Portraying Dark History and the Challenges of Techonology

One of the assignments in my Digital History class was working with my fellow graduate students to create a dark history walking tour of London, Ontario. Our assignment was to each create a page for the tour, after researching a moment of dark history from London's Victorian past. We walked out a route, decided on various points and chose people and places that all fit together into one cohesive walking tour. After all this was done the Death, Destruction and Disgrace in Victorian London tour was born. Sounds simple right?

We very quickly discovered that the technology we were using to create our tour was not the most user friendly. Despite being given a personal walk through of the technology, there were still many challenges and unknowns that we had to over come to make something that looked polished and professional. Most of the time the app worked well, but when it didn't it REALLY didn't. The biggest lesson I learned from this assignment was that you need to leave ample time between when you complete a project, and when it is going to be used by the public, because there are a lot of things that can go wrong. A few days before our tour was set to go public, the entire system that supported it crashed. Because of this we had to do some quick thinking, and convert all of our pages to pdf format so that our test group could still use the tour. Eventually everything worked out, but inevitably the final 3 days before the due date will be the most stressful and will be when everything goes wrong. This is the way of digital history.

The second part of this blog post is on how dark history should be portrayed, or if it should be portrayed at all. Each person and event in our Death, Destruction and Disgrace tour contained some rather dark information, hence the term dark history. One issue we had to wrestle with is if we should be presenting this information for the amusement of others, because essentially that is what this tour was designed to do; educate but also amuse.

The person that I chose to research and present was Cornelius Burley, whose hanging was one of the most unique in London's history. He was the first, and the second man hung at the London courthouse and recent scholarship suggests that he was innocent of his crime. He was accused of murder, and later admitted to the crime after hours of interrogation from Reverend Jackson. This confession was read by Jackson at Burleys hanging, and was later published into a pamphlet and distributed throughout London.
After his death, Burley's body was dissected immediately at the site of the hanging in front of the 3000 people who attended. This practice was not uncommon, and acted as a kind of second show. Burley's skull was taken by the famous phrenologist Orson Squires Fowler on an international tour across America and Europe. This skull eventually ended up back at Eldon House museum, and was buried in 2001.
I found that my subject in particular had a very hard life, death and afterlife full of humiliation and pain. This made the decision to feature Burley's demise on the tour all the more important.

Cornelius Burley's skull

Orson Squires Fowler

To go along with this tour, we had a lot of classes on how dark history should be portrayed, and if it should be portrayed at all. It is a hard topic, especially for people like myself and my classmates who want to be able to communicate all kinds of history. How historical people and information is represented is an especially important consideration when dealing with hard topics. The exploitation of history and heritage is an unfortunate reality of the field that I am looking at getting into. My class was not making any money off of our tour of London, but if we had been, one thing to consider is if it is right to be making money off of the deaths and disgrace of past figures.

This topic continued throughout many of my classes, and one topic that was brought up again and again was the Holocaust. How, as public historians, should we approach this horrifying moment in history? There are many sites connected to the Holocaust that already exist. Many concentration camps are part of tours across Europe designed specifically around these sites, and many different approaches are taken. As with many facets of history, there really is no one right answer. My conclusion is that if we are doing our best to remain empathetic and respectful then there is really no recipe for how to portray dark history.