you're making people -- you're making them have a conflict in their own mind about the history they want to be true and the history they're been presented with with this museum, and people believe what museums say for the most part and they have this huge conflict with it, especially at the home of a president, of a founding father, of one of their guys, their history, the history that they've related to so much for their entire lives. you know, all the sudden that's totally being turned on its head and they have a really hard time with it. >> our department, which is education and visitor programs department at montecello, about 100 people, and we have core values that we adhere to or aspire to. they include unity of effort and

visitor focus. it's really about the guests. but the third and final and provocative interpretation. we thought a lot about that as well, about those words, lots of conversations about words. but we really want our guests to think. it's about provoking thought. it's about the reflection on a car ride home. get the family back in the mini van and they're driving down the road and they say, what about when they said blah blah blah? we see that most successfully when the visitor is obviously processing on site. we have a guest, take a tour. and they'll find someone has a badge, it often has to do with slavery, or with jefferson and hemmings most frequently. on a personal basis, this stuff is hit or miss. i remember one tour in particular, a group from darden, i'm going to turn this on.

i was 20 minutes in, i was spitting gold, it was awesome. this guy pulls me aside and says, so thomas jefferson and abraham lincoln, they were friends? i should have done more research on this, none of them were from the united states. sometimes you miss easily. sometimes it goes really well. and the same as christian said, i've had visitors, 80-year-old african-american woman cry and thank me. that feels like a win. and i would say the same, that when somebody says it's horrible the way that you discuss slavery, like when somebody is telling you that it's wrong that you're saying that slavery is wrong, you've done right. >> well said. >> i would say on the upside for us, when we made the research announcement in 2016 that we had found the foundations of monroe's original house, when you have the most wonderful things to come from that was

that a man posted on social media named george monroe that he was owned at highland. our director was able to make contact with him and he's little by little introduced us to more of his cousins. when you share that with visitors that like last week we met a descendant who -- a slave descendant here, they get really excited that they're hearing living history right now, that we're making these connections. i'm enveeious of the decades and decades of research and everything you guys have, i know we will get there. i was inspired looking at all the pictures from wo came to your opening. i would love that to be our goal at highland to make contact with that many slave descendants. on the down side, sometimes i can see guests taking that as monroe kind of trying to do something nice for the enslaved. when you hear that you're like, okay, we need to talk more about this.

this is not the takeaway we want from that. but i would say our kind of burgeoning relationship with the highland slave descendants and where that is going to go will adjust incredible depth and richness to what we're doing. i'm really excited to see what happens next. >> i have one more question, and i'm going to open it up. one of the things, and this is a car car car carryover from the earlier session. i was surprised to see what a big role the slave community played at montpelier in moving this particular aspect forward. and i wondered how the institutions navigate, and i'm just going to be blunt here, the race of the interpreters, so that having the descendants as such an integral piece of the process of putting that exhibit together and having them really sort of there in the exhibit

seems to be an incredibly powerful way of dealing with that. i wernded if at the other two sites how -- you know, are there african-american interpreters, are they -- are they folks who have a particular relationship not site? or are they professional historians who are -- what -- and what does that do to the dynamic, you think, of the visit visitors' experience, or the ability to be open to this conversation about slavery. it seems like what you did at montpelier, which i want to say in a french accent, but it seems like what you all did there was really just take that on. how is that happening isn't the other sites? >> i do think that's a challenging question that we get a lot. and it is true, that of the hundred interpreters i just mentioned, the most african-american interpreters we've ever had at one time,

three, a couple of latin-american interpreters, a couple asian-american interpreters. we're keenly aware of this. diversifying staff is a goal, but so is diversifies audience, and diversifying interest. i also think there's a part to it that people like us play as well. there have been many times when i've stood up to talk about slavery, and i'm sure you can tell from my accent that i'm not from new york. my ancestors were slaveholders. i know that for a fact. my grandfather's name was robert e. lee, literally. so somebody like me talking about slavery, it's a different voice that sometimes certain people will listen to. and it might be an audience that needs to be reached. but that being said sometimes people will not listen to me

because what am i going to tell them about their ancestor's history. i think part of that, taking the conversation forward, understanding the legacies. i'm a southern white man, the privileges i've experienced in my life is because of slavery. to say that and recognize and talk about it is a powerful step. would i like to see more african-american interpreters, absolutely. i think we will. but i would say, look around this conference, right, this is a conversation that we all have to have. and it's a conversation about academia, a conversation about wealth, a conversation about systemic bias, and generational oppression, it's one we all have to recognize. we're working on it. >> i can't add anymore to what brandon said. we're working on it too. >> so if you could -- they want us to use the mic. we need you to use the mic if you have a question.

so go on up. >> we're on candid -- >> we're on camera. >> this is more of a question for all y'all. but as someone who lives in the middle of paharpers ferry and -a volunteer and a young person giving the talk, and especially when you have the appalachian accent that missouri aost are n familiar with, and we get a lot of people who seem to think that african-americans need to thank white people for the civil war and for freeing them, and also a lot of people who when descendants of slaves are brought into the conversation get really upset about the fact that possibly the slaveholders descendants might feel attacked. and it's just a really awful racist hodgepodge of kkk members. how would you approach that? >> wow, that's a small question

to start with. okay, thank you. >> i'll give a friend of mine some advertisement here, a guy named sean halifax, parks department, oddly enough, the parks department just acquired a plantation down there called mccloud plantation they opened up as an historic park. sean got the role of putting this program together, interpretation program together. and they decided to interpret the plantation from the point of view of the group of people who had lived there the longest, the enslaved community, and then the freed descendants of them. they don't talk about the white family at all. they just talk about the african-american families that were there. what sean did was cobble together ideas and chapters from this series of books that the aslh has put out about interpreting african-american history, interpreting slavery,

and interpreting difficult history. he took ideas from all of those books and sort of developed a curriculum for interpreters called ethical interpretation. and he will come to your site for a small fee, sean halifax, and he will run your interpreters through this program. and it's really great. you can do it in two days, do it in five days. you can put as much or as little into it as you want to. but what it does is it makes you think about your own internal biases and helps you unpack that a little bit. and then it makes you think about how your visitors are coming with those biases, and how you as an interpreter don't have to agree with them or disagree with them. you just have to realize where they're coming from, and start the conversation from that point. i mean, at some point you have to recognize that you're never going to move some people, and maybe the best thing to do in that case is disengage and let them go away and be mad.

and that's fine. but for everybody else you want -- you have to sort of realize where you are in that relationship with your guests where they're coming from, and then walk the ball down the field as slowly as it takes, which is hard if you're under the gun of a 45-minute tour or something like that. there's no great answer to this. and this is something that the field of interpretation is wrangling with in the present day. we're all working to find a solution to this, i think. >> thank you. >> yeah, i think we all stand united in knowing the presidents we interpret could not have achieved what they achieved without slavery. so that's always a good fallback. >> thank you so much. >> hello. i'm from howard university. i've been doing work in the montpelier, and also in

montecello. i've never been to that plantation. i ask myself -- it is commendable what you are doing, i think that we can see the transformation that is going on on these two sides. jennifer touched a point that i think is important, on how much these communities that you call descendants, they are engaged in what is being done. then i have the impression that montpelier, you are doing something now that is different because with this new exhibition. but i recall when i've been there the last time, the cabins were not yet reconstructed. i think now they are. and during the visit to the mansion there was still work to be done with that. then i asked myself what is being done because the impression that i have in the spaces is that a visitor, most of them, i think that they are white visitors, we don't --

there is a minority of african-americans who go there, and we can ask why, why african-americans, they are also not hired to be interpreters because they don't want to have a relation with this space, or because there are no efforts being made. but when we're talking about the mansions, usually what i had an impression in the two places in mount vernon is the same thing, and mount vernon is not even here, but the mansion is a sort of sacred space of these presidents where we don't talk about slavery inside the mansion. we talk about the slavery outside, and you don't talk about this inside. and i was impressed by what you are doing, for example, in montpelier in this exhibition that you used the term rape. the last time i've been in a conference about this issue, there was a descendant of jefferson and hemmings on the

table, and she said that she doesn't like to use the word rape, which is apparently what is being done in montecello. then i asked myself whether or not the stories are being incorporated inside the mansions and whether or not i can go there and simply not see anything that you are showing me here. for example, i can visit the gardens, i can visit other places, other spaces inside the mansion, for example, and not hear anything about what you are doing. and one last example is, for example, what you do elsewhere. i don't know about monroe, but i know that the social media accounts of montecello and montpelier, you are doing a nice job in showing issues related to slavery. but i know that there is another house of president, there is mount vernon that the social media account, it's like how george washington was so nice with his slaves. then i think that all this work of interpretation goes also

beyond the real spaces because there are people in this country who will never be able to go there, but they are able to visit your websites and perhaps follow you on facebook and twitter. thank you. >> i'll try and address some of that. the first thing, you're right. many, many visitors for many years, you come to montecello, take the house tour. going there is going to the house. you take a 45-minute tour, you hop back on the bus, you go down to mic kkey tavern. we don't script our tours. every guide writes their own tour. you are required to say two things. thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings children, and that the family that bought after jefferson's death saved the home from destruction because of their views on his

religious freedom -- >> if the guy has not mentioned the declaration of independence at all, we're going to have a talk. but the idea is that you have to talk about slavery. you have to. now, we don't script our tours. i can't watch every single tour. in all of those conversations that we just had about heritage and identity and memory, remember that most of the people who are giving tours at these sites are wealthy enough to afford to work there, most of them are retired, most of them are white, most of them want to work there because they love, love, love their subjects. that's not true across the board. but it is true that we have to have a lot of conversations about, okay, but you really gotta talk about slavery. you really gotta talk about it on tour. we think we're making progress. we think we're doing that. one of the things we're excited about is we're going to change the tour. so starting in 2018, once these rooms are done, you don't go to

montecello unless you start by talking about slavery, every tour, every house tour, and that segregation of the ideas, it's a 20th century holdover, we're doing our best to break these barriers. we've been doing it at both institutions for a long time. we talk about this with our guides. i think we're making progress. but i think that your observation is right, and this was mentioned at a session before, there was an op-ed that appeared in the "washington post" a few years ago, a woman named desiree melton who's a professor came to montecello, did not take a tour, and walked around, said this institution whitewashes history. i can absolutely see how she could say that. and i can say how an academic would walk by this guy and not listen to what i have to say. there's a lot of stuff there about identity, understanding, full reinterpretation of the sites and hopefully we'll make more progress as we go forward. >> i would echo a lot of what

brandon said. we also don't script our guides. and we are also thinking about changing around our house tour. and we also insist that every room has some -- something to do with slavery incorporated into the interpretation. >> i would just add that i did the mount vernon tour, but it was -- so it was connected to a conference. and the guide in every room said here -- you know, this is the kitchen, there were four enslaved women who worked in this room every time. and i asked her afterwards, are you giving this tour just to us because we're here as slavery scholars? and she said no, this is the tour that i give all the time. but it did make me wonder, so is it -- was it her? she was young and really, like, scrappy and excited, or was it something that the entire -- you know, that all of the tour guides. one of the things that was so impressive was that she would

say, you know, the washingtons had this reputation for being amazing hosts. and that's because there were, you know, four enslaved women who worked upstairs who did all the laundry. she did it in every single room. it seems like that has to happen. this split between the house and the outbuildings is clearly a point of tension. we have a lot of questions. >> i would like to say in terms of highland, likewise, we do a lot of scripted tours, guides are required to talk about slavery. because we have a long way to go, one of our strategies is we did a training on using collections as a spring board to talk about slavery, for instance, like we might not have a primary source talking about a slave being in a specific room, especially now that we know we have the guest house, and not monroe's actual house, but we do have the objects.

monroe's -- how can you use the presidential china showing the 20 stars or 20 states, spring board into the missouri compromise. >> i'm going to ask -- we've got -- maybe we can do short questions, and take two at a time. >> the framers of the constitution were very articulate about rights of the individual and freedom and all that stuff. and yet we had 600,000 or 700,000 people die in the civil war to free the slaves. it wasn't necessary in europe. what's different, what's different about this place? >> you didn't have race-based slavery in europe the way you see it in the americas. and it's not essential to the economy of europe. >> even though the money that's made in the americas, both north america and latin america and the caribbean is crucial to fueling the development of european national sovereignty

and the wealth of european states. so while europeans didn't have race-based slavery in europe, they benefitted tremendously from the existence of race-based slavery in the americas. >> i'm will levi. my question had to do with education and interpretation as it pertains to kids essentially. over the last summer i worked at harpers ferry, and part of my job was to teach middle schoolers about john brown and slavery. the anecdote was used about john brown witnessing a slave being beaten brutally with a shovel and how that inspired him in his anti-slavery movement. i like to use that example because it instilled upon your minds that you can't forget that slavery was an inherently violent system and that's something that you have to not

forget. the thing is, is that i could also notice that it wasn't so much effective on the older, more apathetic teenage high school type kids. so i was just wondering what -- in terms of presenting this kind of subject to children, what kind of strategies or examples do you think are more effective? that's my question. >> well, christian used the term universals when talking about the mere distinction of color exhibit. what are things they can relate to in their own life. imagine your own parents being sent away to another place, you don't know for how long, those type of scenarios do well. >> she just brought that up. nancy's husband is the student program director at montpelier. i told you we were friends. >> what we just described is a program he just created and is rolled out this fall with students.

that's what they do, focus on universal experiences that could go through the time periods. >> thank you very much. i was just really interesting. my name is ann bailey. i'm from bington university. i write about slavery. it's just so interesting to hear the progress being made at all these sites. some of which i'm familiar with. it's great to see this. my big question, similar to the question before, wondering how you try to reach, or if you can reach people beyond the visitors who come. it is hard to get to these spaces just financially for some people in terms of how far away they are and so forth. i was thinking about a curriculum, like a curriculum, a k-12 curriculum, and whether or not that's ever been bandied about as a potential idea for actually bringing that voice of the enslaved so to speak that you're trying to recover, you know, kind of more into the mainstream. that's just one kind of quick

question about that. and also curious also whether or not you are thinking about reaching out to college students. because i could just see a number of our college students would be very interested in internships, and you could maybe get minority college students interested if there was some kind of outreach in that respect. i don't think they realize these changes are happening. i guess that's what i'm saying. they would be very excited to know that they are. >> this is not my area. so i hope i don't botch this. we do something called the montecello teacher institute, grade school teachers come from all over the world, they work on projects and create a curriculum. available online at the montecello classroom. it has a lot of different lesson plans that engage the conversations we're talking about. we've got a program with digital field trips where we have a guide skype with the classroom. students can ask what they're

thinking about. that's very popular, brand new, we just started doing it. it's working well. we're working on revamping our website. we'll see how that goes. and just a lot of work that you're absolutely right, we hope to just push it forward and keep working with it. and as for the colleges, i did say at one point that i think the most we've ever had is like five african-american interpreters, all of them were interns from the university of virginia. so it is -- you're absolutely right, it's the best place. your comment about, i don't know if students know what's going on, and this relates back to your question as well, that, to me, feels like a loss. what you said, when do you feel like you've missed? we have colleagues at mount vernon. we know the work they engage in, we know how important slavery is with all our discussions, if somebody can go and walk away and say i don't know that we talked about it a lot. it's frustrating to us. we can just keep trying. >> quick questions.

>> i'm justin hawkins, university of maryland. i was just wondering if you could talk about how -- you mentioned how the torah is set in a certain year, limitations that come with having physical structures and they can only show a certain snapshot. how do you deal with that difficulty in showing a large chronology of time as it relates, and also the interplay between the three locations being so close in virginia and the idea of slaves being mobile within those communities? >> i should clarify, the augmented reality tour only is set in the year 1819. and probably just because that helped us really condense a huge body of knowledge into what really is about 20 minutes of the tour. so that was kind of the reasoning behind that, also to make it relevant with monroe's presidency. and tell me the second part of your question again. >> when you have physical structures, they're sort of kind of portray a certain snapshot

when the buildings might not have been all around at the same time, or more buildings were added later. and so the visitor sort of gets an image of it as it is in today. >> static. >> yeah, how do you show the fluid chronology with a sort of static limitation? >> i think you all could probably speak to that good with your app for mulberry row. >> one of the things we did year before last, i think, was we created an app that's available through android and iphone, a free downloadable app that shows digital renderings, and it's geolocated. it's narrated by descendants of enslaved people. they'll tell their ancestor's stories. anybody can google that real quick. you can also use it when you're not there. but its real strength is doing what you're saying, talking about how it changed over time. >> we had an outdoor audio tour

that helped people with buildings that might have been there outside of the interptive period. we've interpreted montpelier to the retirement years. the buildings we're restoring would have been there from 1817 to 1836. that's the period we've chosen to interpret, not one year, but fudge it a little bit. >> we have time for just one more question. >> yes, hello, my name is heather scarlet from kent state university in ohio. i'd like to know as museum directors and leaders, do you think that public memory is enhanced more by reenactors, or by multimedia and digital items, such as podcasts and videos? thank you. >> are there reenactors at any -- >> at montpelier we use a james

madison reenactor and a dolly madison reenactor who are highly vetted and very good at what they do, and a little bit weird. the one guy reads the same newspaper that madison would have read 200 years ago every day of his life. he's really into it. he's great. exactly the same age madison was 200 years ago. it's strange. but that being said, i think when costumed interpretation, or first person interpretation is done well, it's great. i also say that it's really hard to do it well. and when you're looking at a plantation site in particular, it's hard to do well because of the people you would need on staff to interpret it accurately. >> same. i mean, we contract people in. most of the interpreters we use are professionals from colonial williams burg. they come because they are really good at what they do.

for the most part, you know, i think my answer to your question would be yes. which is better? yes, depends on the situation. and it depends on who you're using or what kind of digital work is being put out. >> i would caution you not to use technology for the sake of technology. don't news technology for the whiz bang factor, use it because it's the best method to convey the stories. >> before we thank you guys, i just want to say that one of the things that's been so exciting for me about this conversation, and i know there are a lot of folks in the room who do public history, but for those of us who don't do public history, to hear how collaborative this work is on both sides. because i presumed that the interpretation was the collaborative space. when you're engaging with the public. but what i have learned today is the intense collaborative work that you do both, you know, with each other and with other

professionals, but then also with community members. i just find that incredibly exciting and really energizing. i want to thank you all for sharing that with us. they'll stay here for a minute. come and talk to them if you have questions. thank you so much. [ applause ] american history tv on c-span 3, this week in primetime, wednesday night at 8:00 p.m. historians attending the american historical association conference look at how american veterans are being honored, remembered, since world war ii. thursday night at 7:00 p.m. eastern live in the newseum in

washington, d.c. friday night, 8:00 p.m. ed in a green medford on abraham lincoln's friends and enemies. coming up on american history tv, historians and university leaders discuss free speech on college campuses. part of the conversation includes how social media has changed the nature of discourse in university settings, and the role that political protests have played. from the american historical association's annual meeting held earlier, this is 90 minutes. i'm sanford yungar, former president of