id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
concept-2499	none	Embodying Space: Performance, Tourism and Difficult History	2020	25	.pdf	application/pdf	6582	299	49	In presenting a social history, an “excavated” space, history museums can help visitors find not “the truth” but many truths, the multifaceted strands of history that encountered each other in a single place.25 Theresa Singleton points out that focusing on one strand of the history of a site or object does not preclude the development of other narratives about the same site; the various people who lived in the place all made a mark and should be included in interpretation.26 In the last few decades, many American historical sites have begun to tell the stories not just of the “great men,” but also, as best they can considering the extant evidence, the stories of enslaved people who lived in the same spaces.27 These tourist sites are finding new stories and new ways to tell them,28 as a way of rectifying the “symbolic annihilation” of enslaved people’s material culture.29 Despite the “absence of material structures,” museums should, says Jorge L. Giovanetti, “take into account the enslaved…it is a moral imperative to speak out, and represent, the relations of power and socio-racial inequality that ruled in plantation society in order to understand the unequal racial relations in the Americas today. Enslaved people in New York built infrastructure, such as roads; worked on farms; and were bought, sold, and rented as investments.17 In New Jersey, enslaved people worked on farms of various sizes, but also worked as builders, craftsmen, in animal husbandry, and in industry.18 Slavery also thrived in urban areas, as Clifford Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg write, noting dynamics in mid-Atlantic states such as Virginia.19 Because this more varied engagement with slavery prevents the development of a single narrative, it is difficult to create a single image, such as the south’s iconic (and fictional) Tara.	cache/concept-2499.pdf	txt/concept-2499.txt