In 2000, nearly 93 million travelers visited at least one cultural attraction. Some attended performing-arts events, but the most popular cultural venues included historic sites, museums, and heritage or ethnic festivals. These figures -- from an annual survey conducted by the Travel Industry Association of America --- indicate that there's big money in cultural tourism. So why shouldn't Ph.D.'s in the humanities try to get in on the action?
Professors and graduate students in the humanities have, in fact, begun to reach out to travelers and locals who visit cultural attractions. Cultural tourism offers a way to explore the field of public history as well as potential career connections and opportunities for those who study social, cultural, and aesthetic traditions.
Tulane University's Deep South Regional Humanities Center, for example, has entered the crowded New Orleans market for cultural tourism through its Egghead Tours. Last December, while thousands of cultural connoisseurs thronged elegant New Orleans hotels for the Modern Language Association's annual meeting, Katy Coyle, a Tulane graduate student, offered a gripping tour of the Big Easy's notorious Storyville District. Using both her impressive knowledge of local history and just the right touch of jazz-and-blues storytelling, Coyle filled a depressed and crumbling part of downtown New Orleans with fascinating riffs on the city's rich and colorful past. Coyle, who also works as a professional historian with a regional planning company, is paid for her tour work -- between $100 and $125 per 90-minute tour, depending on the size of the group.
Although cultural tours of New Orleans are not unusual, the Egghead Tours are unique in their reliance on serious academic scholarship. The tours are the brainchild of Sylvia Frey, a professor of history at Tulane and director of the Deep South Regional Humanities Center, who based her vision for Egghead on the Big Onion tours of New York City, conducted by graduate students from a group of New York universities. (In Philadelphia, Poor Richard's Walking Tours offer similar services by Penn graduate students.) After she proposed the idea at Tulane, graduate students ran with it, creating and leading a series of tours of different parts of the city and different eras in its development. Frey is "convinced" that Egghead and programs like it "will be a major vehicle both for bringing the humanities to a broader public and for supporting and promoting graduate research."
Egghead's approach includes a financing mechanism to support graduate research into public history. Michael Mizell-Nelson, the Deep South center's public historian, media coordinator, and director of the Egghead program, created "a research fund to support the work of the graduate students who produce the scripts for the Egghead Tours." Profits from the tours go into the research fund -- in essence, an R&D budget that enables Egghead to develop and tailor its product.
Realizing that their expertise lay in the area of research, the graduate students of Egghead Tours forged an unexpected partnership to develop their business plan: They sought the advice of Tulane's future M.B.A.'s on such issues as marketing, finance, and risk management. As Frey explains, "One of the unanticipated pluses has been the all-too-rare opportunity for humanities graduate students to work closely with their counterparts in the Tulane Business School." The result is both a contribution to New Orleans' cultural tourism efforts and a source of experience and support for doctoral students interested in public history.
As the national travel survey makes clear, it's not just cultural sites but also cultural events that attract big audiences and big money. In 2001, thousands attended various events in Buffalo, N.Y., for the centennial of the 1901 Pan American Exposition. The original exposition, which drew more than eight million visitors, showcased a new, broader consciousness of the Americas, made much of the new technology of electricity, and offered ethnographic exhibits and midway entertainments -- some of them culturally complicated and uncomfortable even in 1901.
While Buffalonians and others have long remembered the 1901 event more for its unfortunate end (the assassination of William McKinley) than for its successes, the 2001 centennial offered an opportunity to mark the anniversary, revisit a series of aesthetic and cultural achievements, and recover a broader sense of the region's and nation's multicultural heritage. Community planners organized dozens of events, exhibitions, and performances at venues across the city.
Humanists at the State University of New York at Buffalo saw an opportunity to integrate their work with that of the festival planners. Kerry S. Grant -- then the dean of arts and sciences at the university, now its vice provost for graduate education -- notes: "Without a concentrated effort, the university might have participated in an event or two, but we wanted to do more than that. In an event as important as this one to the city and to the region, we saw an opportunity for a university to make evident its commitment to its local community and to draw that community into the realization of their own role as humanists, collectors of stories, custodians of priceless artifacts."
Grant is the author of The Rainbow City: Celebrating Light, Color and Architecture at the Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, 1901 (Canisius College Press, 2001). His book, produced for the centennial in collaboration with the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society and Canisius College, also served as the basis for a video documentary -- again the product of a collaboration involving the university, a local production company, a local PBS station, and Erie County. The university also sponsored events, created a resource-rich Pan Am Web site, and provided space and staff support for a gathering of the Pan Am Collectors Society. Moreover, faculty and staff members at the university's Center for Computational Research worked with humanities scholars and citizens to create a virtual-reality walk-through of the exposition.
"We were really trying to connect the region's history to the region's possibilities in the present and future -- to help make Buffalo a place where the 21st century was reimagined, just as the Pan Am made it that kind of place for the 20th century," said Michael Frisch, a professor of history and American studies. "We didn't quite get all the way there -- sometimes cross-sector collaborations are harder to realize than you imagine at first -- but we did generate a very strong summer of events." Such celebrations also give humanities scholars and students an opportunity to test their research skills and interests in for-profit ventures, and to explore new career connections.
While cultural festivals and historic sites may offer obvious points of connection for humanities scholars with the outside world, humanists can also provide new dimensions of information in unexpected places. Yosemite National Park, for example, might seem like the kind of place where environmental scientists or geologists would find a venue for scholarship -- or, given its popularity for hikers, perhaps sports-medicine specialists. But, historians and humanists also have a role to play in understanding natural and recreational sites that appeal to tourists.
Raymond Williams, the literary and cultural scholar, once wrote, "The idea of Nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history." William Rowley and Jen Huntley-Smith -- two historians at the University of Nevada at Reno -- kept that in mind when they developed a partnership called "Imagining Yosemite: Actions and Ideals," which aimed to strengthen public-history scholarship on Yosemite. Working with the Yosemite Institute and the Yosemite Research Library, the two have already successfully mounted upper-division university seminars focused on the park as a case study in environmental history. The university's professors and graduate students are now planning to present public lectures, while undergraduates conduct research through the Yosemite Research Library.
Whether through tours or exhibits, multimedia presentations or curriculum development, humanists -- who are often, by both profession and passion, our fundamental interpreters of culture -- offer the depth of understanding and richness of detail that can turn old buildings, declining neighborhoods, and overlooked events into powerful cultural attractions. What's more, experience in providing these scholarly resources can also lead to career opportunities for Ph.D.'s and graduate students in software development and curriculum design.
"Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him," wrote Mark Twain, "as travel and contact with many kind of people." And nothing so richly connects the humanities to local communities as projects that explore their history and expand the context of cultural tourism. By engaging in such work, scholars can both strengthen their communities and explore new avenues for research and employment beyond the academy.
