Only then can we interpret it effectively. It helps us to look more closely, more carefully, more robustly at the past. Aha, I realized, this is what cultural history can do. There us graduate students were, rushing past our evidence-quite complex evidence in the case of Peale’s painting-to “interrogate it,” as they say, “unpack it,” conquer it, tame it, own it, that we were losing its great value as historical material. That question, which I later learned John had adopted from a teaching technique used by one of his advisers at Yale, Jules Prown, struck me as disarmingly profound. John placed this image up on the screen in our Hamilton Hall seminar room from a slide carousel (yes it was still those days) and simply said: “What do you see? Describe this image.” It was such an audaciously basic question, so unusual and against the grain of the typical high-falutin graduate school talk of agency and structure, hegemony and power. Why do I seek to confuse you then? Because I first came upon the painting in John’s graduate seminar in cultural history. It is the painter, naturalist, inventor, and museum founder Charles Willson Peale, pictured here in his famous self-portrait, The Artist In His Museum, created in 1822. Of course, this image is not of John Kasson. He wears his knowledge easily even as what he shows us encompasses an extraordinary range of details, connections, ideas, and more. Despite the awesome display, he is a welcoming and cordial man. Here is John Kasson, the artist in his museum, pulling back the red draped curtain to reveal to us a vast wall of knowledge, classified and stored on display for us to examine, a sublime, almost overwhelming wall of material. It is one of him many of you may not have ever seen.
But first I wish to show you a picture of John.
John has asked us not to shower him with praise but rather turn our eye to the larger stakes of cultural history and its publics, and I will attempt to do that. The kassonian art of cultural observation: talk delivered for “cultural history and its publics – a symposium on the occasion of the retirement of john kasson” unc – chapel hill, 3 October 2015.