Names of the Flowers: Ruby Hemenway's Redemption of History, The

Frontiers, 2004 by Hoberman, Michael

In Ruby Hemenway's rendering, elderly people's familiarity with yesterday's objects, their knowledge of antiques, is a source of their authority, their legitimacy as historians. Historical knowledge can therefore be credited to those who can "Remember When." As "official" historians are versed in the written chronicle of the past, the readership of Hemenway's columns is vested with an object-derived local knowledge that is every bit as significant. Unlike the professional historian, however, the possessor of this material knowledge of history may not be aware of his or her abilities, and so Hemenway continuously encourages and prompts her readers to remember. She calls upon her own storehouse of antique knowledge in order to take readers on a weekly tour of their own attics, to assist them in rummaging through and finding the material facts that they themselves have lived. Nearly every one of her columns engages readers directly, through use of the second person direct address, through open-ended and reader-directed questions, and through speculative treatment of the implied contents of their own collective memories of material things. Her readers know as much as she does, and it is her own humbly-offered knowledge that proves the point. "If you asked any old person who has always lived in New England to give you a little sketch of the history of portraiture in New England, he would probably say, 'Oh, no I don't know enough about it to do that,'" she remarks in her column entitled "Artists Traveled County to Do Portraits."22 The remainder of the column is a richly detailed catalogue of ordinary antique objects of the sorts one might easily find in the attic of an old farmhouse. And the composite of these enumerated objects is, indeed, as authoritative a history of early New England portraiture as one could hope for, a detailed and object-driven description of the evolution from painted portraits through silhouettes to daguerreotypes. Readers of all her columns are encouraged to explore their own collections of historical objects such as these and to confront history by touching these pieces that remain in their immediate possession.

OF DOGS ON COATS (ON ICE): LOCALIZING THE PAST

One of the dilemmas posed by historical writing-at least as Americans formulate it-is that it relies on generalizations-on a constant movement away from the particular and into various realms of collectivity, nationalism, and otherwise extra-local categories. The distant view prefers patterns to particulars, like a bird's-eye view that sees checkered fields and forests instead of grass blades and trees. In American history, this broad view of the past has often privileged the nation's chronicle over the story of its various sections, regions, and locales. Even historians who have applied an interest in sectional, regional, and local life have done so largely in the service of a national history or the overarching synthesis. Regionalism has come and gone as a force within the reckoning of American history. During both the 1930s and the 1960-1970s specifically regionalist historiography was resurgent, and the current period brings yet another regionalist revival, at least among scholars who seek, as Joseph Amato puts it, to satisfy "an innate human desire to be connected to a place," and to locate unifying elements in an increasingly diversifying cultural politics. Meanwhile, a regionalist orientation has remained alive for members of regional groups. Even if professional historians have, in Patricia Nelson Limerick's words, dismissed regional history as "naptime," local historians abound wherever local history exists, which is to say, everywhere.23