Kent Whitworth is the Minnesota Historical Society's new CEO. He's a cheerful and optimistic fellow from Kentucky, where he headed up the Kentucky Historical Society for over a decade. Let's all assure him that the weather is always nice and the state is always lush and colorful. Of course, he'll find out the truth eventually, but by then he'll be in love with the place, lacing up his snowshoes. Before that, he had a chance to chat about his views of history, museum collections and the Minnesota Vikings.
Q: It's good that you're coming to the MHS, instead of to a backwater state like Wisconsin or Iowa. But of course they'd say the same about us. Aren't we all the same? Or is there something that makes Minnesota history different?
A: One of my pet peeves is artificial boundaries — they really muck up the study of history. They feel so arbitrary. But as frustrating as they can be, borders do create these fascinating sort of combinations you wouldn't come up with otherwise. There's a richness and an authenticity and quirkiness to this that leads to state pride and state identity. Within the state, there can be real regional rivalries, but we all close ranks more than we have to.
Q: People think historical museums are full of old, faded parchment and sepia pictures of frowning people with muskets, but anything can be historical. A shot glass from Moby Dick's bar, a hotel key, a Native American arrowhead. What sort of nontraditional museum items would you love to acquire?
A: I'm not even sure it's about what it is, as much as making what we've got more accessible. There's more we want to find, but the immediate challenge is making what we have available.
The digitization of collections is important — if some people can't access things virtually, they might as well not exist. But there's no substitute for seeing the Real McCoy, putting your two feet on a historical site. I still remember going to Split Rock [Lighthouse] as a kid. That's a secret weapon for people in public history, if you can connect with them, and don't jam it down their throat, their journey will bring them physically to these places.
Q: Getting people's attention in the first place sometimes takes a big hook — a date, an event. Is that necessary? Does the emphasis on marquee years given prominence by historians contort what life was really like for most people?
A: History is ubiquitous! People see their connection to the past all around them every single day, so sometimes you need these huge events to serve as attention-grabbers. But I also think that there is so much opportunity to tell equally powerful stories that may not fit into the larger narrative, that don't fit into the quintessential themes.
