Page 1 →Introduction

On the crisp Saturday morning of February 15, 2014, dozens of people gathered between a magnolia tree and the front steps of a blue, Italianate Victorian era house in Columbia, South Carolina. The crowd awaited entry into the childhood home of Woodrow Wilson. The historic house museum (HHM) shuttered its doors to the public nine years prior. A ribbon strung across the home’s porch signaled the last formal barrier in presenting the reinterpretation and rehabilitation of the eighty-year-old HHM. From its inception as a presidential home in the 1920s, the Woodrow Wilson Family Home (WWFH) allowed visitors via tours to explore the teenage years of the twenty-eighth president of the United States. Yet with one slice of a yellow ribbon that President’s Day, the WWFH severed it ties to the shrine approach common in HHMs. Armed with a revolutionary reinterpretation, the WWFH officially opened as the first museum of Reconstruction in the nation. The new interpretation overthrew the traditional HHM narrative of elite white men in an attempt to fill the enormous gap between academic and public knowledge of Reconstruction. Historic Columbia, the organization that administers the home, reimagined the outdated HHM model of docent-guided tours heavily dependent on period rooms. The preservationist group installed a twenty-first-century exhibit reliant on panels and a minimalist approach to displaying artifacts. The organization launched an innovative semiguided tour led by vetted docents trained to interpret the biracial space that the Wilsons and their employees occupied, with the goal of exploring the biracial democracy created by Reconstruction. In the process of blending two seemingly unconnected subjects, the post–Civil War world and a teenager named Tommy who would become president, the museum created complex and at times contested conversations about freedom, citizenship, white domestic terror, systemic racism, hero worship, and memory in South Carolina, the South, and the nation.

Rebirth is the first comprehensive study of the MoRE at the WWFH, believed to be the first Reconstruction museum in the country. Reconstruction as a field is rich in historical assessment and revisionism but not in areas of public interpretation until the last decade. That the MoRE is the first museum of Reconstruction is an institutional claim by Historic Columbia Page 2 →that I have been unable to refute through internet research, examination of National Park Service (NPS) sites, and familiarity with the literature on museums.¹ Both the NPS and the American Association for State and Local History recognize the museum as such on their websites.² Although museums partially focus on Reconstruction as part of their timeframe or housed temporary exhibits on the era, no museum prior to the MoRE focused on the history of Reconstruction. I cannot rule out that there may have been a Reconstruction museum that has disappeared from the record, most likely during the prolific, community-centered Black museum movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As Andrea Burns argues, tracing and analyzing the movement has proven difficult because it was so vast geographically, economically, culturally, and politically. In addition scholarship on Black public history can be challenging to find, since, as Pero Gaglo Dagbovie notes, the term is rarely used, and though African American public history first appeared in 1980s, it was often synonymous with Black history. Furthermore, the specialization of Black public history, with its own methodology and objectives, has not followed the same trajectory as general public history.³

An early form of Black public history began in the late 1820s and lasted into the early twentieth century, when Black urban elites on the East Coast included exhibits as part of their work with churches, literary societies, and benevolent groups.⁴ Two generations of founders followed, heavily influenced by the “Negro canon,” a literary term describing the Black history, culture, and art produced between 1915 and 1960 and often taught at historically Black colleges and universities.⁵ Critical to this first wave countering white supremacist narratives was Carter G. Woodson, the “father of Black history” and arguably the first Black public historian who provided academic scholarship to a mass Black audience through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, Negro History Week, and Negro History clubs, kits, books, and extension courses. At the same time the American Legion Auxiliary saved Woodrow Wilson’s home in Columbia, Black churches, club women, and professionals such as teachers, librarians, and social workers relied on the association’s programming, as well as field trips to Frederick Douglass’s DC home and Harpers Ferry. After World War II, Black neighborhood museums, or what Burns describes as alternative “free spaces,” frequently operated between the private and public sphere of storefronts or apartments.⁶ Amid the mid-century civil rights movement, the first public museums that were both established and maintained by the Black community and dedicated to long-term exhibition and research in Black history, culture, and pride appeared. This movement, inspired by 1940s radicalism and 1960s Black nationalism, expanded the Negro canon and Black pride. Greater interest in African history and Pan-Africanism fueled the Page 3 →“aesthetic” of the Black museum movement.⁷ In the late 1970s, these museums expanded, and a second generation of new public museums materialized, as did the Association of African American Museums. Forced to be resourceful and flexible and lacking professional staff, these independent, grassroots Black museums and their collections successfully countered mainstream museum and educational institutions by controlling and presenting complex, radical narratives that reimagined power, memory, and identity. In the 1980s and 1990s, Black museums faced financial strains that forced some museums to close their doors.⁸ It is this period in which, I suspect, a Reconstruction museum could have emerged and disappeared.

Those Black museums that remained changed dramatically, more closely resembling traditional and professionalized institutions that rely on elite fundraising, expansion, and new buildings that removed them from communities they initially served. Though they still pushed back against the Eurocentric model of the museum, Black museums forged new relationships with academia, on the precipice of institutionalizing public history and Black history as a field of study. Those museums that survived operated amid urban problems of renewal and gentrification, housing shortages, and unemployment and epidemics of crack, violence, over-policing, and mass incarceration.⁹ In the last three decades, a third generation of commemorative museums and a revived national museum movement appeared, culminating in the Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. In the South, cultural tourism helped inspire a surge of “safe icon” museums devoted to important figures like Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr.; however, Black women, such as educator Nannie Burroughs, who were vital to the intersection of women’s and civil rights activism remain largely overlooked. Less well-known and more “revolutionary” subjects like Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey and Nat Turner remain nearly untouchable.¹⁰ Opposition from the Black museum movement, the Smithsonian, and white conservatives to a federal museum on the National Mall delayed its opening by decades.¹¹ Since 1988 experts estimate that there are over two hundred Black museums ranging from those devoted to significant individuals to aspects of culture, slavery, baseball, civil rights, and military service.¹²

Since the MoRE’s opening and during Reconstruction’s sesquicentennial, other sites are interpreting Reconstruction, especially in South Carolina but across the nation as well. In 2015 the state-run North Carolina History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation, and Reconstruction received its first $500,000 grant, but it will not open until 2027. Five years after the MoRE reopened, the National Constitution Center, which possesses original copies of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, claimed that its new permanent exhibit, “Civil War and Reconstruction: The Battle for Page 4 →Freedom and Equality,” was the “first exhibit devoted to exploring the constitutional debates from the Civil War and Reconstruction.”¹³

The MoRE is also part of a growing movement to commemorate Reconstruction in South Carolina, making the state a leader in Reconstruction public history. Not until 2016 did the NPS finally expand from a partial Reconstruction narrative at two sites: the Nicodemus, Kansas, National Historical Site, a freedmen’s town established as Reconstruction eroded, and the Andrew Johnson National Historical Site in Greeneville, Tennessee.¹⁴ The NPS, formed in 1916 during the Progressive Era and Wilson’s administration, in general was slow to preserve sites of Black history, especially those related to more radical Black thinkers and activists.¹⁵ In the late twentieth century, the NPS sought more inclusive narratives, particularly around the Underground Railroad and civil rights movements, culminating in the Beaufort Reconstruction Monument.¹⁶ In October 2016 Reconstruction historians Kate Masur and Gregory Downs completed a Reconstruction-era theme study for the NPS, a prerequisite for adding a new site. Based on this research, the scholars asked President Barack Obama in a Washington Post opinion piece to designate a Reconstruction monument in Beaufort County, South Carolina. In his final days in office, Obama used the Antiquities Act to fulfill their request, naming four properties to the Reconstruction Monument. The NPS’s first Reconstruction site in Beaufort was a victory fifteen years in the making. The South Carolina Sons of Confederate Veterans campaign derailed the first attempt to designate a site there in 2002.¹⁷ Since 2010 the Historic Mitchelville Freedom Park, a nonprofit on nearby Hilton Head Island, works to preserve and commemorate the first self-governed freedmen’s community, which was destroyed in a 1893 hurricane.¹⁸ The South Carolina Department of Archives and History launched a permanent digital exhibit on Reconstruction.¹⁹ Reconstruction 360, a web and mobile application designed by South Carolina Educational Television, expands digital interpretation to increase understanding of the Reconstruction era for the public, students, and educators. A concise and interactive, place-based case study model, the first module dissects the widely misunderstood history of “40 Acres and a Mule.” It brings to digital life the early battle over land and labor waged in Beaufort county, now home to the NPS Reconstruction park, that Willie Lee Rose described in Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment. Reconstruction 360 continues to grow its primary-source-driven documentaries and lesson plans via new modules.²⁰ The South Carolina State Museum updated its permanent exhibit to include a modern interpretation of Reconstruction and its impact in the twenty-first century. In 2018 the museum hosted a Reconstruction exhibit with elements reminiscent of the MoRE, which borrows its legislative desk and chair and red shirt from Page 5 →State Museum. Both sites display a Democratic straight ticket from the 1876 election and a wooden ballot box. The State Museum also hosts an online Reconstruction exhibit.²¹ For over a decade the MoRE, as well as other local, state, and federal projects operating in South Carolina, led the initiative to interpret Reconstruction for the public. Together they show the South and the nation the value of commemorating Reconstruction, the nation’s first Black civil rights movement, in a time of increased Black disenfranchisement and social justice activism.

The MoRE docents became the first tour guides in the country to interpret a museum devoted to Reconstruction and were critical to the success of the semiguided tour of the permanent house exhibit. Eleven docent oral histories anchor the manuscript, amplifying the voices of vital frontline labor that are too often erased in public history literature driven by studies of audience and their identity. As cultural institutions increasingly compete with the leisure and tourism industry, museums have embraced interactive and multimedia exhibits as well as explored more diverse, inclusive narratives and social advocacy. In The Participatory Museum, Nina Simon postulates that the audience-centered institution should be as relevant, useful and accessible as a shopping mall or train station.²² Now museums apply atmospherics, manipulating the environment to affect people’s behavior in their architectural, interior, and exhibition design as well as in commercial or leisure spaces.²³ Attending a museum, like other leisure activities, also affirms identity. John Falk argues a person’s “self-aspects” (or “i”dentities), such as being a family member, impact leisure choices more than race, religion, or gender (“I”dentities), especially when matched with convenience and affordability. His theory marked a contextual turn in visitor studies away from a focus on the length of visits to identify and define five types of visitor identity: explorer; experience seeker; professional/hobbyist; recharger, who looks for a therapeutic or rejuvenating experience; and facilitator, who encourages learning. Emily Dawson and Eric Jensen criticized Falk’s “short-term” identities as reductionist and shaped by a “behaviorist market research framework.” Though he rightly argued “long-term” identities did not fully explain visitors’ leisure choices, he neglected them all together.²⁴ The importance of Falk’s identities lies in their contribution to understanding how visitor motivations complement demographic factors such as gender, sexuality, age, race and ethnicity, education level, ability/disability, and the complexity of socioeconomic status that also shape attendance and experience. A new contextual turn is needed to research nonvisitors and aid museums in attracting this previously ignored group. Scholarship shows, and public historians know, that adult museum visitors are younger, white professionals, often wealthier and more educated than the general population. Families are Page 6 →numerous, but minorities, those with disabilities, and non-English speakers are rare.²⁵ In the case of Black museums, at least 20 percent of their visitors are non-Black, while Black visitors rarely make up more than 10 percent of primarily white-centered museums’ guests. Art museums receive the harshest criticism with respect to accessibility. Nonvisitors view galleries and the ability to interpret their collections as for elites only.²⁶ Although they lack a grounding in museum theory, absent audiences likely understand that museums solicit diverse audiences not as an attempt to promote inclusiveness but as a form of hegemonic messaging intended to shape societal norms based on white middle- and upper-class ideals.²⁷

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, public history and museum practitioners began asking important questions about the limited training docents received and their motivations in volunteering at museums.²⁸ Volunteer docents who worked with the public on the front lines of an institution were not considered a professional force. Consequently, interpreters struggle to professionalize their field within public history. As such the mediated learning and experiences of paid and volunteer staff remain understudied in the museum field.²⁹ Scholarship that incorporates docents often centers the visitor experience during a tour or the perspective of the trainers or full-time staff rather than giving these interpreters their own voice and agency. For example, The Museum Educator’s Manual appeared in 2009 as a step-by-step handbook for a “team approach” to volunteer management and the three Rs: recruitment, recognition, and retention of docents. A solid training manual, it offers no docent perspectives.³⁰ A notable exception most relevant to the MoRE training is Shawn Halifax’s reflective essay on the training at McLeod Plantation Historic Site, a former Sea Island cotton planation once occupied by Confederate artillery officers and the 54th Massachusetts United States Colored Troops. As a trainer Halifax found a gap in interpretive scholarship for practitioners that was accessible yet methodological and offered solutions on the psychological and pedagogical hurdles docents faced when interpreting the legacy of slavery. The site, which opened a year after MoRE and also depicts Reconstruction, required new training protocols and professionalization, supported by Charleston County Parks.³¹ McLeod trained four paid interpreters in methods based on the National Association for Interpretation’s interpretive philosophy, which stresses research skills, knowledge of audience/behavior, and a foundational theme across interpretation. Docents received a contextual narrative connecting primary and secondary sources and attended multiday workshops on themes and visitor resistance and response. They spent the last two months creating a tour lasting forty-five to sixty minutes.³²

Case studies demonstrate patterns of docent resistance that emerged with the interpretive training at MoRE and are elucidated in several chapters Page 7 →of this book. Docents at San Francisco’s Haas-Lillienthal House rejected a 1993 “counter-tour” that followed the “invisible life” of a fictional, 120-year-old man. The docents felt undermined by the museum’s effort to create a fictional life with artifacts and docent-told stories that created a false “historical presence.” Similar to the volunteer docents at Historic Columbia who contested the reinterpretation of Wilson’s early life, some docents participated, while others refused.³³ Akin also to the Wilson house, the 2001 reopening of the Campbell House tour in Spokane, Washington, moved away from a tour based on décor and objects to one with larger themes of class, gender, and labor. At both sites docents struggled with the complicated script and its difficult interpretive material. At Campbell House docents broke character during vignettes placed within the tour and gave visitors the wrong information.³⁴ When the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta hosted the American Museum of Natural History’s traveling exhibit the Genomic Revolution from June 2004 through January of 2005, the museum adopted a peer training model for undergraduate students, who possessed an existing framework of knowledge and were on payroll. The success of the MoRE at the WWFH depended on the paid weekend staff, who were often graduate public history students, and well-educated volunteers.³⁵ These studies offer glimpses at the docent experience, foreshadowing docent resistance to HHM counter-tours that move away from elite, white narratives and deemphasize static objects and decorative arts.³⁶ This book illuminates the voices of ten volunteers and six paid weekend staff who completed short written surveys and ten oral histories at a “reinterpret or perish” turning point in HHM history.

As the title Rebirth seeks to convey, the book expands our understanding of a key debate emerging within the last decade in the museum studies field. Put simply, there are too many HHMs, many of which are outdated and some of which cannot be saved.³⁷ The MoRE reinterpretation grew out of an attempt to make a former HHM that was a decorative art shrine to Woodrow Wilson relevant as well as distinctive from the three other HHMs devoted to the former president. My research into Wilson’s childhood living in three southern states helped to answer docent questions about how the regional experience shaped him, his family, and his leadership. It also led to new interpretations of Wilson’s Reconstruction experiences with a biracial government and community that will add to the robust literature on his life.³⁸

The MoRE joins other HHMs revolutionizing interpretation with counternarratives and unorthodox approaches as called for in a 2015 issue of Public Historian that looked to reimagine the HHMs inundating the landscape. The Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn and the home of Page 8 →Matilda Joslyn Gage, a more progressive and lesser-known contemporary of Susan B. Anthony, exemplify sites choosing inclusion and eschewing white men and elites to contest “biased systems of power and narrow histories.”³⁹ The MoRE, the Weeksville Center, and the Gage home are not “object-rich” or vignette focused. They abandoned decorative arts to address “the trauma inflicted by social and political invisibility.”⁴⁰ Like the MoRE, the Weeksville Center tells “a needed counterculture narrative” about a free Black community first founded in 1838 a decade after New York eradicated slavery. Both sites commemorate the creation of schools, churches, and other institutions by their respective Black communities through “creativity, entrepreneurship, and self-sufficiency” in the post-emancipation era. The MoRE and the center tackle continued oppression after liberation rather than focus on one of these “two extremes” that dominate the historic representation of Black communities. They both juxtapose questions about freedom with “unfreedom.”⁴¹ MoRE weekend docent Jennifer Gunter was “fascinated with the idea of freedom.” In thinking about the concept of emancipation, she asked, “Some men in Washington D.C. say you’re free. What do you do? What’s next? … How do you be free? What does that entail?”⁴² Both sites share slavery as the visitors’ “default reference point,” which create patterns of assumption that free individuals were enslaved. But the center counters the HHM model of “elite architecture” and conveys the “normalcy” of freed peoples’ daily lives better than a presidential home ever could. Yet, both stress that people built and maintained routines to their lives surrounded by “families, jobs, procuring food, leisure” that counter the traditional “aberrant” narrative of enslavement, poverty, and criminalization.⁴³ Where the MoRE only implies it, Gage informs its visitors of two rules: “Check your dogma at the door” and “Think for yourself.” This is a wise warning for a site that comes out swinging with a “dialogical model” centered first on reproductive rights, which was part of a decision to use Gage’s ideas and writings about social justice rather than a traditional lens of domesticity. With dialogue as the driver of the interpretation, the volunteer facilitators at Gage’s home also resemble MoRE docents.⁴⁴

This project’s title also reflects a conversation with the theoretical literature on how museum visitors receive and contest power. Rebirth comes from its engagement with three texts on power, including a theoretical study of the modern museum, Birth of the Museum. The MoRE exhibited the other two visual works, the 1915 white supremacist epic The Birth of a Nation (dir. D. W. Griffith, 1915) and a modern-day response, The Rebirth of a Nation (2007), by the Black artist DJ Spooky. His film and the MoRE are both attempts to contest and invert unilateral dominant messages of power in traditional public spheres. For more than a century, museums and their ordered Page 9 →collection of objects, as well as theaters, parks, and libraries, managed the social behavior and conduct of their visitors with a surveilling white gaze. One of these unidirectional, dominant cultural messages disseminated both in museums and in The Birth of a Nation in response to a demographically changing United States was white supremacy. The MoRE’s semiguided tour disrupts the one-way system of a docent talking at guests as they are guided in a linear fashion on a timed tour. Instead visitors are free to construct the meaning in their museum visit by exploring and discussing topics of interest to them.⁴⁵

The reinterpretation of the MoRE revolutionizes the conventional models of the HHM and the presidential shrine, though it is only one approach to modernizing these traditional, ideological spaces. The MoRE also stands in stark contrast to the overproduced Old South plantation HHM and tells an interracial story of the past. For over a century, the nostalgia-driven heritage industry in the South and HHMs devoted to elites across the nation emphasized the beauty of the home and its objects, displacing a narrative about slavery and the social relations that existed between biracial communities. Fascination with the plantation as a site of leisure began in the late nineteenth century when elite northern men purchased plantation ruins to evoke, not replicate, antebellum experiences and construct what Daniel Vivian calls a “new plantation world.” This “second Yankee invasion” of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, which lasted through the New Deal era, transformed plantations into sites of recreation and leisure, first as hunting clubs and retreats and eventually as lavish rehabilitated and landscaped sports estates with modern amenities. There new owners enacted the fantasy consumed by the nation on film, in novels, and in print media. The local and national press embraced these restorations, cementing these plantation sites as significant and central to the region’s history. Moonlight and magnolia plantation tourism, or “selling the South,” arose during this period, emphasizing the big house and erasing slavery.⁴⁶ Though sites of extreme violence, tourism flourished and plantations became settings of lavish weddings, complete with docents in hoopskirts, furnished antebellum homes, and opulent landscaping that masked the labor of slavery and daily interracial interactions with what Tara McPherson describes as a “a southern mise-en-scène of imagined hospitality.”⁴⁷ The twenty-first century, though, brought significant changes in interpretation to a limited number of plantations that finally welcomed Black visitors as an “imagined audience,” such as McLeod Plantation Historic Site.⁴⁸ Just as films and novels contributed to the moonlight and magnolia tourism, modern films centered on slavery, such as Lincoln (dir. Steven Spielberg, 2012), Django Unchained (dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2012), and 12 Years a Slave (dir. Steve McQueen, 2013), as well as Page 10 →social movements, including the removal of Confederate iconography from public spaces and Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests, inspired a new “slave-centric” retelling that overturned the dominant narrative. Still, most of the nearly four hundred public plantations across the South host tourists that are white, affluent, and over fifty and at best market “roots” or genealogy tourism to Black communities. These sites often include slave cabins, which come off as nothing more than outbuildings and place markers, denied the status of homeplaces and absent of intimate family and community experiences that render their mostly anonymous occupants as objects within the plantation economy. The most dramatic transformation in what Melaine Harnay calls the “plantation turn” is that of Whitney Plantation on Louisiana’s famed River Road. One time known as Millionaire Row for its long line of plantations, more than a dozen today make up a “neo-plantation economy.” As with MoRE and Reconstruction, the Whitney claims to be the first museum of slavery. In contrast, the owner of a nearby plantation Houmas offered the site as a home for Confederate statues removed from New Orleans in 2018.⁴⁹

The Whitney tour disrupts traditional white plantation narratives in its spatial organization and emphasis on memorial sculpture. Using a new materialist approach, the concept that “knowledge is generated in material-semiotic ways,” Dorota Golanska contends the tour is an “aesthetic encounter” where visitors are immersed in learning via the landscape, the inhabitants, the violence, and the context of the transatlantic slave trade.⁵⁰ The tour begins at Anti-Yoke Baptist Church, founded by freed people, where visitors watch a film on Whitney’s renovation and archival research, heavily anchored in Work Projects Administration (WPA) slave narratives. Here visitors encounter Woodrow Nash’s Children of Whitney installation of sixty clay sculptures of children. Other memorials with powerful but traumatic history abound throughout the tour, such as sixty ceramic skulls on steel rods representing those decapitated in an 1811 German Coast slave revolt. When possible the memorials name the members of the enslaved community, whether insurrectionists, two thousand children who died between 1823 and 1863, or people trafficked.⁵¹ One of the most potent artifacts is a rusted jail that leaves visitors feeling trapped, baking in the sun, and reflecting on the myth of benevolent masters evoked at other plantation museums. Visitors first glimpse the big house, which they tour briefly at the end of the tour, from behind the jail’s bars.⁵²

The book explains how the MoRE centered a Black narrative of Reconstruction. There were “competing visions of Reconstruction” from the beginning, both as a plan for reunion and in the emerging historical narratives that shaped the memory of the sectional crisis and Civil War. These competing Page 11 →visions came from political autobiographies, textbooks, popular novels, local celebrations, reform movement gatherings, and even material culture. This process, W. Fitzhugh Brundage argues, was “one of the major American cultural projects of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.” The space overturns what Bruce Baker, in his study of Reconstruction memory in South Carolina, called a “white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction.” It overshadowed a Black created and centered counter narrative in the public sphere, helping to buttress Jim Crow and divide Black and white workers. This connectedness between the Lost Cause and the white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction is why docents often use the language of the Lost Cause to describe their own historical memory of Reconstruction or what Brundage defines as the “social construction of historical identity.” For most white Americans, Reconstruction demonstrated freedmen were ill-prepared for the vote, citizenship and equality with whites. Furthermore, a crooked North and excessive federal intervention corrupted the South.⁵³ The MoRE disrupts the white supremacist narrative that the Red Shirts were heroes rather than a paramilitary force that violently ended Reconstruction.⁵⁴ Poised to come to terms with its long history of white supremacy and white domestic terror, the United States is learning, albeit slowly, its Reconstruction history. The museum provides a blueprint for making HHMs reparative sites that confront white supremacy and train their frontline staff in teaching contested history. These conversations remain vital to American democracy in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol and attacks on teaching Critical Race Theory and racism in classrooms.

In October 2020 Historic Columbia formally changed the name of the Wilson home to the Museum of the Reconstruction Era at the Woodrow Wilson Family Home. By originally capitalizing on the name of Woodrow Wilson rather than Reconstruction, the HHM escaped the backlash that befell the 2002 attempt to make Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of the NPS’s first Reconstruction-focused site.⁵⁵ The nation had yet to confront systemic racism in its public spaces. The Confederate flag still waved boldly on the grounds of the South Carolina State House, five blocks from Wilson’s childhood home. Statues to Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders were untouchable. The thought of renaming buildings at Princeton University, where Wilson served as president, and other commemorative efforts praising him had gained little traction. However, the public’s mood regarding these issues of historical memory shifted dramatically in the summer of 2015 following the horrific massacre of nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.⁵⁶ On June 22, less than week after the shooting, Governor Nikki Haley called for the Confederate flag to be removed from the capitol grounds after decades of debate.⁵⁷ Living Page 12 →just outside of Columbia, shooter Dylann Roof saw the flag regularly. Pictures circulated of him with it. He visited McLeod Plantation two months before the massacre and took three pictures in front of a slave cabin and the big house and at the African and African American cemetery, “desecrating” the site and leading to new training on active shooters and white nationalist symbols. He flashed racist symbols during his trial and defended his actions after his death sentence.⁵⁸ Subsequently, “great men” in the American history pantheon, their flaws more visible, sustained scrutiny. Impromptu crowds toppled Confederate iconography in public spectacle. Vandalism continued as state legislatures blocked legal removal with heritage protection acts and President Donald Trump issued an executive order criminalizing monument defacement. These were symbolic acts in the war against systemic racism, levied against monuments long weaponized by white supremacy movements, but they contributed to an environment where Historic Columbia could finally rename the WWFH the Museum of the Reconstruction Era.⁵⁹

This reckoning with the legacy of white supremacy and its commemoration on the public landscape intensified during the Trump administration. In August 2017 white supremacist, far right, and alt-right groups descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, for a Unite the Right Rally to protest the removal of a local Robert E. Lee statue. This resulted in the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer and accelerated monument removal.⁶⁰ The heated and violent clashes over the commemoration of white supremacy peaked alongside a mainstream Black Lives Matter movement in the summer of 2020. Protests erupted across the country and globe following the murder of George Floyd and death of Breonna Taylor at the hands (and knees) of police. These deadly encounters directly followed the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery.⁶¹ Some mayors removed controversial statues while their residents slept to avoid threats and counterprotests. Others bypassed their state legislatures by finding loopholes such as transferring public land to private ownership. The culmination of the national debate and removal took place along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Protesters toppled Jefferson Davis’s statue, and the city eventually removed Stonewall Jackson. However, the most powerful moment in the sequence of events was when locals projected George Floyd’s image, “BLM,” and the protest slogan “No Justice, No Peace” on the Robert E. Lee statue’s pedestal. The protest art evolved to include famous Black historical figures and other victims of police brutality. Witnessing this spectacle on Monument Avenue felt like the end of Confederate and white supremacist iconography in public spaces. More than 100 Confederate monuments, markers, and memorials disappeared from the landscape. Regrettably, more than 2,400 remain, a third of them statues.⁶²

Page 13 →Historic Columbia renamed the MoRE in the wake of these protests, mere months before unmasked, white paramilitary forces attempted a coup d’état at the US Capitol. On January 6, 2021, these men and women sought to stop formal congressional approval of the Electoral College votes legally required to make Joe Biden the president a few weeks later. Outraged Trump supporters, in their red “Make America Great Again” apparel and furry horn hats, provided cover for more organized militia and helped lay siege to the Capitol.⁶³ One hundred forty-five years prior, white Democrats committed to ending Republican and Black Reconstruction in South Carolina gathered around the State House in Columbia prepared to assault Republicans who claimed they were the legitimate victors amid a disputed election plagued by white terror and fraud. Like Trump, Governor Wade Hampton spoke to the mob and convinced them to disband, demonstrating his control over the white populace. For months the federal military presence kept the Republican house in power in name only while Hampton’s Democrats maintained their own government. On April 3, 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered those troops to depart.⁶⁴

The process of creating and implementing the MoRE’s reinterpretation, centered on a Reconstruction narrative, is more than a case study of one solution to public history’s conundrum of HHM oversaturation. It helps us understand and connect to the country’s larger, evolving dialogue on race and systemic white supremacy. The evolution of the MoRE’s interpretation is also another example of a highly contested, nationwide historical reckoning that is revising history across our public landscapes and in our public institutions to teach a more accurate representation of a whitewashed past. Rebirth traces the transformation of the WWFH from an eighty-year-old presidential shrine celebrating Wilson’s teenage years in Columbia to the nation’s first museum of the Reconstruction era. The tour of the HHM uses the lens of Thomas Woodrow “Tommy” Wilson’s childhood to reveal for its public audiences the joy and hope of Reconstruction and how the period, and the white memory of it as a failure, might have shaped President Wilson. The MoRE’s reinterpretation upends the conventional model of the HHM as presidential shrine. Trained docents facilitate a semiguided tour that navigates visitors through a permanent panel exhibit with each room in the HHM devoted to a key theme. The tour and exhibit juxtapose a comprehensive history of Reconstruction with the Wilson family’s timeline of moving to the first home that they ever owned and joining the Presbyterian community in postwar Columbia. At the tour’s conclusion, docents help visitors unravel a fifty-year history of white supremacy and domestic terror that was both political and racialized. Together they dissect the Page 14 →complex intersection of Reconstruction memory and historiography with Wilson’s presidency. White terror and election fraud dismantled the socioeconomic and political gains of Black Americans during Reconstruction and buttressed Jim Crow, a codified legal and cultural system of apartheid in the United States that Wilson defended, which endured until the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement.

Rebirth shows managers and staff of historic sites at predominantly white institutions how to lead docents and visitors during controversial interpretive transitions, center Black narratives, and train frontline docent staff to interpret white supremacy. As such the book focuses on paid and volunteer docents ranging in age and education who gave tours for Historic Columbia, the parent preservationist organization that administers the MoRE and three other HHMs. My analysis of docent training demonstrates the importance of mandatory language and cultural sensitivity exercises for all docents as part of an inclusive practice. I conclude that trained public historians and volunteer docents with advanced degrees were most successful in delivering a counternarrative tour that challenged public perceptions of Reconstruction and what a presidential home should highlight. Until recently HHMs limited or excluded narratives that were not elite or white and had great difficulty discussing white supremacy.⁶⁵ Yet MoRE docents were successful in interpreting racialized and political terrorism. Some even questioned their own privilege as white docents discussing racialized violence against Black Americans. The examples I include of interpretive debates that took place between Historic Columbia’s leadership and docents offer tools for dialogue and revision to improve exhibits and tours while respecting the expertise that docents provide.

The book also reveals how public history methodology can fill silences in the historical record about both the Black experience during Reconstruction as well as lives of so-called great men, who for centuries have driven the HHM movement. The chapter “Aren’t I a Citizen? Interpreting the Lives of Black Women and Domestic Workers in Historic House Museums” demonstrates how incorporating historical literature, census records, and architectural and image analysis into the tour and exhibit as well as docent training can illuminate the lives of unknown domestic workers. Local Columbia history and my analysis of the interpretations at the three other HHMs devoted to Wilson answered new docent-inspired questions about President Wilson’s childhood that are of value to Wilson scholars. Docent queries included how Wilson’s parents felt about slavery and the Confederacy, which political party they supported, and how a southern upbringing during the Civil War and Reconstruction shaped the future president. For example a Black legislator, Beverly Nash, represented Tommy Wilson’s district at a time the Page 15 →teenager developed a deep interest in government. Building on my research for the MoRE’s primary exhibit film, Rebirth is also a revisionist history, reviving the question of how Wilson felt about his White House screening of the white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation. The film’s Civil War and Reconstruction-era setting is South Carolina, which was the same state that Wilson experienced the first US civil rights movement.

Finally I illuminate the transformative power of MoRE’s interpretation for docents and the majority of visitors. Some docents ultimately used their training and tours to combat their own biases and indoctrination regarding the Lost Cause and white supremacist narratives of Reconstruction, shaped from the inaccurate public history and education of their past. The majority of visitors often consumed this same false narrative that convinced generations of white Americans that Reconstruction was corrupt and needed to fail. Their tour evaluations reveal an eagerness to learn about Reconstruction at a Wilson HHM. Interpreting history with negative political or cultural implications for many white visitors risks backlash from that demographic. A national example and worst case scenario of audience “expectation distortion,” when an exhibit contradicts visitor memory and knowledge, was the scrapping of the Smithsonian’s original Enola Gay exhibition. It was interpretively sound but filled with historical complexity that posed difficult questions about the atomic bomb on the fiftieth university of its deployment. However, in the twenty-first century, a growing number of museums refuse to be held hostage by the public relations dangers that revisionist interpretations and updates previously posed among some white audiences and supporters. The MoRE joins a burgeoning movement to reframe museums not as sites of neutrality (as many white audiences view them) but as spaces that are inherently political and multivocal.⁶⁶ MoRE visitor evaluation data determined expectation distortion from the change in focus from Wilson to Reconstruction to be minimal. Often visitors failed to realize that myths of Reconstruction need correcting and did not know they wanted Reconstruction content until after they received it.⁶⁷

The MoRE actualizes twenty-first-century theories of visitor identity and visitation patterns that reimagine how docents and visitors exchange information. Visitors negotiate and conflate the perspectives of both institution and self, in turn becoming a self-styled museum docent.⁶⁸ Although Historic Columbia selected a dominant scholarly message about Reconstruction for the MoRE, both docent and visitor communicate and receive messages, negotiate their identity, and create and modify memory. This process enables the MoRE tour to resolve some of the most common complaints about museums: they are static sites of institutional power that do not represent their visitors. By adopting an original theme and reinterpretation, the MoRE Page 16 →demonstrates that HHMs can present multiple views and encourage visitors to challenge authoritative voices, even those of the museum.⁶⁹ The visitors’ choice to move between panels, artifacts, and interactives at their discretion democratizes the tour experience. These movements, made possible by the semiguided tour, the conversational nature of the tour’s design, and open-ended questions, create original, individualized tours for every visitor. In this way the MoRE remains unfinished, as new meanings always are being constructed by visitors based on their individual life experiences and ideologies. The visitor transforms into a self-made docent.

An example of this interplay at work is how the MoRE corrects the interpretation of Reconstruction built on the false narrative that it was a disastrous punishment for white southerners and warranted a violent response. This reinterpretation is possible because many white visitors now abhor the political and domestic terrorism ending Reconstruction, once celebrated as part of a white supremacist narrative of the era. The first modern museums regulated and monitored visitors for middle-class decorum via the surveying eye of other guests and staff. Today this same style of surveillance by visitors and docents, who no longer accept white supremacist violence as a mainstream or respectable response to Reconstruction, silences or challenges the antiquated ideology of their peers. Visitors perform their identity and surveillance in response to the institutions’ visual signs or messages. They may nod in approval at panel text highlighting Black political participation. Or they may ask a question about new information or previous incorrect information they learned, demonstrating that their identity and ideology are evolving. For example, white southern visitors and docents shared stories about being taught that Wade Hampton III and his Red Shirts were heroes by their schools or by their family who admired a Red Shirt among their clan. Some visitors may visually or physically reject the performance of a white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction with an eye roll, verbal response, or walking away. Guests, accordingly, curate a dynamic tour in real time based on what they learn and encounter as part of this institutional performance.⁷⁰

Many of the sources for my book and the questions that I answer herein emerged from the year and a half that I served as lead facilitator for the MoRE’s reinterpretation and reopening. In helping create the first museum of Reconstruction, I began to ask: What can future Reconstruction sites and outdated HHMs learn from the MoRE? What missteps should these institutions steer clear of, and what issues should they be prepared to address? What new scholarship can be produced at HHMs revising their interpretations? As I worked closely with Historic Columbia docents, I drew my own conclusions about a question that the museums studies field has largely ignored: What should the role and expectations of a docent be? To address Page 17 →these questions, I rely on a rich, diverse collection of primary sources mined from both manuscript and film archives and new sources created as part of the practice of public history, including oral histories, tour scripts, and tour experiences.

The primary method used to tell the MoRE’s story and answer my questions is oral history with docents. Historic Columbia relies on paid and volunteer docents to conduct the tours of its four HHMs: the Robert Mills House, the Hampton-Preston Mansion, the Mann-Simons site, and the MoRE. At the time of the MoRE’s reopening, paid docents, often from the public history program housed at the University of South Carolina, filled the busier weekend schedule. Volunteer docents, the weekend staff coordinator, and, as necessary, other staff guided tours Monday through Friday. For my research ten volunteers and six paid weekend docents completed a preliminary survey. Eleven of them went on to participate in oral interviews. One of those docents requested anonymity in their oral history, which I granted. While anonymity in oral history practice is frowned upon, the docent’s voice and expertise were more important than their identity. To truly understand the power of Reconstruction memory and how issues of race influence white docents and public history, docents must feel comfortable having these contentious but necessary conversations. Renowned oral historian Donald Ritchie cites a case where Palestinian women were not identified because of political conditions. Had a large number of the docents chosen to give anonymous oral histories, the validity of the research perhaps could be questioned. Fortunately, that was not the case.⁷¹

I also analyze public history primary sources produced at Historic Columbia, including both records related to the WWFH before the reinterpretation and materials produced during its transformation into the MoRE. Historic Columbia’s emails and administrative files proved vital in tracing tour development, training procedures, and docent assessment. In addition I examine my personal experiences serving as lead facilitator from November 2013 until May 2015. My responsibilities included crafting the semiguided tour, training volunteer and paid docents, and serving on the interpretive team as we finalized the exhibit. The interpretive team at the time of my hire comprised six of Historic Columbia’s full-time staff: Ann Posner (volunteer manager), James Quint (education coordinator), Fielding Freed (director of historic house museums), Sarah Blackwell (director of programs), John Sherrer (director of cultural resources), and Robin Waites (executive director). As lead docent for fourteen months, I gave over half of the MoRE tours, processed visitor evaluation data, presented those results monthly, and offered strategies to docents for improvement. My hire was part of a larger collaboration between Historic Columbia’s interpretive team and experts at Page 18 →the University of South Carolina: Drs. Daniella Cook (education), Allison Marsh (public history), Kendrick Clements (Wilson history), and Tom Brown (Reconstruction and public memory). My facilitator position evolved in the year after MoRE reopened. When combined with the number of paid weekend docents and scholarly consultants, it demonstrates the close working relationship between Historic Columbia and the University of South Carolina’s history department and public history program, one of the first in the nation when it was formed in 1975.⁷² As the lead facilitator position phased out, my research expanded to site visits of the three other Woodrow Wilson HHMs. Retracing Wilson’s childhood, I traveled in Staunton, Virginia, and Augusta, Georgia, to evaluate their exhibits and tours. My last stop was in Washington, DC, to the Woodrow Wilson House, a National Trust for Historic Preservation HHM where the president died.

My experience in many ways mirrors that of Amy Tyson at Minnesota’s premier living history attraction, Minnesota Historical Society’s Historic Fort Snelling, which resulted in her book The Wages of History: Emotional Labor on Public History’s Front Line. Similar to me, Tyson began her work as a living history interpreter and researcher at the same time she was a graduate student. She also conducted thirty-two interviews with frontline workers and managers, though mine were a blend of part-time paid docents and volunteers. While only one MoRE narrator chose anonymity, Burns assigned narrators a pseudonym. She also relied on unique archival materials, including institutional memos, work schedules, training notes, interpretive materials, and electronic files, with the support of fort staff.⁷³

Rebirth also integrates a variety of archival primary source material. This includes collections at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library, located next door to his first childhood home in Virginia. Most relevant were documents related to Edith Galt Wilson’s support for the establishment of the Staunton HHM. I consulted four manuscript collections at the South Caroliniana Library at the University of South Carolina, where records of the local American Legion Auxiliary and their efforts to save Wilson’s Columbia home in the 1920s are held. The university’s Moving Image Research Library also provided footage of a 1926 Red Shirt parade celebrating the end of Reconstruction in Columbia, which is used in a MoRE exhibit film. The last chapter on President Wilson’s screening of The Birth of a Nation draws heavily on film analysis and the National Archives digitization of silent era films, including Griffith’s and a response film by Black director Oscar Micheaux titled Within Our Gates (1920). This chapter, centering the MoRE’s last exhibit film, The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson and Reconstruction, required working across the disciplines of history and media studies to contextualize a film central to the dual narrative of Reconstruction and Wilson.

Page 19 →This book is primarily a public and oral history monograph about historic house museums and Reconstruction. I wrote for public history practitioners, especially docents, oral historians, and those working with contested spaces. However, executive directors and museums studies specialists in education and interpretation will benefit immensely from this study in best practices. In addition the book traverses the terrain of southern history, historic preservation, women’s history, presidential history, and film and media studies. Dismantling a shrine preserved by white clubwomen to President Wilson to interpret the gains and promise of Reconstruction for Black citizens in South Carolina as well as show how white supremacy and racialized violence brought the period to a tragic end required all of these instruments of knowledge.

I have divided Rebirth into two parts. Part I, “Bait and Switch?,” traces the origin of the Woodrow Wilson Family Home as a presidential shrine in the 1920s, its redesign between 2005 and 2014, and the subsequent docent training process. Part II, “Interpreting Silences, Violence, and Memories,” provides a deeper dive into four interpretive spaces and exhibits within the home. Each chapter serves as a concise case study of four themes either absent in most HHM interpretation or difficult to discuss because of the subject of white supremacy and violence against African American people. These examples center on the lives of Black people as they made their way through a new free labor system, the continuous white supremacy campaign that ultimately ended Reconstruction in South Carolina in 1876, and the memory of Wilson’s Progressive Era presidency through 1920.

The first chapter traces the 1920s origins of the MoRE at the WWFH in Columbia as a presidential shrine. In the wake of World War I, the local unit of the American Legion Auxiliary saved the home from demolition as part of a larger campaign by white women’s organizations to commemorate the Lost Cause, white supremacy, and segregationist leaders along the southern landscape. The chapter lays the foundation of the MoRE as a typical “great white man” HHM and shrine that defined the preservation movement since Ann Pamela Cunningham arranged purchase of Mount Vernon in the 1850s. The chapter also uncovers the fiscal challenges the Legion Auxiliary faced to preserve the home, made worse by their failure to secure public and financial support from Wilson’s widow, Edith Galt. Instead she devoted most of her commemorative energies to her husband’s birthplace in Staunton, Virginia, now the location of his private presidential library. In 1961 she donated his last residence with her in Washington, DC, the President Woodrow Wilson House, to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The chapter situates the MoRE within all four of Wilson’s HHMs, all located in the South. Three of them were where a young boy known by his family as Tommy lived Page 20 →long before he became president. In 2001 Historic Augusta, Inc., opened the last one, a decorative-arts-centered shrine. The Wilsons lived in a Presbyterian manse, now the Boyhood Home of President Woodrow Wilson, during the Civil War and early Reconstruction before moving to Columbia.

Chapter 2 details how redesigning the WWFH into the MoRE upended the outdated structure of HHMs. The WWFH overturned traditional assumptions about HHMs, namely the need for a fully guided tour, period room furniture vignettes, and original artifacts. The Wilson home itself became the primary artifact, allowing for an interpretation focused on a specific place and period: Reconstruction-era Columbia. Thematic panel exhibits line each room, most of which contain a small number of objects from Historic Columbia’s collection owned by the Wilson family or material culture related to Reconstruction. The MoRE emphasizes a people-centered approach to interpreting objects rather than an object-centered approach dominant in HHMs.

The final chapter of part I, “Docent Training: Unlearning the Lost Cause and Reconstruction Memory,” focuses on rarely studied docents, encouraging future examination of their experiences and training. The MoRE’s unconventional redesign upended the traditional model of an HHM. The unexpected panel exhibit, the horrific nature of some of the subject matter, and visitor expectations of a guided tour resulted in the decision to maintain the use of docents to interpret a semiguided tour. Historic Columbia reinvented docent education and their training process for the MoRE. Not only did the organization offer a variety of required workshops covering history, public history best practices, and racial and cultural sensitivity training, but it also evaluated and thoroughly vetted each docent to conduct tours. The majority of Historic Columbia’s volunteers did not complete the training process. Most docents rejected the new home and training because they disliked the Reconstruction-heavy script or the time-consuming and rigorous evaluation demands. The docents who excelled were those who worked in education or held advanced degrees and were primarily women. Over time some recalcitrant docents embraced the changes once they saw the museum’s success or learned that the interpretation had evolved based on feedback from MoRE docents. Although numerous docents came into the process having learned the Lost Cause or elements of a white supremacist view of Reconstruction, many of them used the training and their tours to overturn these biased or inaccurate preconceived notions. Remarkably those docents “reconstructed” their memory of Reconstruction and taught visitors to do the same. However, docent resistance, which mostly came from volunteers, demonstrates the importance of professionalizing docent interpretation.

Page 21 →Part II showcases thematic case studies, beginning with “Aren’t I a Citizen? Interpreting the Lives of Black Women and Domestic Workers in Historic House Museums.” This chapter focuses on the MoRE within the context of HHMs, especially southern ones, and their tradition of limiting or excluding narratives of nonelite whites. Chapter 4 describes how the MoRE incorporated historiography, census records, architecture, image analysis, and docent training to give greater agency to unidentified domestic workers and Black women educators discussed throughout the home. But in the effort to illuminate the lives of working-class domestics, some docents and visitors succumbed to the Downton Abbey effect, which blinded them to the unique racial circumstances that affected workers’ lives beyond their economic and social status. However, the MoRE’s interpretation of Black experiences proved far more successful than other Wilson homes at that time, which employed either annihilation or relative incorporation. Those outdated interpretive modes, which remain common at plantation sites, either avoid Black narratives or include them intermittently; nonetheless, as a radical HHM, the MoRE fell short because the interpretation avoided the violence and sexual exploitation experienced by Black women during Reconstruction. Nor did the docent training adequately prepare MoRE docents to discuss this unsettling history with visitors when necessary.

Set in the context of the assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, chapter 5 addresses best practices for interpreting white supremacy and domestic political terrorism. The chapter presents the MoRE’s interpretation of the end of Reconstruction in South Carolina and the violence of Red Shirts—the statewide paramilitary force that used fraud and violence to return white Democrats to power in 1876. White supremacist artifacts and images from Reconstruction, combined with docent-guided open-ended questions, facilitate visitor dialogue about the Red Shirts and their predecessors, including the Ku Klux Klan. The room’s exhibit introduced Reconstruction-era violence to some white visitors for the first time. Script revisions, docent evaluations, and docent oral histories show that docents were at their most comfortable and successful in this challenging space. For some, discussing white violence against Black citizens made them acutely aware of their own white privilege as well as their family and community ties to violence. The chapter is also a call to action to spark public dialogue and guide policymakers in addressing our nation’s recent surge in paramilitary white nationalism and domestic terrorism. The exhibit demonstrates historical continuity by offering concrete examples from the distant past that are still recognizable today, including the inept federal and state responses that failed to stop contemporary white supremacist violence and political fraud.

Page 22 →Chapter 6, “Interpreting the Craft: Doing Reconstruction History,” looks at the difficult transition that MoRE docents faced coming from the “Red Shirt room” to the final semi-guided space in the home. The bedroom that once belonged to Wilson’s parents, signified by the couple’s authentic bed, demanded a succinct but powerful denouement that tied the history and memory of Reconstruction to Wilson’s presidency. The most successful docents focused on how history, specifically Reconstruction history, gets professionally made. Docents with advanced degrees, particularly in public history, crafted a narrative for visitors that explained and simultaneously revised the early twentieth-century Dunning School’s academic defense of the Lost Cause and white supremacist narrative of Reconstruction, which was supported by Wilson as a historian. This choice to bring visitors up-to-date with current scholarship crafted by historians over the last fifty years serves as a modification of Hilary Iris Lowe’s call for HHMs to adopt the interpretive techniques of literary house museums. These literary centered sites provide visitors with creative, interactive engagement experiences via books and their authors that continue to resonate long after the tour.⁷⁴

The final chapter illuminates the challenges of interpreting memory, both of Reconstruction and Woodrow Wilson, as well as the white supremacy that is associated with both subjects. The chapter focuses on the exhibit film The Legacy of Woodrow Wilson and Reconstruction, its revision within the first year of opening, and its attempts to explain the importance of The Birth of a Nation to Wilson’s presidency and Reconstruction memory. The debate that the exhibit film ignited made Historic Columbia acutely aware that most volunteer docents were reluctant to frame Wilson as a racist akin to fellow politicians from South Carolina, such as Benjamin Tillman or “Cotton Ed” Smith. However, in the wake of the 2015 Charleston massacre and nationwide student protests on college campuses addressing institutional racism, Wilson’s memory and white supremacy came under attack. These events allowed Historic Columbia to address the issue of Wilson’s relationship with white supremacy, which had been minimized by the original MoRE interpretation of the former president. Workshops with docents generated new conversations within the institution outside of public view, which often continued between docents and visitors in the public space of the MoRE.

The conclusion applies visitor evaluation data and reviews to assess the success of key arguments in each chapter. The chapter surveys the overwhelmingly positive responses from visitors to the Reconstruction narrative in the first year of opening. The conclusion also addressed the October 2020 name change from the WWFH to the MoRE, which resolved one of the chief criticisms raised by the tour review appearing in the professional journal Public Historian for its special issue on HHMs. The museum’s name Page 23 →change met the energy of a nationwide effort to dismantle white supremacy commemorated in the public sphere that had flourished and faced fierce resistance since the MoRE reopened its doors in 2014. The conclusion closes with Historic Columbia’s increased resolve to challenge white supremacist narratives and to teach Reconstruction history to the public.

The MoRE demanded relevancy as it shunned its presidential shrine origins and the partial political and social truths that style of interpretation sold. Rather than be trapped in a clichéd, dollhouse-style interpretation with voyeuristic vignettes that serve as a “repetitive time stamp” set to the average afternoon typically depicted in HHMs, the MoRE answered the call of Franklin Vagnone and Deborah Ryan, self-described historic house museum anarchists, to turn these sites “upside down and inside out” for the sake of survival.⁷⁵ When the deteriorating home closed in 2005, the WWFH was guilty of all these charges. But with the MoRE’s reopening, Historic Columbia produced an exhibit and tour that when combined with the voices of public historians, docents, and visitors serve as a guide to revolutionize the obsolete house museum. The process of this transformation from presidential shrine to Reconstruction museum simultaneously demonstrates the unique challenges of correcting alternative memory and the boundaries of discussing violence and oppression perpetuated against Black citizens by white Americans. The difficulty lay not only in initiating conversations with the public but also in promoting honest dialogues and best practices within the institution itself.

In illuminating the voices of the docents in conversation with staff and visitors, this book provides valuable insight into how this revolutionary reinterpretation of Reconstruction at a presidential shrine succeeded and at times failed on the front lines. I recall that conflicted anonymous docent, who was excited to be a part of the MoRE “as it transformed into the nation’s first museum of Reconstruction” but not in the historical record. Since college the docent felt both North and South knew almost nothing about this period of American history. The native South Carolinian knew personally that white southerners often espoused the Lost Cause and a negative interpretation of Reconstruction. The docent recognized they were a part of a Reconstruction reckoning and, I suspect, worried that their views, progressive by standards of the Jim Crow era, might one day be antiquated or used against them. Yet this docent boasted that “in Columbia, South Carolina and in the “state that was the first to secede from the Union” is the “first museum dedicated to Reconstruction, which I think is wonderful.”⁷⁶ The MoRE is no longer the sole museum or site devoted to Reconstruction in the state, but the first of many in South Carolina attempting to atone for its Reconstruction sins. Page 24 →