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devoted to projects in which few had a genuine interest, but which were among the forms of documentation NPS has prioritized as essential management tools. One informant noted that some of the most valuable studies he and his colleagues undertook were, in fact, completed “outside and independent of the normal NPS history program.” Had this site “followed the normal path of attempting to gain funding for special history studies, the region or Washington would have wanted the park to first complete an Administrative History and an Ethnographic Overview and Assessment,” our correspondent observed. Instead, he continued, “The park felt that these administrative and bureaucratic studies could be produced at a later date, when the park was on sound footings as to what, actually, its history was.” This park had access to independent funding, and so was able to complete the research needed to interpret its resources in new and important ways and create “an effective and state-of-the-art program.”19 We concur with this respondent that the best results emerge when a site can first “survey and determine” what its “cultural and interpretive staff [feel] are the studies that they need to do their jobs more effectively. Checklists of needed documents (GMP, historic structure reports, historic landscape reports, special history studies) should be discarded in favor of documents that seek to define the cultural history of a park in the broadest and most accessible manner. Once this definition has been accomplished, more bureaucratic [work] could be undertaken.” In any case, the split between cultural resources management and interpretation processes replicates itself at almost every level of NPS, from WASO to the regional offices to many of the larger parks. Smaller parks often have combined interpretation and cultural resources management divisions or by necessity foster regular communication among all park staff— an arrangement many survey respondents found more logical and functional. More often, however, this pervasive divide and the narrow conception of history’s role that the agency perpetuates seriously impoverishes the NPS’s mission in a number of ways: • The agency’s most highly trained professional historians, and the outside scholars often hired under contract for particular projects, too often have little to do with the agency’s most visible and public history activities—its interpretive exhibits, products, and programs. Historical interpretation, meanwhile, is left to a cadre of staff with (often) little formal training in history, subject knowledge, or experience doing primary source research on the topics they are charged with communicating. Interpretation thus misses opportunities to take advantage of the most up-to-date historical research and scholarship, including that conducted and sponsored by NPS itself. • Mandated cultural resource preservation or planning processes have an undue influence on NPS history practice; “compliance” becomes the end unto itself, rather than a means by which resources are better understood and documented. History seems trapped in a standardized systems of plans and studies that are not necessarily as or relevant as they should be to genuine historical questions and needs—either for resource management or interpretation. Meanwhile, with the exception of parks that have either private support or fee-based funds, there is little money or latitude for parks to commission topical studies on the questions they—or their publics—genuinely want answers to. More than one survey respondent notes that cultural resources management can be unresponsive or out of touch with interpretation’s needs for research, and about 26% of our respondents mentioned site-specific research as their most pressing research need.20
19 Reed Engle, personal narrative for State of History team, June 2010. 20 The 26% figure is based on 80 out of 304 of our respondents who identified a primary history research need for their site.