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The Underground Railroad Immersion Experience; and “Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries”

Historian Anthony Cohen brings the ‘living history’ model to the Underground Railroad; and Earle Havens highlights the genuinely bogus texts of the BibliothecaFictiva Collection 

  At places like colonial Williamsburg and Fort McHenry and Gettysburg, historical interpreters bring history to life, as the brochures say.  They also make it an entertainment spectacle and a tourist attraction.  So what happens if you apply the living-history model to slavery?  Do you have a blacksmith make you authentic slave collar?  Do you recreate a slave auction?  Do you pack yourself in a crate and mail yourself to freedom, like Henry 'Box' Brown?  Historian Anthony Cohen has done all of the above.  He’s also collected oral histories about the Underground Railroad, mapped them into routes, and hiked them himself.  Nowadays he operates the Button Farm Living History Center in Germantown, Maryland, where visitors can experience an unvarnished interpretation of a Southern Plantation.  

Earle Havens uses 'air quotes' a lot when he tours you through the "Fakes, Lies, & Forgeries" exhibition

  If we’re to believe the rare books and manuscripts of the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection, then we have definitive proof that Noah’s Ark landed in the Swiss Alps, Homer’s tomb was discovered in Denmark, and Jesus Christ wrote the world a posthumous chain-letter from heaven.  Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries is on exhibit at the George Peabody Library, and rare books curator Earle Havens tours us through some of history’s most outlandish literary deceptions.

fakes_lies_and_forgeries.mp3
Earle Havens tours us through the historical fakes, lies, & forgeries of the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection

Aaron creates and produces original radio programs and podcasts for WYPR. His current project is The Maryland Curiosity Bureau. Aaron's neighborhood documentary series, Out of the Blocks, earned the 2018 national Edward R Murrow Award. His past work includes the long-running weekly cultural program, The Signal, and the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings series, Tapestry of the Times. Aaron's stories have aired nationally on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered.