This Week at the Woodrow Wilson House
April 22, 2021
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The spring season brings back the warm weather as well as seasonal fauna and flora. This week, the Wilson House welcomed its first house guests, a couple of foul feathered friends, of 2021! |
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The Wilson House encourages its super sleuths to help it identify a special chair supposedly connected to the Wilson family. Let us know your thoughts at wilsonhouse@savingplaces.org!
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Advisory Council Member Dana Tai Soon Burgess In the News
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The Washington Post's Celia Wren profiles Wilson House Advisory Board Member Dana Tai Soon Burgess' Social Justice Leaders Series
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Tom is a student at Union College in Schenectady, NY. Interested in cartography, Tom is working on maps for the walking tours as well as a map of Woodrow Wilson influenced buildings and landmarks in the DC Area. He is also working on organizing the Kelly Collection with WWH Advisory Board member Cary Fuller; working on social media posts for Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter; and creating infographics for the website such as a Woodrow Wilson Collegiate Timeline. |
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Ani is a junior at Luther College, IA, studying Art and Museum Studies. Her main project at the Wilson House focuses on research for an upcoming exhibition about Propaganda and Fake News from President Wilson's time to today. Additionally, she also helps with updating the President Wilson House Website and making it look more modern and compliant to the mission statement. She is also in the process of creating some illustrations that can be used for social media or postcards in the future. |
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Kimberly Totten is a graduate student at George Washington University, completing her Master's in Museum Studies. Her specialty is Collections Management and she has a particular interest in historic house museums. Kimberly has worked with the Wilson House’s collection management software, helping to organize and care for the collection. She has also aided with the installation of paintings in the President’s bedroom and the Drawing Room. |
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Zachary Burt is a graduate student in historic preservation at Goucher College. He lives in Washington, D.C., and loves exploring the city's history and architecture. He also enjoys visiting historic sites around the country (his picture is from a recent trip to Old Salem in NC). As a Spring Scholar at the Wilson House, he has been learning more about the management and operations of historic house museums and is interested in the long-term sustainability of historic properties through continued relevance to their local communities. He has assisted with a grant application, attended an Advisory Council meeting, and will be helping with the planning of the upcoming outdoor exhibition Drawing the Line.
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Jacky graduated from the University of Maryland with a BA in Art History and Studio Art, and will begin graduate school next fall. At the Wilson House, she is working on a project for the website and social media pages about African-American Inventors during the early 20th century. Her hobbies are record collecting and reading.
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The Wilson House Tuesday Speaker Series Continues!
On the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month, notable historians, authors, curators, and leaders explore the social movements of the early 20th Century and their relevance today. Talks explore women's suffrage, activism and protest, racial inequity, and the consequences and legacy of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency.
The Wilson House Tuesday Speaker Series is brought to you through generous donations from:
Cary C. Fuller, Nancy Bliss, Edward F. Gerber, and Christopher W. Keller.
Register now for upcoming speakers.
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Lunch & Learn Noon on Zoom with
Philip Zelikow discussing his book, The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917
Tuesday, April 27, 12 p.m. EST
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Join Professor Philip Zelikow to discuss his new book, THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917, the never-before-told understory of how the Great War could have ended in early 1917 saving millions of lives.
For more than five months, from August 1916 to the end of January 1917, leaders from America, Britain and Germany held secret peace negotiations in an attempt to end the Great War. They did so far out of public sight—one reason why their battle, which came astonishingly close to ending the war, is little understood today. Through Philip Zelikow, this unknown story finally sees the light and revises the historical understanding of this pivot in world history, perhaps more than any other book on the war published in a very long time.
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Lunch & Learn Noon on Zoom with Dr. Cathleen Cahill discussing her book, Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement
Tuesday, May 11, 12 p.m. EST
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A diverse cadre of extraordinary women struggled to build a movement that would truly include all women, regardless of race or national origin. In Recasting the Vote, Cathleen D. Cahill tells the powerful stories of a multiracial group of activists who propelled the national suffrage movement toward a more inclusive vision of equal rights.
Dr. Cahill, PhD, - author of Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Suffrage Movement is a social historian holding a Ph.D in history from the University of Chicago. She explores the everyday experiences of ordinary people, primarily women, focusing on how identities including race, nationality, class, and age shaped their working as well as political lives.
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Seeing America: History Travel Blog
By Maggie Wald, Wilson House Fall Scholar
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Maggie Wald is a junior from Washington University of St Louis who participated in the summer and fall sessions of the Student Volunteer Scholar Program at the Woodrow Wilson House and spent the fall of 2020 traveling around the country (attending college virtually) while writing a blog about the historical stops on her tour. Maggie’s latest blogpost discusses her stop in Savanah, Georgia. |
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Awakening the Past: Contemporary Art in Historic Homes
Our linear chronological perception of time inhibits our ability to comprehend history as alive. As a discipline, history delves into events already concluded, people already lived, and letters already written. In many ways, it’s a field of study born out of the dead.
Naturally, it’s hard to connect with the past – a challenge lurking within every history class, historical museums, and especially every national historic landmark. This problem is particularly omnipresent for national historic landmarks like historic houses because, unlike classes or museums that can optimize and modernize to adapt to changing visitor expectations, historic houses are stagnant by design. The challenge for historic houses is employing new, innovative, and creative programming revitalizing as well as animating the past for audiences who may have little interest in something not existing alongside or among them.
Historic houses like the Woodrow Wilson House and the Neill-Cochran House in Austin, Texas, are exploiting contemporary art’s ability to enchant audiences as a way to enliven their histories. At the Wilson House, a choreographed performance by the Dana Tai Soon Burgess Company last month from the 1903 play Tracings and artwork on the Syrian refugee crisis by Helen Zughaib at the House’s Gallery Week in July 2019 engage audiences in discussions about immigration and national self-determination. At the Neill-Cochran House, artwork by ceramicist Ginger Geyer and performances by actor Jennifer Rousseau engage the audiences in discussions about slavery.
To effectively integrate contemporary art into their spaces and generate their desired results, both houses are fusing the featured artwork with their houses’ historical legacies. Tracings and Zughaib’s artwork at the Wilson House remind audiences that the xenophobia and sovereignty issues Wilson experienced during this administration are still present today. Geyer’s conceptual postmodern reappropriation of an Operation gameboard and Rousseau’s performances remind audiences of the significant impact of slavey on the house’s – as well as the nation’s – history. Geyer, Burgess, Rousseau, and Zughaib breathe new life into old dialogues about xenophobia, freedom, and slavery through their artistic mediums.
Contemporary art is a wonderful medium. It can assist victims cope with their traumas and, as I’ve seen, can help audiences contextualize history as well as better understand it. The stagnancy of history is an allusion – it is alive, breathing, and affecting our present like seasons, episodes, or chapters a series’ or saga’s overall arch. There is no future or past, argues Dr. Manhattan in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, rather “an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time when the whole design is visible in every facet.” Everything that happened in the past brought our lives to the point they are at today—from our sprawling nation to even the smallest individual. Sometimes it just takes a creative combination to remind us of that fact and awaken the past.
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Exploring Woodrow Wilson's Legacy Through US Postal Stamps
By Traci Holmer, Wilson House Fall Scholar
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Grand Canyon USPS stamp commemorating the establishment of the landmark as a national park in 1919. |
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Earth Day is April 22nd, which was a perfect time for Fall Scholar Traci Holmer to highlight the 105th anniversary of the National Park Service (NPS).
The National Park Service (NPS), which was founded
during Wilson's presidency, established the Grand Canyon as a national park in 1919. This stamp commemorated one of the first 20 national parks recognized at the time. This series was issued because in 1934 FDR was attempting to expand the NPS, and wanted to show the American public the diversity and beauty of these national parks. Today, there are 62 national parks in the United States, so the work of the NPS has left a tremendous impact on the U.S. long after Wilson died.
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