HERITAGE SITES

In terms of international tourism, "heritage" refers to conserving and transmitting cultural or natural resources that are important to a country's identity. Included under this broad meaning of heritage are segments of the tourist market such as ecotourism, "adventure" vacations, and visiting sites of historic or cultural significance. But in the West, particularly the United States and Britain, heritage has assumed a narrower meaning associated with nostalgia. During the past quarter century, an enthusiasm for the past has been manifested in a marketplace of collecting, preserving, restoring, presenting, and reenacting. Part of this vogue is represented in touring heritage sites, environments that plunge visitors into historical scenarios. Travel to heritage sites composes a significant and increasing segment of the domestic tourist industry, according to the Travel Industry Association of America.

Travel to Historic Places

Heritage sites have their origin in travel to places of historic significance. In the United States, touring before the Civil War chiefly consisted of travel to scenic places promoted by railroads, landscape artists, and writers. A "grand tour" analogous to the European Grand Tour featured a mix of natural wonders and technological marvels, such as the Catskills and Niagara Falls via railroads and canals. Scenery and evidence of progress aided self-definition for the young nation's genteel middle class. Although tourists visited a few historic sites such as Bunker Hill or Mount Vernon, influential Americans lamented the landscape's general lack of historic associations akin to those found in Europe.

By the final decades of the nineteenth century, the pace of change and the nation's centennial encouraged reflection on America's past. History infused a new civil religion that served as an anodyne to change and compensation for religious doubt raised by science. A new commercial culture prompted by more money and leisure time exploited American historical themes through the era's great fairs, cycloramas, department store displays, and stage spectacles. Railroads in need of passengers became vehicles in the service of patriotism by sponsoring excursions and package tours to historic sites. Cultural leaders, uneasy about new immigrant masses, promoted pilgrimages to historically significant places for working-class denizens who now enjoyed enough time and money for day travel. Historic touring helped disseminate a narrative of national triumph and destiny for a diverse people.

Aging Civil War veterans created national shrines through lavish monumentation of battlefields they frequented in large numbers. Erected from 1870 to 1910 during the nation's most active monument-building period, Civil War monuments reflected the more popular taste of new tourists with a style of action statuary that replaced earlier symbolic monuments of the genteel. The trend affected Revolutionary War–era sites sacralized by time and associations with national birth. Beyond monuments, historic sites also generally featured private museums of memorabilia and relics, and sometimes guides who laced their tours with human-interest stories. Combined with picnics and other recreation, touring historic sites for both the middle and working class could offer entertainment under the guise of inspiration and enhanced national loyalty.

The automobile's primacy over railroads in the twentieth century transformed nineteenth-century shrines. Touring changed from a communal experience of rail travel and hotels into a private activity shared with family members. Tourists took to the roads with different expectations. The car—along with movies, radio, television, mass magazines, newspapers, advertising, and highways—blended working-class and genteel culture into mass culture. In the new environment, monuments and museums stuffed with antiquities no longer adequately transmitted historic meaning. Americans exposed to this visual culture needed more representation and less symbolism than their predecessors when they visited historic places. They also expected spaces free of factories, utility polls, highways, billboards, and other modern clutter. Moreover, the shock of two world wars interspaced by depression lengthened the distance between past and present, adding to the difficulty of retrieving national memory.

Beginning in the 1920s, historic sites that met the new criteria were fashioned by government and automotive-related industries, ironically two organizations responsible for producing the landscape that tourists sought to escape. Henry Ford assembled Greenfield Village in Michigan (1929) and John D. Rockefeller Jr. restored Colonial Williamsburg (1932), both historic environments re-created for tourists. Ford, who once referred to textual history as "bunk," hoped Americans could appreciate the American past through the objects that shaped it. Both projects were followed by similar ventures at sites such as Old Sturbridge Village, Massachusetts (1936), and Mystic Seaport, Connecticut (1930). (American restoration projects lagged behind similar ventures in Europe, the first of which was Skansen, a village featuring traditional Swedish buildings and crafts, established near Stockholm in 1897.)

Government launched similar initiatives when the U.S. Department of the Interior's National Park Service (NPS) absorbed hundreds of historic sites from other cabinet departments during the New Deal. The first director of the NPS historical division hoped to "breathe the breath of life into American history for those to whom it has been a dull recitation of facts" by re-creating "the color, pageantry, and dignity of our national past" (Verne Chatelain, quoted in Unrau and Willis, p. 22). To produce historic-looking scenes, the NPS began removing modern appurtenances from landscapes, adding period fencing, and restoring buildings to their original appearance. Interpretive maps, illustrations, and recorded narration placed along park roads for drive-by touring also were added.

NPS planned for a deluge of postwar tourists through Mission 66, which added visitors' centers, programs, new sites, and sometimes facilities for food and housing. Postwar families largely accounted for the flood of tourists that paralleled the nation's suburban growth. Reminders of the American past in popular entertainment, interior design, and advertising helped reassure settlers on the new "crabgrass frontier." Family vacations to historic places offered more than a sense of rootedness and an opportunity to restore family bonds detached by frenetic suburban life. Responsible parents also intended to teach children patriotic lessons as an antidote to godless communism. Still, conditioned by the cultural nationalism of media images as well as dazzling fantasies such as Disneyland's "Frontier Land" and "Main Street," families on vacation expected to "see" history like the entertainment they viewed in the family room.

The Heritage Boom

National convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s again transformed both historic places and tourists. Vietnam, Watergate, civil unrest, economic spasms, and resulting exhaustion shattered established notions about national destiny and America's divine mission. Families went out of fashion, their decline aided by the women's movement and marketing trends encouraging individual fulfillment rather than family-centered consumption. Devices intended to facilitate communications further isolated individuals while ratcheting up the tempo of life. Terms used to describe the present, such as "poststructural" or "post-postmodern," suggest an age adrift. The shift from the Cold War's remote threat to terrorism's hot war, where everyone is perpetually in the war zone, added further insecurity.

Fragmented Americans grasped at mooring offered by the stability of the past, but it was a past selectively used and severed from the national narrative. Heritage met psychic needs with both identity enhancement and a surrogate "narrative of triumph" (Engelhardt, p. 3). Relief from doubts about national purpose following the nation's defeat in Vietnam could be found in an ersatz past. It joined a variety of packaged commercial venues, ranging from "adventure" vacations to Disney World, which paradoxically sold ersatz authenticity as escape from unreality. More demanding work schedules also forced greater intensity into available vacation time. Heritage traded history's flow for a capacity to situate consumers in a past of their choosing.

Heritage obviously differs from memory prompted by monuments, but it also diverges significantly from earlier "living" museums. For one reason, with a site's connections to history swept away, heritage relies more heavily on sensory experience to evoke emotion and subjective experience. Authentic sounds, sights, and often smells confront tourists who touch as well as gaze. For another, attention to authentic detail is much keener. Earlier, public and private developers of historic sites added features to the landscape that simply presented the appearance of age without concern for historic accuracy. And while in the past anachronisms on the landscape were often tolerated, heritage demands that nothing pollutes what is labeled with the neologism "viewshed"—a term that refers to a visually-pure landscape unsullied by features not from the represented historic period. Paradoxically, purity extends only as far as the consumer image of the authentic rather than its reality.

Unlike the unifying force of earlier American shrines, heritage sites tend to fragment society. The vogue among hyphenated Americans (i.e., Americans of mixed or diverse backgrounds) for "roots" in the late twentieth century spawned attractions that attempted to resuscitate "authentic" racial and ethnic legacies. White males, diminished from fewer social outlets and the women's movement, responded with their own heritage activities, such as restoring locomotives and wargaming. Marketing techniques that used the late twentieth century's diffusion of media outlets to exploit divisions in American society further fragmented society by producing consumer groups of heritage enthusiasts. They created another difference between old and new historic attractions by serving as producers as well as consumers of heritage sites. Constituent support groups, including aficionados ("buffs") or reenactors, for example, shape heritage sites through development projects and public exhibitions of history "being made."

Although touring historic sites always has been part of the marketplace, heritage blurs previously discrete distinctions between market and memory. Whereas on the one hand heritage popularizes the past, it also transforms it into a market decision by relying on the consumer's experience to shape the product. Gift shops stuffed with collectible kitsch that dwarf souvenir selections of previous generations cater to individual consumer taste much like the central attraction sells subjective experiences. Critics have not failed to note the similarities between heritage sites and malls, which have grown more heritage-like in creating a shopping "experience" fulfilling individual desires. Furthermore, the visual and tangible focus of heritage owes a debt to images produced by the entertainment industry that whet the public's narrative imagination. Surround sound, high-definition television, and giant screens provide "authentic" experiences that legitimate historic sites. Films and television programs such as Gettysburg, The Patriot, and Ken Burns's The Civil War can prompt a flood of tourists to validate the images depicted onscreen by visiting the site and entering the narrative.

Heritage Sites

The proliferation of heritage sites in a number of forms during the late twentieth century reflected the public vogue for a past that entertains and titillates. Many sprouted out of the ground like mushrooms. For example, the Pequot Museum in Mashantucket, Connecticut, built by the tribe with casino proceeds, mists and chills visitors as they descend into a darkened Ice Age tunnel complete with tableaux that can be touched. At the Pamplin Park Civil War Museum near Petersburg, Virginia, floors rumble and jets of air simulate whistling bullets. Pamplin Park represents one of several Civil War museums that opened in the 1990s within driving range of Gettysburg, creating a Civil War tourist vortex out of the southern Pennsylvania-Virginia corridor. At the National Civil War Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a bricolage of expensive relics, hi-tech displays, and, according to the museum's promotional brochure, "life-size dioramas. . .help elevate the typical museum experience by touching visitors' emotions" about the Civil War. Among many new outdoor museums, such as coal mines and farms, tourists not only watch how people labored in the past, but sometimes even can join in the work.

In addition to the new heritage sites, established historical tourist attractions have embraced heritage. At Colonial Williamsburg, for example, visitors now are feted with "living history" mob scenes, slave patrols, or "tea with Martha Washington." Tourists to Gettysburg, where reenacting once was considered profaning, can mingle with reenactors who stage "authentic" camps on the battlefield and fire Civil War weapons. Gettysburg visitors now commonly replicate Pickett's Charge during a mile-long walk "into the Union guns" that includes graphic narration. A Civil War show at the Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland invites visitors to handle weapons and crawl inside an authentic Union tent, while tourists can "dress up like Indians" at the annual reenactment of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in Hardin, Montana. Scenarios of questionable accuracy abound, such as the authentic slave cabins in Charleston, South Carolina, which have been refurbished for lodging with air-conditioning and English hunting prints.

Both the new and the older heritage sites often host festival days to boost attendance and publicize continuously. Some might be ethnic festivals, while others are designed to attract heritage enthusiasts such as collectors or reenactors. At "Looking for Lincoln" days in Springfield, Illinois, visitors "relax, enjoy free cider and popcorn," "encounter some of Lincoln's old friends," and "enjoy the same kinds of entertainment available in Lincoln's Springfield." Some heritage attractions are permanent festivals using authentic settings that more overtly demonstrate the bond between heritage and the marketplace. In the final decades of the twentieth century, developers cashed in on the economic potential of heritage—what one pundit called "the successful packaging of authenticity." Old buildings, and in some cases monumental architecture, were converted to shopping malls. Evoking the past in malls such as South Seaport in New York City, Faneuil Hall in Boston, or Union Station in Washington, D.C., upgrades shopping not only by boosting the value of goods on display, but also providing shoppers with a comforting environment that encourages spending. Because only the ambiance of authenticity matters, developers also designed new malls with an antique look. The transformation of historic places into malls could be reversed so that malls could be turned into historic places.

Consumers

Sanitizing the past has earned heritage sites a reputation as enjoyable and relaxing family places. Gone are disease, hunger, desperation, horror, unpleasant hygiene, and ugly "inhabitants." Unlike Cold War parents, however, modern parents are part of a specialized market of heritage consumers who join children in suspending belief and pretending staged attractions are authentic. Teaching patriotism has been displaced by participating in the "memory bath" along with the kids. The baby boom generation includes many who failed to define maturity the same way as their parents, who were confronted in their formative years by depression and war.

While heritage tourists participate in the scene rather than exclusively watch, other patrons help manufacture the site through contributions, volunteer work, or acting out historical scenarios. These enthusiasts find community in an isolating society by sharing their interest electronically through Internet chat rooms and listservs. As with other heritage patrons, historical meaning is insignificant for these "buffs" who try to recapture childhood through play or hobbies. Railroad buffs restore coaches and engines with the zeal of young model builders; volunteers erect fencing on battlefields as if moving pieces on a play set; reenactors engage in "make believe" to sense the intensity of combat, if only for an instant. Heritage sites serve as personal fantasies for baby boomers not only by allowing them to slip into an earlier time, but through the sense of control they attain over historic events.

Criticism of Heritage

What makes heritage attractive to these specialized consumers is what critics decry. Scholars such as David Lowenthal and Robert Hewison point out that heritage is ahistorical, that "hands-on" experience in manufactured scenarios is no substitute for the knotty issues debated by history. History flows into the present; heritage, on the other hand, is fractured from the present, cleansed, and enjoyed at a distance. Unlike history, critics charge, heritage reveals truth determined by the widest audience of consumers. Advocates promote the seeing, doing, and feeling of heritage as an antidote to boredom induced by history lectures and texts. At a 1999 Civil War reenactment, for example, history teachers were encouraged to bring their classes "so their students' dry and dusty history textbooks may come alive." If heritage is so popular and superior to history, critics ask, then why is the public more ignorant of basic historical information than ever before? History may teach how to make relevant judgments and discriminate, but many have noted the undiscriminating nature of heritage. The marketplace tends to flatten the historical importance of sites so that Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or Graceland, for example, become the equivalents of Independence National Park.

Just as consumer culture in the twentieth century has enticed Americans away from politics and community life, heritage as part of that culture is pulling Americans away from history. What may be most troubling about heritage is its assurances of truth without asking questions. It is likely that global homogenization will increase the number and popularity of heritage sites as people search for identity in groups smaller than nations. The market will aid this process by segmenting potential buyers and herding them into "tribes" of heritage consumers. And the cultural populism of the entertainment industry, with authority vested in gate receipts, will likely continue. Critics hope that heritage will, as its advocates claim, lead consumers to further explore the past through history.

See also: Disneyland, Historical Reenactment Societies, National Parks, Niagara Falls, Shopping Malls, State Parks

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cross, Gary. An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Engelhardt, Tom. The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen Publishing, 1987.

Kammen, Michael. Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.

Lowenthal, David. The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

——. Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press, 1996.

MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: Schocken Books, 1976; reprint, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1999.

Prentice, Richard. Tourism and Heritage Attractions. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Travel Industry Association of America. The Historic/Cultural Traveler. 2001 Edition. Washington, D.C.: Research Department, Travel Industry Association of America, 2001.

Unrau, Harlan, And G. Frank Willis. "To Preserve the Nation's Past: The Growth of Historic Preservation in the National Park Service During the 1930s." Public Historian (Spring 1987).

Urry, John. Consuming Places. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Weeks, Jim. Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Jim Weeks