Transcript edited for length and clarity.
Clay Wallace, WUKY
I'm at the Thomas D. Clark Center for Kentucky History, the headquarters to the Kentucky Historical Society. I'm speaking with Director of Historical Resources, Jonathan Noffke. Good morning, Jonathan! Hey, good morning. Thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Jonathan Noffke, Kentucky Historical Society Director of Historical Resources
Hey, good morning.
Clay
Thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Jonathan
Yeah, very happy to do it! We're really excited about this exhibit, so we appreciate the opportunity to share a little bit about this with the folks out there.
Clay
So, this new exhibit is "Revolution to Statehood: Kentucky's Founding in History and Memory." What can you tell me about what that's presenting to people?
Jonathan
We wanted to get specific with our America250 celebration and talk about that founding period from the standpoint of a Kentucky lens. We wanted to focus in some way on what is the European settlement period up until statehood, and this all happens against the backdrop of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, but it's a very complex story, so this has been a couple years in development.
There's a lot of conversations about what stays in the story and what you leave out and what that means, and the process of developing an exhibit is a journey unto itself and your goals modify as you understand more and more about the subject matter and what artifacts you're going to use and how you want to communicate with the public. So, what we have now is the product of maybe a two-and-a-half-year conversation about subjects like that.
Clay
When telling these stories, we're dealing with not a very long period of history, but it is a very dense - informationally dense - period of history.
Jonathan
That's right.
Clay
And as we go further and further away from it, we also have all of these previous tellings, previous understandings of what this period was like. How does this telling of this period in Kentucky's history approach that?
Jonathan
Well, what we wanted to do is draw from our own material culture and archival collection. We have over 160,000 objects in our collection. We are Kentucky's attic.
So: how do we use that material and what does it mean? This question comes up as you're looking at objects commemorating either the settlement of Kentucky or the American Revolution. Many of them were created 100 years or more ago, so they're very much through the lens of the maker and how history was interpreted at different points after the fact.
The exhibition is a combination of artifacts from the period and objects or art that celebrate or commemorate that founding period over the century or century-and-a-half after the events had taken place. What became very apparent to us along the way was they're very much products of their time and attitudes.
If we were to portray a battle or an event today, we would look for a certain level of accuracy. With these commemorative pieces done in the past, it's very celebratory. It's very obvious the point of view that the artist or creator had in trying to commemorate or celebrate the events. So, we try to unpack what the artists or creators were looking at and how they thought about the history at that time.
What we really understand about this is that interpretation of history, whether it was in one of the first comments on the settlement of the period in 1784 or whether it happens 50 years later or it's happening in the 1850s, that retelling of that settlement period changes over time, and people understood it differently over time.
We continue to understand it differently today as we unpack it with a new set of eyes.
Clay
I just got the chance to go walk through and see the exhibit, and I was struck with how some of these objects were made with the intention to commemorate, but there's also objects that were, at the time, not things that the people there thought, 'Oh, this is going to be in a museum someday.' I'm thinking about the notes on – you have both Kentucky's Constitution, but you also have the notes of Kentucky's Constitution during the convention.
Jonathan
Right.
Clay
Where someone's drawn faces in the margin.
Jonathan
Yeah, it's like graffiti! It brings some humanity to it. I think that's what's really interesting. You know, these venerated figures, but somebody is absent-minded enough to be doodling on the cover of the Constitutional Convention Journal while these deliberations are ongoing. It's like they're practicing signatures.
I think it's very humanizing to see an artifact like that - something that steps out of that formal, self-conscious presentation of something.
Clay
Would you care to highlight a specific artifact? Like, what's a particular artifact down there in the exhibit that you think expands upon a story that maybe people aren't super familiar with?
Jonathan
Gosh, I will probably go back to the Simon Kenton painting.
So, there's this romanticized 1850s painting that portrays, in a very romantic style, a story about Simon Kenton, an early settler. He is captured by Native Americans, and he is tied to the back of a horse naked, and this is a ritualistic trial that he survives.
Simon Kenton, you know, think Kenton County. Kenton's a contemporary of Boone. He's a famous early figure. But this painting is very much in a classical style, a nearly-nude figure on this white horse with Native Americans menacing him... But it could be from classical times through almost any period.
What is hidden in that image is that it's based on the story of Mazepa, a Ukrainian prince who was forced to endure this same trial in the early 19th century. He becomes famous. Lord Byron writes this sprawling epic poem about him. There are operas. There are performances - equestrian performances - based on this character, Mazepa, being tied to the back of a horse and performing stunts.
To the 19th century eye when this was painted, it would have been considered a meme. The visual language of what was being represented there was very familiar. If you had the benefit of being exposed to art and literature, you would have known exactly what it was referencing. It was just transposing this Kentucky settler and frontiersman on this classically executed theme from halfway across the world. So, it's the unexpected stories or references that you see in the iconography that develop around early Kentucky that I think are really fascinating.
Clay
And that understanding of that piece of art is something that, without the help of a museum or historians, would not be accessible to people.
Jonathan
It would be a real head-scratcher. You know, it's certainly customary and expected in fine art museums to see nudity or near nudity in classical paintings. This character is represented this way. It seems like an odd fit as a historical narrative painting because it is so romanticized, but once you understand the combination of the fame of the subject plus this existing story that was very familiar to people, then it starts to make sense why this was commissioned and collected here more than a century ago.
Clay
And this exhibit also has items which are significant on the national stage. We see things that are associated with George Washington.
Jonathan
Right, right.
Clay
Can you tell me a little bit about those?
Jonathan
We have a couple of great objects associated with Washington. There is a survey that's in our archival collection that is drawn in Washington's hand. He is having a land dispute like many other Kentuckians, and after he leaves the White House, he is trying to settle this legal claim for some land he bought. He was a professional surveyor. He writes up where he thinks his land claim lands. It was land purchased in earlier speculation. He didn't set foot in Kentucky.
The other great Washington item that we have is very interesting. It is George Washington's coat liner.
The story behind it, the provenance behind it, is kind of better than the artifact itself in some ways: a Washington descendant who lived in Newport, Kentucky, passes away in the 1920s and gives this to the Kentucky Historical Society. It had passed very cleanly through the Washington family; her great-great-great-grandpappy was Washington's nephew. Upon Washington's death, the coat was given to him. It was kept, but moths ate all the fur off of this coat, and all that was left was the lining. But so important is that connection to Washington and their association with him that they tossed out the bad parts and reconstructed the lining, and that became the artifact that was worth preserving as their family heirloom and then given to KHS.
Clay
When you walk into the exhibit, you're immediately confronted with the typical understanding of Kentucky's early history. You see Daniel Boone. You see this painting where he's in the center of the frame, luminous, with his rifle, looking out over the Kentucky River... Which is not at the point where he would have first entered Kentucky, but it's framed as if it is.
Jonathan
And that's part of the magic of popular memory. It's a mashup of different thoughts. The artist creating those studies is clearly operating from a knowledge of other images that have come before, and they get combined. I made sort of tongue-in-cheek comment to you earlier that, you know, what's clear about Boone in early Kentucky history is that he liked to climb on top of precipices and look down and point, because that image just keeps recurring time and time again.
So, people begin to think of that moment when Boone first sees Kentucky, and there's a basis in fact, but it's a much richer story and a more complex story than that. Those complex stories that are central to a complete understanding of Kentucky's early settlement often give way to sort of these more simplified, accessible, iconographic images. There are cultural influences at play there that go beyond purely trying to represent something accurately. It involves veneration and celebration of particular people or particular events. It's kind of remarkable to think about those moments that then get codified in our brain again and again and again.
Clay
One thing that I noticed that was interesting is we start with seeing Daniel Boone in this kind of common historical memory that we have. Then, we move into this understanding of what we know about the indigenous people who lived here at the time. And in the very center of that portion of the exhibit, there is an empty display case. Tell me a little bit about what's said with that.
Jonathan
The concept is that we think about this in the public history field as silences in our collection. That silence simply means that there are areas in history that don't have a lot of archival or material culture associated in our collection. Now, there are various reasons for that. With Native American material culture, a lot of it didn't survive just because of the materials it was made from. What does survive is often lithic and much earlier, like pre-contact period; archaeological artifacts.
In terms of the historic period, we don't really have a lot of objects made by native hands. That happens in museums, but I would say that is something of a silence in our collection because not a lot of it survived. It was not the priority of earlier generations of historians and curators. With an organization as old as ours, the interpretive focus or the collecting focus shifted for the Kentucky Historical Society over time. That concept of broadly representing different communities or people beyond the dominant culture, while it's been around for a long time, it's still relatively new on the time scale of collecting that our institution has done. It was just a moment to recognize that, you know, while we have a lot to say about this subject, we don't have as much to represent it, and part of the necessity of doing that interpretation is working with Native American tribes themselves to help tell that story from their point of view.
The field of history is in a strange place right now, especially public history. There are impulses to venerate and celebrate, which is appropriate when you're celebrating the nation's 250th birthday, but there are difficult stories; there are difficult stories in our history that historians feel the responsible approach is to celebrate but recognize those moments in our nation's history because they add to a fuller understanding of the struggle that we continue in to become a more perfect union.
I think that that's part of the conversation right now: what stories do we tell about our past that lead us toward that concept of continuous improvement that our founders thought of?