![]() In the past, Rabinowitz has defined the vanguard of exhibition makers as “the playwrights of memory and its reputation,” setting them against the old guard or the ancien régime, the antiquarians and architectural historians who keep dusty objects in Plexiglas cases. ![]() It is a process he sees as essentially theatrical, using the same dramatic and visual techniques that make, say, a great production of Macbeth into a life-altering experience. But work as a consulting historian was unsatisfying, with its “days of interviewing to get a three-day job.” After a stint working for the National Endowment for the Humanities, he decided to start American History Workshop ( Since that January day at Sturbridge, first as a historic interpreter and later as a curator, Rabinowitz has dedicated himself to conveying the stuffitude of history. One of his first completed projects was designing the “Cranberry Bog” at Ocean Spray’s Cranberry World. He quit for more project-driven work, consulting for small museums. In 1975, he went back to Harvard and finished his Ph.D., but was again bored by the inertia of academic life, with its endless meetings and bureaucracy. Rabinowitz spent six years at Old Sturbridge Village, working his way up to director of education. Of this visceral learning experience, he says, “it was a revelation that the world had this physicality to it, this materiality to it, this stuff-this stuffitude.” His years of reading primary documents had never impressed on him such a basic reality of early American life. ![]() Wearing loafers and chinos, he was unprepared for the cold he encountered inside the buildings of the historic village. Rabinowitz remembers his visit, on a Sunday in January 1967. “That kind of learning,” he says, is what he saw at Old Sturbridge Village. “She had such extraordinary knowledge in her fingertips,” he tells the now-rapt crowd of college students. It wasn't an industrial product the way it is today in, you know, Frank Perdue’s world.” We don't know that chicken was once, not just organic, but it actually had variability. It’s disappeared because our lives are so different. “I realized,” he says, “that we don’t have so much of the knowledge of the past. Chicken back then, he discovered, differed in flavor and quality from season to season, and this “challenged the cook’s ingenuity” in a way that today’s supermarket chicken does not. ![]() “What time of year are we talking about?” she responded. He asked her how his grandmother had prepared chicken during the family’s first years in America. “I had an instinct,” he says, “that there was more to the way in which history should be studied than could be found simply in libraries, in written documents.”Īn example of such learning came to him during an extensive oral history interview he once conducted with his mother, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Rabinowitz says he couldn’t have articulated it at the time, but as a stilted grad student in the winter of 1967, he had a sense that something was missing from his education. His recent blockbuster exhibition for N-YHS, “New York Divided: Slavery in the Civil War” won him critical acclaim, as well as contracts to develop four new exhibitions, including “French Founding Father: Lafayette’s Return to Washington’s America,” which continues through the summer, and “Grant and Lee,” which opens in the fall. Through his company, American History Workshop, Rabinowitz has created more than five hundred successful and innovative history programs at sites such as the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and Federal Hall, just to name a few in the New York area. Instead, the instinct that drove him away from the Ivory Tower and toward the mock village from the 1830s guided him over the next forty-one years to a celebrated career as one of America’s most respected developers of museum exhibitions. Rabinowitz did not end up in the Mekong Delta, fighting for his life. ![]()
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