| This dissertation provides ethnographic accounts of two living history museums, Historic Fort Snelling in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Conner Prairie Living History Museum in Fishers, Indiana, where tourists interacted with "interpreters" who portrayed characters from the past. The relationship between these interpreters and the public operated at two levels: on the one hand, it was a service worker/customer relationship, which aimed to make the customer happy; on the other hand, it was a teaching relationship through which an impression of history was transmitted. Hence the dual nature of the product offered by living history museums: they offered historical narratives and emotionally fulfilling experiences.;Drawing on archival research, fieldwork at Conner Prairie, six years of participant observation at Historic Fort Snelling, and 23 extensive interviews with workers at that site, my dissertation brings together scholarship from the fields of public history, museum studies and labor studies and has three main objectives: (1) to theorize how the directives of the service economy shaped the visions and versions of history that are represented at the museums---particularly with regards to how the sites differently dealt with interpreting the history of enslavement; (2) to analyze how living history interpreters were affected by the work that they performed and how both the work they performed and the management of that work was differentiated by gender; (3) to examine how workers at "institutions of culture" responded to or resisted the increased corporatization of their worksites in the New Economy. As the first study to examine living history museums through the lens of labor and service work, my dissertation challenges literature in museum studies and public history which has generally resisted analyzing museums as corporations or as worksites, while it also extends theories of the service economy by looking at the museum as a site of service production. |
