savior is often still central to the narrative. watch tonight beginning at 8:00 p.m. eastern and enjoy "american history tv" every weekend on c-span3. "american history tv" on c-span3, every weekend documenting america's story. funding for "american history tv" comes from these companies, who support c-span3 as a public service. up next on "american history tv," representatives from thomas jefferson's monticello, james monroe's highland and james madison mont pilier talk about the questions they are asked. this was a meeting held recently in washington, d.c. >> 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 have 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 what i think is 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 areics extricable. i'm excited to here about their work at the presidential plantations. i'm going to introduce them to you now in the order 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 the audience to ask questions. so, first we're going to hear -- oh, we switched it around so many times. first we're going to hear from nancy stetz, who has been education programs manager at james madison -- i'm sorry, at james monroe's highland since

2014. in this role she hires and trains new interprets, coordinates school and group tours and manages public programming. she created a slavery at highland program provides training for staff through resources and individual biographies. prior to her work there, she served as volunteer coordinator at the imperial center for the arts and sciences and tour supervisor and interpreter at monticello. she has a bs in education and an ma in public history from appalachian state university. next we're going to hear from brandon dillard, manager of special programs at monticello. he's been with the thomas jefferson foundation since 2010. for the past eight years he's spent most of his time in frontline interpretation. he also studies cultural anthropology at the university of virginia focusing on museums and public sites as places of memory, identity and power. i believe he's so a bartender of

some renoun and has a bit of a cult following. christian coates is director of education and visitor engagement at james madison's montpelier where he came as the student education coordinator. he oversees a staff of approximately 50 interprets and has been at the forefront to build and maintain relationships with families descendant from the enslaved community. most recently he was the project director for the mere distinction of color exhibition, who uses descendant's voices to convey the stories of their ancestors and connects the dots between 1787 and today to shine a light on a legacy of slavery that still exists in the 21st century. please join me in welcoming them, and we'll start with nancy. thank you. [ applause ] . >> all right. well, i'm really glad to be here with you all today.

it's my first aha 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 difference house the monroes lived in, so i've had a front row seat for the whole process. when i first started we were ash lawn highland and now we're highland, monroe's original name, and we know that we have a presidential era guest house and have a lot more archeology to do, which is really fun. 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 and individual slaves by name. we have a slavery at highland kind of 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 short a time as they wish. we attempted to have just a formal walking tour and found that guests didn't quite have that time budgeted. so by switching to a drop-in station we're able to multiply our engagement, which we were really happy about. we interpret slavery on the property just through the structures that are there. you can see a reconstructed slave quarter that was done in the 1980s. here's another angle of that with the reconstructed quarter in the center, flanked by an original 1821 overseer house on the left, and an original monroe area smoke house on the right. now, highland was, at its height, a 3,500 acre plantation right next to thomas jefferson's monticello. their property does still border. you see a lot of green space there and the line of buildings you saw earlier. i think this is also kind of

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, from advertisements, there were a lot more buildings that would have been at highland. we know there was a blacksmith shop, a sawmill, lots more slave quarters and a slave cemetery that we have not found yet. my boss is very quick to say that's an opportunity rather than a challenge, so stay tuned and we hope to be making those discoveries. now, in terms of the slaves who are at highland, we know from the 1810 census, we see monroe's name highlighted as 49. i notice when guests come here usually coming to both monticello and montpelier and they're trying to size up and compare what were the similarities and differences. highland was on the smaller size but monroe is kind of funny in terms of numbers. when you look at his writing,

one thing that stood out to me is when he writes about how many slaves he has, you see a lot of kind 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 that he's largely an absentee owner of highland. he was living overseas or in other places of the united states, so he was relying on overseers for that information. another way it's different or unique is these are not inherited slaves. we see when he was 16 in his father's will he inherits his first slave, a negro boy, ralph, and the colt and saddle. for the rest of monroe's life he is actively buying and selling slaves, which would certainly add very much of 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 at the university of virginia is built on, as well as a property named oak hill. you see the lines are back and forth between properties all the time, and so we try to give the takeaway of being a slave at highland as uncertainty. you've got the fact monroe is gone, the fact there's 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 monroes' original house, the tree ring dating informed us that this white structure with the porch in front of you was actually 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 the house is almost built, he says, this is done by a carpenter i bought of judge brooks last winter for $450. so now we know who built that, and it was to enslave men. that's become a new part of our interpretation, it's a guest house built by peter and george. if you look at the paper records, you can identify who the carpenter was, who turned out to be peter. here he is in an oak hill inventory. in the yellow rectangle, peter mallorie carpenter and 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 lauden 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. 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 the 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 know it was through enslaved carpenters. so several of the scenes set in 1819 do involve conversations between 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 area and would have seen the guest house being built and been aware of it. so we found that monroe had a

cook named hanna, so in 1796 she's a young mother with three small boys. fast forward a little over 20 years, she's probably approaching 50 by 1819 when the tour is set. we also selected for her to be speaking with a blacksmith named nelson, because he probably had a role or could have potentially had a role in the guesthouse of blacksmithing accessories for the shutters or something. you see his name highlighted. he's a young man at that point. i also wanted to point out with hannah we recently found a document where it's inventory of items monroe is hoping madison will buy from him and mentioning a soup spoon. that, to me, expressed that hannah would be a person of importance around the property. and i'm going to -- i'm going to give you two sneak peek previews

from our augmented reality tour of these conversations between the enslaved. the first is going to be a conversation between that 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 last summer to build this house, all they talked about was missing their wives. it was so hard for them to be apart, and never know when and for how long they can stay in the same place. i know they're glad to be back together. >> i wanted to underscore the fact that separating families would have been something that was no doubt not missed by the enslaved community of noticing that was happening. then there's 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 represent the many unnamed by their masters, slaves in american history. the kind of irony is that monroe is one of those classic examples of a plantation in virginia where grain is the primary export, and they can't keep up with the cotton revolution that's coming. in the earlier scene you can see monroe talking about an overseer about how highland is not making the profit it should. we see hannah and the spinner talk about their fear that maybe monroe will sell highland. of course he absolutely does do this, and ironically they end up being sold to a cotton plantation in florida. so we see that fear does become real in what actually happened nine years later. >> all i know is wool, washing, spinning, weaving. i hear the women and the men

have terrible conditions in those cotton fields down south and it's a lot rougher than year. lord, i hope mr. monroe does not sell us south. it's worry enough never 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. they won't be black like that. we chose to do illustrations instead of have live actors. we felt that allowed for more scope for the imagination. when you see an actor, you know you're looking at an actor, and we thought you could let your mind explore more with the illustrations. we hope that you will come to see us at highlands this year and we hope to talk to you following the presentations. [ applause ]

>> something that i omitted from my bio notes is that i also have a degree in philosophy which i got 12 years ago, which is why i was a bartender for 20 years. i don't know how jennifer heard that i was a bartender. i thought that joke would go over well in an academic room. you know what i'm talking about, the philosophy firm is never hiring. i found myself at monticello eight years ago now and i have spent many of those years still interpreting. i was still bartending in the evenings and working as a tour guide earlier in the days. and i've talked to literally thousands of people from all over the world about the institution of slavery and what that means and about thomas jefferson and monticello and the vast majority of those people are museum-goers. it's not a diverse group of

people, it's middle-aged, affluent white people, so their ideas about what slavery is and why they're even visiting the historic site 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? which says nothing about their intellect. if you're trained in engineering, the last time you took a social scientist course might have been in high school. so think about your high school history class. i'm sure most of y'all were real good at that class, right? but that probably isn't the case for mathematically minded people. monticello is a beautiful place. we have provided tours for the public since 1923, which is a long time. in the centuries since we have been offering tours, we have changed a lot. the message has changed a lot and the tour has changed.

and i think that something that jen said earlier in the intro introduction in terms of the processes, when people visit a presidential home, they're there for a reason, which is about the idea of heritage and the idea of memory and what that means as our identity as americans. and i like to show this picks customer as 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, that instead of celebrating memory, we want to really talk about history, a nuanced idea. but that's the biggest pedestal i've ever seen, right? and we could get into a conversation about how we've blasted four dead white guys on the most sacred site for several american indians nations of the west, which is also something we should probably recognize. when you're having a conversation at monticello about how great thomas jefferson was, it's pretty hard to move into a conversation about slavery.

there isn't a national memorial to slavery in the united states. there are many memorials, but in terms of actually recognizing that institution as a people, we're pretty far off from that. so having conversations with folks day in and day out at monticello, it leads to a lot of very interesting conversations that are illuminating in a lot of ways. some people really understand the institution and they want to get into the depths of jefferson's involvement and talk about the individuals who were enslaved there and what their lives were like. and some people come to monticello and they 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. they don't really -- they haven't studied it for a long time. most of all people see this botanical garden that's on a beautiful landscape and it's hard to imagine that as a living plantation where people were

held in bondage by the jefferson and randolph families. over the last few years we have been working to talk about slavery more. we started offering slavery at monticello tours in 1993, so which is the 25th year of offering those tours and we started archeological excavations specifically focused on slavery in the 1950s. so it's been an ongoing process for a long time. in 1980s slavery became part of the exhibitions and the interpretation has changed a lot over the years. and there are several people in this room who have worked hard on how the interpretation has come to the foreand helping us understand thomas jefferson was a person better means we have to understand the institution of slavery and the lives of those people that were held in bondage. the picture i show you was an image of mull bury road and it runs down monticello and it's the main street of the plantation. this image was taken maybe five years ago. and you can see the beauty of

the mullberry trees. this was a vibrant street. it was dynamic in jefferson's life. a lot of it changed throughout those years. but he held 607 people in bondage throughout the course of his life, over 400 of them at p at any given time, there were all kinds of slaves. there was a blacksmith shop, a nailery. this building is a storehouse for iron, and just beyond it there would have been a nail-making shop, but it was only there for a couple years, so there have been a lot of conversations about what to build and how. as it changed over time, you can't build every building, so which buildings will be most representative about what life was like? this is the inside of a building that's a little farther up. this is interpreted as a home

for john and priscilla hemmings. john hemmings was the master carpenter at monticello, and his wife, priscilla hemmings, was the nursemaid. they lived in a small cabin not unlike any that lived in the republic. white or black, that's what it looked like. we noticed building this that lots and lots of people had an interesting reaction. we could hear this. the guests would say, that's not so bad. a guest would say, my great-grandfather lived in something way worse than that. the implication there is the obvious one, which is thomas jefferson took care of his slaves, which sometimes is stated directly to you. so we had conversations about this. we can't get every visitor on tour to engage with us on a dialogue with us, and there is a sign on the wall in big red

letters, "not so bad?" when your children can be sold from you, it doesn't really matter what kind of house you live in. getting people to engage in that kind of conversation is something we've worked with. the primary role i engage in is to help our guides work on ways to talk with visitors about these ideas about slavery and what it means for people who are really processing through this stuff sometimes for the first time. but they'll be on the same tour as someone who knows more about it than i will ever read, and others, again, think they're at thomas edison's house. then you get the guy who just gets to stand there and say, that's interesting. the big thing we're about to engage in, we're coming to the final push.

this is the terrace wing. this is an old picture but it shows the way it has been discussed for many years. these are small rooms. there is a kitchen, a smokehouse, and there are two rooms that were servants' quarters. servants' quarters is what jefferson called them, all right? when virginia was still a segregated state in 1923, it shouldn't surprise anyone that conversations about race and slavery were not paramount. so the decision was made in the 1940s to build public restrooms in both those spaces. we've known for a long time that we want to remove that, but it takes a lot of time and money, so the removal of that started this pals year. you can see the restoration site. that structure is the oldest standing structure on the monticello mountain. that's the oldest building where

thomas jefferson moved, and below it is the slave quarters. that was the men's room for years and years and years. now it's not and it's an empty space. we're hoping to open it in june of this year fully restored with more of a conversation about slavery. one of the things we found that was most surprising, that is the base of a stew stove. so when jefferson had this area remodeled, he had it backfilled, which means that there was about this much dirt from the 1770s piled up on top of a base that we didn't know existed. that stove would have been primarily used by a man named james hemmings who jefferson took to paris who learned how to cook french cuisine and he brought him back as a french chef. we're going to leave that ex exposed so we can talk about james hemmings. this man would speak a few

languages. a man who took his own life. we don't know why. but a life who really shows what it's like for people who were enslaved to try to operate in the world of white and black. you can see our plan for what it's going to look like when it's open. in 1993, we also began an oral history project. that oral history project has, over the past 25 years, interviewed over 200 descenants of people who were enslaved. you can hear some of the oral histories of people who were descended from those who were enslaved by jefferson and his family. that project is ongoing. the director is also in this room. so 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 of monticello to talk about how to make these things. it will have panels on the walls and probably some digital stuff so you can go in and learn. the room next door would be sally hemmings' room. probably the biggest change is when they said, we believe thomas jefferson is the father of sally hemmings' children. as the research got bigger and bigger and deeper and deeper, it got to a point where it was fairly difficult to deny that thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children. notice i did not say impossible, because most people do, but one of the lines i use to talk about this is thomas jefferson was the father of sally hemmings' children more than there is evidence that he is the father of his wife's children.

which is true. so 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? 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 eight square miles. today we own about half of that, and a lot of it is 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 that people don't come in and have this reinforcement of an idea that slavery is this idyllic, pastoral thing that existed when hollywood portrays slavery. it's something that existed but very different than what west virginia slavery looked like. people were not separated from each other in the way 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 take, you're going to have a conversation about slavery, you're going to have a conversation about what lives were like for the people who lived there. we focus on agency, we focus on telling the individual stories. one of the things nancy said was monroe's numbers were approximate with thomas jefferson. we have the opposite, right? we have thomas jefferson

counting the shovelfuls of dirt it took to bury his friend's body. come on, y'all, that's creepy. that's real specific. thomas jefferson was a man really focused on precision. we know a lot about the people who were enslaved there and we know it not only from his records but from their own oral histories, their own records, their primary documents, archeology and just ongoing history that teaches us more and more about it. so 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 helped us understand who we are as a people. i want to close with one last thing. anybody 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 inextricably combined with the concept of race that was created at the same time. you want to talk about having a difficult nuance conversation in 36 minutes where you have to talk about the declaration of independence, the beauty of the architecture and help your guests understand that race is a socialogical bioconstruct and that our race is about developing hierarchies? i just did it in 30 seconds, folks. it can be done, it can be done. but these guys don't hear it and they have no idea. quite frankly, for some of them, it's not really their fault. i would ask this in closing.

what can we do? as sites of historians, what can we do to help challenge that? 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 reinforces systemic racism today, that's our challenge. and hopefully it can make things like that become part of history as well. thanks. [ applause ]

well, good afternoon. my name is christian coates. i'm the director of education at mont pe lier. 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 conversation today, it was home to over six generations of enslaved african-americans that lived at montpelier of the slavery ownership which lasted about 120 years. montpelier is unique because we have the ability to track three centuries of american history. we have enslavement that ran

through the 1820s through the 1840s. we have the restored montpelier chain depot which was built in 1910. we have restored it to that segregation look with the white and colored waiting rooms, and we have an active descendant community that works and advises us on our interpretation today. and 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 never really come back in a meaningful way to montpelier. where the african-american community that lived there first in enslavement and later semi

forms of freedom are still around and still active in montpelier today. i want to tell you a little about what we've done the last 20 years which gets us to the big project we just opened in june. the point here is that what we did, the exhibit that we opened in june would not have been possible without the 20 years that preceded it, okay? this is really important for historians to think about. you can't just get a chunk of money and have this big, meaningful exhibit. you have to put in your time with the community. so in 2000, or in 1999, rebecca gilmore coleman who is in the far right approached us about the falling-down cabin that was 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 really knew much about were the

montpelier main house which had 25,000 square feet added to it by the dupont family and the construction next to it. everything he was was 19th century buildings. we didn't much care about them and we didn't have the funds to care about them. so this was more than the 158 buildings that was falling down on the property. so rebecca comes and says, that was my great-grandfather's home. he was a montpelier slave and he built that during construction, and i think you should restore it. we said, we agree with you. that's really cool. we did the research and we figured it out. that restoration took five years. that little cabin took five years because we had no money to do it, right? we would start and stop, 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, right? and that really started this

engagement with the descendant community. her family came out and continued with the archeology of the cabin, and she opened doors for us into the orange county community. so we were meeting all these descendants who were coming to us with their stories and who wanted to be involved in montpelier. we had descendant reunions in 2001 and 2007. i don't have pictures because nobody had digital cameras back then, but in 2009, we met the family of tom generalings. paul was the guy who saved that picture of george washington when the british came with the tours 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 also started public archeology programs and we had those going for a while, but we really started making a

concerted effort to bring the descendant community into those programs, right? so 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. 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 descending community what else we should be doing in the current interpretation of montpelier, what would they like to see? we were at a turning point where we had completed a few products and we didn't know where we were going next and we wanted their opinions on it. the big thing that came out of that meeting was you had to restore the south yard. the south yard is those 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. and we had done archeology 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 archeology, matt reeves, said let's frame out the structures. let's put these ghosted timber frame structures there. i said, matt, dumb idea. these are going to look like jungle gyms and the kids are going to be climbing all over them. he said, that's okay. that's exactly what happened, but he said, some donor is going to see this. they're going to say why didn't you finish those, and we'll say because we need the money to build the cabins the way they should be. and i said, it's never going to happen. lo and behold, in november of 2014, david rubinstein came through with a $10 million gift to do just that, which is pretty amazing. i got to stand on the terrace of the mansion explaining matt's idea to him. i left out giving up part of his money to do it, but it must have

been a good idea. we took down all those structures that we had built and we started doing the archeology. as we did the archeology, it sort of moved slowly, right? so we did archeology, and we restored buildings. while these buildings are being restored, archeology is being done on small buildings in the middle, on and on. right now there are four buildings that have been restored and two left to go, but the archeology is done. his gift was to finish the archeology, restore the six structures and then refurnish all the spaces in the mansion that had yet to be refurnished, okay? that included about a third of the rooms above stairs and the entire cellar level of the mansion and then the six new buildings in the south yard. and my job was to furnish those cellar spaces and the new six buildings and the south yard. and what we decided pretty immediately was that 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. and so we came up with this idea, the exhibit title is "the mere distinction of color." it comes from a quote from madison. madison does not talk in sound bites like other people, but at the constitutional convention he said, we have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time aground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man. if you take the constitutional convention away and the data way and james madison's name away,

you could really stop and ask yourself, when was that quotation spoken? we have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time aground of the most oppressive dominion 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 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. none of you will ever 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 grandchild. you know what it would feel like to have those things taken away from you. those are concepts and characterizations and experiences that people can relate to, okay? so we took photographs from the library of congress, and we sort of ghosted them on these glass panels, and we used 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, and there are little text blurbs with them that don't try to share somebody's biography, right? these aren't historical individuals that we're talking about in particular, right? but, rather, again, those universal concepts that people could relate to. so 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 really long conversation. that's how museum people are, right? so these images share these emotions, right? the shadows share the emotions. we also have these listening stations spread out through 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, right? why don't we let the descendants tell the stories of their ancestors? so we have this beautiful black and white photography that

scrolls behind the words of people talking. i'll just play you a short clip of that. >> i think with montpelier, we're trying to look at a 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 told, we know that. but their stories need to be told. they weren't invisible. they were someone's great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandfather. it's etched in their dna and they are us. >> she does talk in sound bites. she is a gold mine. as we recorded these people, these were not narrations. we asked people open-ended questions, they responded and then we edited them to make these recordings, which are really pretty cool.

we also stenceled the 280 names that we know were enslaved at montpelier on the wall. this goes along with the vietnam war memorial. why is that so moving? because when you start to think about the slaves as individuals, it's much more meaningful than it is when you're looking at them as a monolith. this happened to one person at a time. every 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 lived. so you walk into this quarter and you see a full-size picture of lee anthony or rebecca here. there are others. you see a text blurb about the historic family that lived there, and you push a button and you hear rebecca talk about the artifact in a glass case, which in this case is a piece of

pencil and a writing slate. she explains how this was used by her ancestors. her great-great-grandfather is recorded as one of six african-americans in orange county who were literate. paul jennings' associates, hugh and mary alexander and paul jennings in their family. joe mcgair is also part of it, and there underneath the kid is a full-sized brick that was excavated that has the fingerprint in it of an enslaved child who would have made that brick. in part of the cellar we also decided to tell this national story about slavery, right? how does montpelier fit into the

nation's history? how does the plantation fit into the economic world? how does slavery fund these states? how does the wealth that slavery created ascend to the presidency or translate into the presidency? how does that wealth or the people spouting the idealogy 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, right? 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. then we needed to acknowledge that slavery, even though it ends in 1865, the story doesn't end in 1865, right? it doesn't end when madison dies, it doesn't end when dolly sells everybody, it doesn't end

with abe lilincoln. but this slavery continues today and brandon is going to say, what about charlottesville this summer? this tells you a little bit about what we're trying to do, and 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 hate to be indicted. >> don't shoot him.

don't shoot him. he has no weapon. he has no weapon. [ gunshots ] >> four black hands inside of one car with one hip-hop album, driving ten miles above the speed limit will always guarantee one pullover 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 picking 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 finds himself in exile in his own land. >> don't you put all our boys in jail because you deserve to be

in treason, because any time you force people to live that way, you deserve to be in treason. you are guilty, not us. >> there are days when you wonder what your role is in this country and what your future is in it. >> amazing grace. amazing grace. may god continue to shed his grace on the united states of america. >> i'd show you more but then it goes into the ray charles music, and we had to pay a lot of money for that and we're not allowed to show it on the screens. that video piece is about the legacies of slavery, and i showed you the middle, right?

it starts with madison and the constitution and it goes to slavery and how important it was to the economy of the nation, and 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 that 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, right? and i am pretty sure i can guarantee you that's the first time there were ever that many african-american people at montpelier in its history. i think it speaks volumes about how building relationships and doing, you know, your due diligence really pays off in the end.

[ applause ] >> all right. well, thank you very much for these presentations. i guess i wanted to start by asking if listening to each other you have thoughts or responses or questions for each other so that we could start there. we have a little more than a half hour for conversations, so let's start there and 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 was the project of interpreting must be very different based on the kind of support and the structure of each house and each site in ways that aren't visible

to me. but as i'm listening to it, 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. >> i'll start off. actually, 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, right? and who haven't backed down when we've been edgy or pushy. >> i would say the same. just an ongoing effort, you know, from the board to the donors to the leadership to everybody that's at monticello, it's been this constant push to try to talk more and more. further, the relationships we have with each other. so many of us are in this very small area in central virginia that we know each other pretty well. we didn't really have much of a preliminary conversation before

this panel took place. it was like, okay, let's do that, you know? >> can you push the mic closer? >> how is that? better? >> one thing that's really unique about these sites is we all do a guide training together where we get all our staffs together. i love it because that keeps the spirit of the friendship of our founders together. >> there is also a great barbecue place that's kind of centrally located and we get together there and talk about what's happening at the different sites. >> the best barbecue in charlottesville is actually in gordonsville. >> i have another thought and this relates directly to a question i raised. first a comment, which is to say i've had the opportunity to say the exhibits of color twice now. i can't commend montpelier enough for what this has done in terms of raising the bar for

this conversation, and that is incredible. it really does engage what we're trying to talk about in a way that is desirable and not cult and not sterile. i think people really do respond to it, and maybe not always positively, but they definitely respond to it. my question, christian, is if you would just talk us through a little bit of the process fortunate creation of the video, how that happened, and just thoughts that went into it. >> sure, yeah, the video -- we knew we wanted to do something about the legacy of slavery, and we really didn't know, you know, in the concept design, it was like, okay, that room is going to be the legacy of slavery. but we didn't really nail down what that meant. we came up with the idea of doing the multi-screen video show. so now we're going to do a multi-screen video show about the legacy of slavery, right? that could be a six-hour documentary, right? and we had 10 to 12 minutes that we thought we could realistically work with. so how do you boil down the legacy of slavery into ten minutes, right? that was pretty challenging. we beat our head against the wall about that for over a year,

and 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. it was martin luther king weekend last year, actually. we had academics, activists, artists who came and participated with us in this think tank. we filled a room of whiteboards 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, right? it was like six hours of work gone. but what it did was it really narrowed it down for the filmmakers to come up with this sort of story line. as the weekend developed, 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

is a spoken word artist in boston. it also includes rebecca, as i said, and the president emeritus of the university of virginia kind of kicks things off talking about the 18th and 19th century, and hasan jeffries of the united states talks about contemporary issues of education and slavery and talks about how students today have this notion of slavery in the 18th and 19th century that is very disney-ish that he has to combat all the time. does that answer your question? >> yeah. >> one of the things, doug, that you said when you were talking as you talked about the different ways that visitors think about history and about memory and about why to visit a presidential home, what brings them 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 liblg to hear a little more specificity about your visit, or your hopes. when you have a moment where you say, oh, yeah, we got this right, or we're still struggling with this. >> we have those every day with a new exhibit, right? 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, right? it was not going to be what most people expected, and there were going to be very visceral reactions to it, both in a positive way and a negative way. we have people coming out of the exhibit bawling and they need a shoulder, they need somebody to talk to, they just 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, right? 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. they want somebody to vent to. and how do you train your staff to deal with that, right? basically, the answer is you provide somebody who will listen. not necessarily agree, but listen. anyway, that's really boiling it down. but we also kind of feel like we got it right when we see those reactions, right? because you're making people rethink their notions of history. your 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 being presented with with this museum, and people believe what museums say, for the most part, right, and

they have this huge conflict with it, especially at the home of a president, of a founding father, right, of one of their guys, their history, the history that they've related to so much for their entire lives. all of a sudden, that's totally being turned on its head and they have a really hard time with it. >> our department, which is the education and visitors program department at monticello, it's big, about 100 people, and we have core values that we adhere to or aspire to, i should say. they include unity of effort and visitor focus, so it's really about the guest. the third and final is 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 the car ride home. get the family back in the minivan 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 processing on-site. we have a guest who will take a tour, then they'll come out and find somebody wearing a badge and they'll say, hey, they said this. that shows us they're really thinking about it. or, is that true, because i read blah, blah, blah. at monticello, it often has to do with slavery, with jefferson and hemmings, usually. with this stuff, it's hit or miss. i remember one tour in particular from the business school of darden uva. i was 20 minutes in. i was spitting gold. it was awesome. and a guy pulls me aside and says in a very thick accent, so thomas jefferson and abraham lincoln, they were friends? i said, i should have done more research on this group because none of them were from the united states. sometimes you miss easily and sometimes it goes very well. same thing christian said, i've

had visitors, like an 80-year-old african-american woman cry and that feels like a win. or when somebody says, it's horrible the way you discuss slavery. when someone is telling you 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, one of the most absolutely wonderful things to come from that was a man posted on social media named george monroe, an african-american, that he was owned at highland. that was our ancestry. our director was able to make contact with him and he was introduced more as their cousins. so when you share with a visitor that last week we met a slave descendant here, they get really excited that they're literally hearing living history right now, that we're making these

connections. i'm envious of the deades and decades of research that you have, and i know we'll get there, but i'm inspired by looking at all the pictures of who came to your opening. i would love for that to be our goal at highland, to make contact with that many descendants. on the down side, some may be familiar with the colonization society, sometimes i could see guests taking that as monroe kind of trying to do something nice for the enslaved, and 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, you know, our kind of burgeoning relationship with the highland descendants and where that will go will add an incredible depth and richness to where we're going, and i'm really excited to see what happens next. >> i have one more question and then i'll open it up, if you

don't mind. this is a carryover from the earlier session. i was surprised to see what a big role the descendant community played at montpelier in moving this particular aspect forward. and i wondered how the institutions navigate -- and i'm 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. but i wondered if, at the other two sites, like how -- you know, are there african-american interpreters? are they folks who have a particular relationship to the site or are they professional historians? and what does that do to the dynamic, you think, of the visitors' experience or of the ability to be kind of open to

this conversation about slavery? because it seems like what you did at montpelier, which i always want to say as montpelier as if i'm french, but it seems like what you did there was really just take that on. so how is that happening in the other sites? >> i do think that's a challenging question that we get a lot. it is true that of the hundred interpreters that i just mentioned, the most african-american interpreters we've ever had at one time, three. a couple latin american interpreters, a couple asian-american interpreters, and we're very keenly aware of that. of course, diversifying staff is a goal. it's an institutional goal. but so is diversifying the audience. so is diversifying interest. and i also think there is a part to it that people like us play

as well. there have been many times when i've set up to talk about slavery, and i'm sure you can tell from my accent that i'm not from new york, right? my ancestors were slave holders. 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. but sometimes people will listen to it and there is an audience that needs to be reached. but some people will not listen to me, because who am i to tell them about their history? i'm a southern white man. the privileges that i experienced in my life, the onuses in my life is about slavery. would i like to see more african-american interpreters at monticello? absolutely, and i think that we

will. but i also say, look around this conference, right? this is a conversation that we all have to have. and it's a conversation about academia, it's a conversation about wealth, it's a conversation about systemic bias, it's a conversation about pressure. we're working on it. >> so we need you to use the mic if you have a question, so come on up. >> we're on camera. >> this is more of a question for all y'all, but as someone who lives in the middle of harper's ferry, tetum and gettysburg, we have a lot of conversations about slavery when we have guests visit, especially when you're a volunteer and a young person giving the talk, and especially when you have an accent that none of them are

familiar with, because most of them are from the deep south and they're not used to how we sound. 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, like, the slave holders' descendants might feel attacked. it's really a hodgepodge of kkk members, and how would approach that? >> 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 from the parks department, the parks department just acquired a plantation down there called cloud plantation that they opened up as a historic site. sean had worked for the parks

department, he was an interpreter. he got the role of putting this 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, which was 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 a 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 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. it's really great. you can do it in two days, you can do it in five days, you can

put as much or as little into it as you want to. but 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, right, 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 poin, right? at some point you have to recognize 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, right? but for everybody else, 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, right? there's no great answer to this. and this is something that the field of interpretation is

wrangling with, you know, in the present day, right? so we're all working to find a solution to this, i think. >> thank you. >> i think we all just stand united in knowing that 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 on montpelier and also monticello. i've never been in james monroe's plantation. but i ask myself -- and i think it is commendable what you are doing. i think that we can see the transformation that is going on in these two different sites. but i think that jennifer, she 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 ifr the impression that montpelier you are doing something different with this new exhibition. i recall when i was there the last time, the cabins were not yet reconstructed that i think now they are. during the visit to the mansion, there was some work to be done with that, and i asked myself, what is being done, because the impression that i have in these spaces is that a visitor, most of them, i think that they are white visitors. there is a minority of african-americans who go there, and you 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 you were talking about the dimensions, usually what i had an impression in two places,

and mt. vernon is the same thing and mt. vernon is not even here, but the mansion is sort of a sacred space of the presidents where we don't talk about slavery inside the mansion. we talk about 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 was 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. and i ask myself whether or not the stories are being incorporated inside 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 monticello and montpelier, you are doing a nice job in showing issues related to slavery. but i know there is another house of a president that is mt. vernon, the social media account. it's how george washington was so nice with his slaves. and i think that all of this work of interpretation goes also beyond the 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. >> thank you. >> i'll try and address some of that. the first thing, you're right, right? i mean, many, many visitors for many years, you come to monticello, you go, you buy the ticket, you take the house tour.

in your head going to monticello is going to the house. you take a 45-minute tour, you go to mickey's tavern, you have a nice colonial lunch and drive back to where you're going. we don't script our tours. every guide writes their own tour. you are required to say two things, that thomas jefferson was the father of hemmings' children, and that they saved the home from destruction because of the interest in freedom. if i get through a tour and the guide has not mentioned the declaration of independence at all, we're going to have a talk, right? 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. and all of those conversations 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 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 got to talk about slavery. you really got to talk about it on tour. we think we're making progress. we think we're doing that. and one of the things we're very excited about at monticello is we're going to change the tour. so starting in 2018, once these rooms are done, you don't go to monticello unless you start by talking about slavery. every tour. every house tour. and that segregation of the ideas, it's a 20th century holdover. it's an early 20th century holdover. we've been doing our best to break barriers. we always talk about this with our guides, and i think we're making progress, but i think 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 is a professor came to monticello, did not take a tour. walked around and said, this institution whitewashes history. i can absolutely see how she could say that. and i could see how an african-american female academic might pass by this redneck guy wearing a tie and i beu blazer and not want to listen to what i have to say. there is a lot there about identity, understanding, full range of opportunity of the sites and hopefully we'll make more progress as we go forth. >> 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 something to do with slavery incorporated into the interpretation. >> i would just add that i did a mt. vernon tour, but -- so it was connected to a conference.

and the guide in every room said, this is the kitchen. there were four enslaved women who worked in this room every time. and i asked her afterwards, i was like, 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 was it her? she was young and really, like, scrappy and excited, right, or was it something that the entire -- you know, that all the tour guides gave. something that was so impressive, she would say, the washingtons had this reputation for being amazing hosts, and that's because there were four enslaved women who worked upstairs and did all the laundry. she did it in every single room, but it seems like that has to happen, because the split between the house and the outbuildings is clearly a point of contention. but we have a lot of questions.

i'm sorry. >> i would like to say just in terms of highland, likewise, we don't have scripted tours. guides are required to talk about slavery as the main narrative. but as far as papers being transcribed, one of our strategy was to use a springboard to talk about slavery. we might not have the primary source to talk about a slave being in a specific room, but we do have the objects. instead of saying monroe's presidential china of his presidency, how can you use that china to maybe springboard into the missouri compromise and what's the future slavery of america? that's one of our strategies. >> maybe we can do some short questions and take two at a time, okay? yes, thank you. >> the framers of the constitution were very articulate about rights of the individual and freedom and all that stuff, and yet we had six

or seven hundred thousand people die in the civil war to free the slaves, but it wasn't necessary in europe. what's different about this place? >> you didn't have race-based slavery in europe the way you see you didn't have race-based slavery in europe as you see it in americas andist not central to the economy of europe. >> even though the money that's made in the americas, both america, 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 levy from christopher newport university. 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 i was part -- part of my job was basically to teach middle schoolers about john brown and the anecdote that's oftentimes used was about john brown witnessing a slave being beaten brutally with a shovel and how that inspired him in his anti-slavery movement. anyway, i like to use that example because it instilled upon their minds the idea that you can't forget that slavery was an inherently violent system and that that's something you have to not forget. and the thing is that i could also notice it wasn't so much effective on the older, more aptathetic teenage high school type kids. so i was wondering in terms of presenting this kind of stuff to children, what kind much strategies or examples do you think is more effective? i guess that's my question. >> thanks.

>> chris used the term universal. i would absolutely agree with that. what are things they can relate to in their own life. in our case, imagine your own parents being sent away to another place you don't know for how long, how would you feel? those type of scenarios seem to do well. but go ahead. >> she just brought that up. nancy's husband is the student program director at montpelier, so -- >> we're good friends. >> -- what she just described is a program he created with his students and that's exactly what they do. they focus on universal experiences that could go back and forth through the time periods. >> thank you. >> thank you. >> thank you very much. i was just really interesting. my name is ann bailey. i'm from binghamton university and i write about slavery. just so interesting to hear the progress that's being made at all these sites. some of which i'm familiar with, so it's great to see this. my big question is similar to the question before, wondering

how you try to reach or if you can reach even people beyond the visitors who come, because 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, a k through 12 curriculum and whether or not that's 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, more into the mainstream. so, that's just one quick question about that. curious also whether or not to thinking about reaching out to college students? i could see a number of our college students would be very interested in internships and you could get more 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 think they would be excited to know they are.

>> this is not my area so i hope i don't botch this, but we do something at monticello called the monticello teacher institute where grade school students come from all over the world, they work on projects and create a curriculum which is available online at the monticello classroom. it has a lot of different lesson plans that engage some of the conversations we're talking about here. we've also begun a program with digital field trips where we'll have a guide skype with the classroom so the students can ask directly, they can ask what they're thinking about. that's been immediately very popular. it's brand-new. we just started doing it but it's working well. we're working on revamping our website, so we'll see how that goes. and a lot of work, you're absolutely right, we hope to push it forward and work with it. as for the colleges, i did say at one point, i think the most we've this is five african-american interpreters. all were from the university of virginia. so, you're absolutely right. it's the best place and your

comment about, i don't know if students know what's going on. this relates back to your question as well. that to me feels like a loss. what you said, you know, when do you feel like you've missed? we have colleagues at mt. vernon. we know the work they engage in. we know how important slavery is to all of us in our discussions, but if somebody can walk away and say, i don't feel like we talked about it at all, that feels like a loss for us. it's frustrating for those of us behind the scenes who dedicate our lives trying to get that conversation out there. so, we can just keep trying. >> quick question. >> justin hawkins, university of maryland. i wonder if you can talk how the tourists are set in a certain year and there are limitations with having physical structures and they can only sort of show a certain snapshot. how do you deal with that difficulty in showing a large chronology of time and how it relates? 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 because that helped us 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. tell me the second part of your question again? >> when you have physical structures, they 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. so, the visitor sort of gets an image of it as it is today. >> how do you show the fluid chronology with sort of static limitation? >> i think you should speak to that with your app. >> one of the things we did year

before last is we created an app that's available through android and iphone. it's a free downloadable app that shows digital rendering and it gives a chronology and geolocated. you walk along monticello and it's narrated by an sesers of monticello. anybody can google that, find it on the app store and you can also use it when you're not at monticello. its real strength is doing exactly what you're saying and talking about how it changed over time. >> we also had an outdoor audio tour that helped people with buildings that might have been there outside of the interpretive period. we interpreted montpelier back to the retirement years. all the buildings that we're restoring on the landscape would have been there from 1837 to 1836. that's sort of the period we have chosen to interpret. not one year, but fudge it a little bit. >> thank you.

>> i think we have time for just one more question. >> 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 re-enact tors or by multimedia and digital items, such as podcasts and videos? thank you. >> are there re-enactors? >> at montpelier we use a james madison re-enactor and dolley madison, who are highly vetted. the same guy that reads the newspaper that madison would have read 200 years ago every day of his life so he's really into it. and he's great. he's exactly the same age madison was 200 years ago and he looks like -- it's strange. but that being said, i think

when costumed interpretation, first-person interpretation is done well, it's great. i also say that it's really hard to do it well. 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. >> yeah, yeah. >> same. we contract people in. we use professionals from colonial williamsburg. for the most part, you know, i think my answer to your question would be yes. which is better, yes, depends on the swa igs. and it depends on who you're using or what kind kf digital work is being put out. >> i would caution you not to use technology for the sake of technology. don't use technology for the whiz bang factor. use it because it's the best

method to convey the story in the most effective way. >> before we thank you guys, i just want to say one of the things that's been so exciting about this conversation, and i know there are a lot of folks in the room who do public history, but for those who don't do public history, to hear how collaborative this work is on both sides. i presumed that the interpretation was the collaborative space. when you're engaging with the public. what i've learned today is the intense claptive work you do both with each other and other professionals and with community members. i 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 so come and talk to them if you have other questions. thank you so much.

american history tv on c-span3, every weekend documenting america's story, funding for american history tv comes from these companies who support c-span tv as a public service. james monroe and george washington shared a bond forged in the revolutionary war. each man would serve his country as president but the politics of the young nation drove a wedge between them. next on the presidency, in this lecture from the university of mary washington's great live series, scott harris explains where things went wrong. he's the executive director of university's museums. the university of mary washington provided this video.