This 2013 directory of noteworthy American cultural sites does double duty as an encyclopedia containing brief descriptions of the lives and “accomplishments of 409 “famous” people memorialized in museums, historic sites and memorials”. The book is written by Victor J. Danilov, a former director of the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago and the founder of the Museum Management Program at the University of Colorado. The entries, while brief, are informative and provide useful context for each site. Descriptions are grouped into 26 categories, including actors, aviators/astronauts, educators, explorers, outlaws, social activists and so on. Some figures, such as John Brown, the revolutionary abolitionist, have multiple associated sites. In Brown’s case, there is a national historical park, two houses, a farm and a museum – all in different locales; each one with its own entry.
For each site, logistical information is provided; contact details, hours of operation, admission costs. A $95 419-page hardcover book is an antiquated and impractical format for this kind of logistical information, so prone to fluctuation. Published in 2013 the information appears to be current but will fast become out of date, many of the sites listed, such as presidential libraries and museums are unlikely to close, still, email addresses, web addresses, admissions fees change. Other sites, devoted to poets, playwrights, musicians and outlaws, are the gems of the bunch, but one never knows how they will fare.
The book provides a nice, if elliptical, road map of American history through the lives and legacies of the “famous”. Danilov is correct to problematize the term by placing it in quotation marks in his introduction. He is careful to note that people become famous for all sorts of reasons, some negative. In museums and historic sites, these American stories are curated in physical space, be it Brigham Young’s house in St. George, Utah or Walt Disney’s Carolwood Barn in LA, and these spaces provide a sort of interactive map of history. This compilation of these sites is enormously useful and certainly interesting.
The volume is a listing of the “famous”, and there is no one you would not find in your seventh-grade history book, and I would have appreciated some more obscure figures. Still, there is lots of interesting information, the Crazy Horse Memorial in South Dakota will be the largest sculpture carved into a mountain when it is completed (641 feet wide and 563 feet high! about the size of one of the tallest buildings in Austin, Texas) The P. T. Barnum Museum in Connecticut (did you know that he was, in addition to the circus-figure we now know, a state legislator, a mayor and a newspaper publisher?) contains a 1,000-square-foot replica of Barnum’s circus, a miniature reproduction of his estate library, an exhibit on Tom Thumb and “an authentic 2,500-year-old Egyptian Dummy”. Great fodder for vacation planning, day trips, armchair anthropology or elementary school reports.
The book is easy enough to use. Following the 26 sections, there is a geographical guide, listing sites by state. It would be helpful if these were indexed, but the index in the back addresses any concerns about that and the idiosyncrasy of the categorical listings.
Despite its charm, Famous Americans is ultimately not a volume that I would recommend for a library or an individual. There may indeed be a place for print reference, but a directory of cultural sites is not it. This would be infinitely better online. In that format, it could be updated regularly, hyperlinks could be included, the rich biographical information expanded and the many sites that were excluded, for whatever reason, could be covered.
