Monument Lab:Creative Speculations for Philadelphia ed. by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum, and: The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America by David W. Young (review)

Reviewed by: Monument Lab:Creative Speculations for Philadelphia ed. by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum, and: The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America by David W. Young Abby R. Eron Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia. Edited by Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2020. 336 pp. Illustrations. Cloth, $35.) The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America. By David W. Young. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. 294 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Paper, $29.95; cloth, $109.50; ebook, $29.95.) Contemporary artist Karyn Olivier stepped into one of public history's particularly contentious arenas with her The Battle is Joined (2017), one of twenty Monument Lab commissions documented in the present exhibition catalog. Spread across Philadelphia's public spaces, this nontraditional exhibition revolved around the question, "What is an appropriate monument for the current city of Philadelphia?" In response, Olivier used acrylic mirrors to encase a 1903 memorial to the Battle of Germantown in Vernon Park, located in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. Her visually and conceptually intriguing intervention, though only temporary, disturbed some, as the installation's reflective surface seemed to disappear the hundred-plus-year-old memorial it enclosed. Americans lost the 1777 Battle of Germantown, but it provided momentum for eventual victory in the Revolutionary War. In The Battles of Germantown: Effective Public History in America, which features an image of Olivier's work on its book cover, David W. Young diagnoses Germantown's public history apparatus with an overly narrow focus on this battle and on white colonial history, to the exclusion of more chronologically, racially, and otherwise diverse narratives. Young writes as former executive director of two of Germantown's historic house museums. His book examines, through a series of "battles," the successes and failures of over a century of public history. He offers Germantown as a case study, arguing that the neighborhood has begun to practice "effective public history," that which fosters dialogue and addresses contemporary problems while confronting and amending the historical record's gaps and biases. [End Page 69] Chapter one looks at how Cliveden house and the Historic Germantown consortium revised their interpretative approaches in the first decades of the twenty-first century to reflect Germantown's majority African American population more meaningfully and truthfully. Chapter two considers the Negro Achievement Week celebration in Germantown in 1928. This event was significant as a predecessor to Black History Month, as an expression of Harlem Renaissance artistry and philosophy, and as "the first modern public history program in America" (38). Young analyzes why it was forgotten and discusses how it has since been remembered. Chapter three looks at a failed attempt to enact a Colonial Williamsburg–style development project in Germantown in the 1950s and '60s. Chapter four recounts the process through which Johnson House gained recognition as a station on the Underground Railroad. The success of the site as a waystation toward freedom depended on its secrecy, a semi-invisibility that presented challenges for historians. Chapter five looks at how Germantown has addressed "empty" spaces, including a dilapidated town hall, an out-of-business house museum, the Cliveden kitchen, and an abandoned housing project that had been built atop a potter's field (public burial ground). With the latter, one wishes to know more about the local availability of affordable housing, and the possible tensions between, or coalescing of, justice in remembrance and justice in housing. In general, though, Young does not shy away from the realities of his work. Through his commitment to archival research and to his constituents, Young sets an encouraging example for public history's practitioners. Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia presents an excellent record of a unique art exhibition. Professors Paul M. Farber and Ken Lum, the book's editors, led the project. They and the head of Mural Arts Philadelphia, their partner in the exhibition, contribute essays to part one of the volume. They critique the city's current collection of monuments for what and whom they exclude. The bulk of the catalog, part two, consists of entries for twenty monument commissions, called "prototypes," followed by a reflection...