At only five years old, the Museum of the American Revolution has already welcomed its millionth visitor. It is a source of pride for Putman, who loves conversing with guests. Most haven’t studied the Revolutionary War since fourth grade, and fewer still have seen a depiction featuring anyone other than white men.
“People ask things like, ‘Was George Washington racist?’ ‘Was there such a thing as a good slave owner?’ They’re powerful conversations, and we don’t often get the chance to ask difficult questions or talk about difficult topics in an educational way.”
A museum fosters such critical dialogue. “Some people think of America’s founding as the ‘good old days,’ and it’s our job to present a bigger history—the oppression of women, Native Americans, enslaved people,” Putman says. “Then there are others who say, ‘These were the Dark Ages. Everyone was evil, the world was a mess,’ and we say, ‘But then how did people come up with these ideals that we still haven’t lived up to?’”
In leading special events at the museum, Boettcher never tires of this centuries-long interpretation. “The Revolution is ongoing and includes all kinds of voices,” she says. “It’s something to define for yourself.”
She takes joy in designing events that cross history, art, music, theatre, academia, current events and pop culture. For instance, Boettcher helped organize a baroque orchestra concert to accompany an exhibit featuring a contemporary painting of Hessian soldiers captured
in Trenton, New Jersey, imagining the music they might have played. The event serves as a reminder to Boettcher that
“the Revolutionary War is owned by so many different people, in so many different ways.”
That’s what curator Skic finds especially fascinating. Having grown up in Hopewell, New Jersey, about 10 minutes away from where Washington crossed the Delaware, he has long been enthralled by people and events from the past. In high school, he discovered UD’s program in American Material Culture, and when he went to the website and read Putman’s student bio, he thought, “Wow, I want to be like him.”
In his current role, Skic now explores the ways ordinary people experienced world-changing events. “The complexity and diversity of the past is often oversimplified in ways that can lead to misunderstandings or a misguided impression of history,” he says. “History is how we define ourselves as a nation, how we establish our ideals and work to fulfill them.”
Washington’s tent brings our nation’s history to life.
A champion of liberty, America’s first president was also a slaveholder whose war tent served as both home and headquarters. Vowing to “share in the hardship and partake of every inconvenience,” Washington would live beside his troops through blistering heat and bitter cold. “We are at the end of our tether,” he once wrote, but the general soldiered on, ultimately winning an eight-year war, seven years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.
With no biological children of his own, his belongings were eventually passed down to Martha Washington’s great-granddaughter, Mary Custis Lee, wife of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
In time, Civil War would tear the nation apart over the momentous question Washington’s generation failed to answer: Do the words “all men are created equal” apply to all people?
Once again, his tent would bear witness to war. Eventually, it would return to the Lee family and be sold to raise funds for the care of Confederate widows. The buyer, a Pennsylvania minister named W. Herbert Burk, dreamed of building a museum to honor Washington and the American Revolution. In time, his dream would come true. And the tent, like the Republic, would survive.