Looking between fences in american history

Radical History Review

Volumn , Issue 108, 2010, Pages 161-174

  Streamas, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 78049249075     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2010-010     Document Type: Article

References (17)

1. Robert Frost, "Mending Wall," in Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995), 39-40.
2. The poem's speaker is at first ambivalent about fences and their value. He asks, "Why do they make good neighbors?" If, indeed, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" - in his mind, he suggests that that something is "elves," but still "it's not elves exactly" - then he fumbles toward a recognition that it is he who does not love walls. Ultimately, he fails, and the neighbor gets the final line.
3. A 1996 exhibit of the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, was also called Between Fences, which the Smithsonian's traveling exhibit updated and modified to suit the Traveling Exhibition Service's educational goals.
4. Gregory K. Dreicer curated the original exhibit and edited its catalog Between Fences (Washington, DC: National Building Museum/Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
5. When the Smithsonian exhibit stopped in December 2008 in Twin Falls, Idaho, the local flier credited Dreicer as its curator; the Smithsonian poster credits his design company, Chicken & Egg Public Projects, Inc; and a display panel in the national exhibit credits the Smithsonian's Office of Exhibits Central for designing, editing, and producing the material, "in collaboration with" curator Dreicer and Chicken & Egg, while acknowledging that the original version was staged at the National Building Museum.
6. Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, Museum on Main Street, "Between Fences," www.museumonmainstreet.org/exhibs_fences/fences_class.htm (last accessed January 7, 2010).
7. Sun Valley Center for the Arts, www.sunvalleycenter.com (accessed June 11, 2009).
8. In the interest of full disclosure, I have seen none of the other traveling exhibits of the Museum on Main Street program, nor did I attend any events related to the Between Fences exhibit's stop in Ketchum. I traveled to the Community Library to see the exhibit on June 25, 2009, then on June 26 to see the local paintings, drawings, and photographs in the Sun Valley Center for the Arts in Hailey. My trip to Ketchum coincided with the annual pilgrimage of Japanese Americans to the site of the nearby Minidoka camp, which I attended on June 27. In a "talk story" session, many former internees, their families, and local residents mentioned the barbed wire that ringed the camp.
9. David R. Stoecklein, "David's Story," www.thestoeckleincollection.com/StoeckleinPrints.com/Stoeckleinprints/davids.html (last accessed January 7, 2010).
10. David R. Stoecklein, Western Fences (Ketchum, ID: Stoecklein Publishing, 2005), 36 - 37.
11. To be fair, Stoecklein does concede that barbed wire, on its arrival in the West, "brought a halt to the open range. It was the end of the era of the freedom of the open range" (30). But later he credits barbed wire for "great cattle ranches and empires" that appeared: "The West we know and love was established because of this invention" (30). And his images of ranch fences - even his close-ups of barbed wire - are stunning tributes to landscapes whose beauty cannot be imagined without fences.
12. All quotations and, where indicated, paraphrases from display panels derive from the original texts included in the Smithsonian's traveling exhibit.
13. Raymond Williams, "Advertising: The Magic System," in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005), 177-178.
14. Ibid., 178.
15. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "Events and Programs," American www.history.si.edu/events/event.cfm?archive=true&key=26&eventkey=1132&date=2007-02-19 (last accessed January 7, 2010).
16. Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi, "Expansion, Confrontation, Containment: An Interview with Reviel Netz," Cabinet 22 (2006): 75-79.
17. Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 14-15.