Partners in detecting: Zuberi, Wright, Luray & Cowan. (Photo: PBS.)
History Detectives
Little clues lead quartet to more ‘big history’
While flipping through old records at a Lakeland, Fla., flea market, a man found a strange aluminum disc with “Amos & Andy” handwritten on its label. Could it be an extremely rare recording of the 1930s radio show?
A North Carolina woman’s great-grandfather had a small commemorative pin that might have been made from a piece of the Liberty Bell.
In Omaha, some folks found what appears to be a Colonial $6 bill pressed between pages of an old book.
A magnificent, 12-foot-high cast-iron eagle, rescued years ago from the scrap heap, may once have perched on Grand Central Terminal.
There’s a spy-plane’s altimeter (pictured at left) that may have crashed to earth with Howard Hughes, a long-lost letter from Abraham Lincoln and an astounding home movie of Adolf Hitler.
These artifacts hold some of more than two dozen mysteries, big and small, investigated this season by History Detectives.
“These are stories that connect people to the past,” says Wes Cowan, one of the quartet of gumshoes who recently completed the 50th episode of the PBS series, which airs from late June to early September on 95 percent of PBS stations.
Cowan has a Ph.D. in anthropology but left academics to work full time as an independent appraiser and auctioneer. Tukufu Zuberi is a sociology professor and director of the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Elyse Luray, an alumna of Christie’s auction house, is an art history expert and independent appraiser. And Gwendolyn Wright is an architectural historian and history professor at Columbia.
They’re the History Detectives.
“We’re people fascinated by the sound of turning the pages of old newspapers,” Wright says, “because the paper has aged and makes a ruffling sound that’s very exciting.”
Loved and promoted since day one by librarians, teachers and other veteran paper rufflers, the detectives clearly are finding a following. PBS says an average of 4 million people a week watch the show, and though that’s often just two-thirds the audience of its lead-in, the perennially top-rated Antiques Roadshow, PBS President Paula Kerger says History Detectives has “a little bit of momentum” and an audience that grows with each broadcast.
Programming chief John Wilson says Antiques Roadshow and History Detectives have become a popular one-two punch. And Detectives woos viewers with “a unique blend” of genres, melding Roadshow’s viewer participation with CSI’s science.
Viewers love the CSI elements, “all these different technologies like dating wood and magnifying dyes under a microscope,” agrees David Davis, series co-executive producer at Oregon Public Broadcasting, which co-produces Detectives with the American production arm of Britain’s Lion Television.
Davis says it took a couple of seasons for the audience to discover the summer-season show, “but now they look forward to it. We get great e-mail response.” Indeed: some 14,000 e-mails in the past three years, 6,000 last year alone. PBS says viewers send nearly three-quarters of the show’s story ideas.
Despite its viewer appeal, the show relies on station funding through PBS’s National Program Service. PBS is pursuing at least one underwriter, Wilson acknowledges, and Davis says OPB is hopeful that it can find a partial underwriter for the sixth season.
Even deep into the Internet era, History Detectives has managed to make old-fashioned library research sexy.
In a typical Detectives story, the owner of an artifact that may be historically significant asks for investigative help. Often, a cryptic jotting on a document or an old family story provides the only clue suggesting where to start digging. After chats with experts and a whirlwind tour of archives and historic sites, the detective reports back.
Exciting or not, the findings are often less important than the journey, the critical eye and the detectives’ sleuthing.
“We show how to gather evidence, how to find things and how to interpret them,” says Wright. “History Detectives is about knowledge and the ability to make judgments.”
And attitude, too. CSI Miami has a Who song as its theme; the Detectives grabbed a catchy hook from Elvis Costello. Like the cops and lawyers of Law and Order, the History Detectives do a slow-motion strut toward the camera as their opening credits roll, but in what looks like swirling, backlit fog from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And while the detectives don’t yet have their own secret lair, the credit sequence that shows them intensely examining evidence in darkened labs certainly gives that impression.
Luray at the microscope is as cool as any CSI on TV.
History Detectives was designed to be “entertainment-focused and not overly highbrow,” says Lion’s Chris Bryson, one of the show’s executive producers. He ticks off the ingredients that he thinks make the show work: “Infinitely interesting stories, a connection to the audience and a sense of mystery.”
The format of History Detectives has changed little over its five seasons — “because it works,” says OPB’s Davis. One reason for that, the producers agree, was the early decision to divide the hourlong program into three main stories, each running a digestible 15 to 17 minutes.
“We wanted to create a history series that gave viewers the information in shorter, more accessible segments,” says Wilson, citing greater appeal to families and teachers.
But while most segments are still short, the series is subtly shifting to pay more attention to what Davis calls “big History, capital H.”
Consider the Abe Lincoln letter that a Tampa, Fla., firefighter bought at a yard sale for little more than pocket change. Dated to the period of Lincoln’s early unsuccessful race against Illinois Sen. Stephen Douglas, the letter was a missing original in a series well known to historians for displaying Lincoln’s consummate political skill, four years before the Civil War, at balancing the demands of hard-line abolitionists and party moderates.
Like anything with Lincoln’s signature, the letter would have made Roadshow appraisers salivate, but for Detectives it presented a chance to show the president-to-be approaching a profoundly divisive issue that would soon engulf the nation in war.
History Detectives has been simultaneously beefed up and streamlined since e-mails and focus groups began to show that viewers wanted more archival footage and documentary-style storytelling and less schmoozing with artifact owners. The pace has picked up and the editing is tighter. The hosts, who once tag-teamed for investigations, now work solo, and the owners of the artifacts get a bit less screen time.
Most noticeable: Short “interstitials” akin to mini-documentaries were added after each segment to help put the object and its story into a broader historical and social context—what Cowan, with an auctioneer’s flair, terms the “grand panoply” of history.
The changes are fine with Wright. “We want most of the stories to go beyond themselves, to raise some interesting questions about American history,” she says. The story of the Colonial $6 bill is one of Wright’s favorites because it did just that.
The process of proving the bill’s authenticity was interesting, but Wright was more attracted to “the sheer moxie of the ideas” behind the curious currency.
It was printed in the months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, when many colonists were still loyal to the Crown, and it wasn’t clear whether the skirmishes with the British were a tax revolt or real war. To pay for the rebellion, leaders printed money as needed—some $240 million altogether—backed with nothing more than faith. Wright’s complex story reveals that the British issued counterfeit bills to devalue the real ones, and Ben Franklin responded with early anti-counterfeit measures.
Not everything on the show points to big-H history, however. Some objects investigated this season are bit players in the grand panoply but introduce undeservedly obscure figures and offer insight into the development of our national character. “Small h” history has its charms.
The idea for History Detectives came from a honcho at Lion, one of the most successful producers for a host of broadcast and cable networks including Discovery, Fox, MSNBC, A&E, HBO and CBS. Lion brought the concept to OPB producers who had worked with them before. “They said, ‘Let’s do this together, and let’s pitch this to PBS together,’” recalls Davis.
And they did, although two years passed before PBS agreed to fund the show. Wilson says they liked the “new angle” History Detectives proposed on “a tried-and-true genre.”
“We think it’s a wonderful complement to American Experience,” the PBS exec says.
The producers then set out to find their quartet of hosts. “We looked for a mix of men and women and different ages and ethnic diversity,” says Davis. Cowan jokes that his silver hair got him the job with the older-skewing PBS. “I was picked to appeal to their target audience.”
Already a fixture on Antiques Roadshow for some seven years, Cowan was in fact perhaps the best known of the candidates. Luray also had a Roadshow following, but that didn’t spare her or Cowan from auditioning along with Zufari and Wright.
“We traveled around the country videotaping a number of historians, appraisers and people who seemed to have the right expertise,” says Davis. Each talked on camera for a few minutes. OPB then gave the audition tape to PBS with its recommendations.
History Detectives is unusual in that the production of each season’s stories is split between producers, researchers and crews at OPB on the West Coast and at Lion, based in New York. The partners shoot 27 stories per season, OPB doing six and Lion 21. The show’s segmented format allows six repeated segments to be mixed into the season’s 11 broadcasts.
Viewers see very little of the background work that goes into each segment, and, this being television, there’s a certain amount of legerdemain involved, too. When Luray walks into the library, flips through a couple of books and quickly nails her research, you’re seeing shorthand for much more exhaustive work by researchers at OPB and Lion. Though the show risks making research look too easy, the real grunt work would make for phenomenally dull TV.
In the months before the cameras start rolling, the researchers investigate submissions, choose stories and find experts. At OPB, a producer, associate producer and researcher, along with numerous camera and editing crews, shoot from October through January and then work full-time until the end of July putting together their six segments.
Lion’s share of the production schedule is much more complex, peaking in what Bryson calls “the perfect storm in early spring”— a maelstrom of five production teams flying around the country at once.
Whether for OPB or Lion, the hosts typically spend a week or so shooting 12 to 14 hours of video, including interviews and continuity. They do one story at a time, and spend a lot of time in the air and behind the wheel traveling to locations and back and forth to their other jobs.
“They get their hands dirty,” says Lion’s Bryson, who considers host-expert “face time” to be a key element of the show’s appeal. Wright says it’s exciting to meet so many knowledgeable experts “who love what they do.”
Cowan just loves to listen. “It’s unbelievable that I can sit down and talk with a guy who was a scientist on the Manhattan Project,” he says. “Eighty-five-year-old guy. He was a relatively low-level scientist on the Manhattan Project, but man, he was working on one of the most important projects that shaped the world. And here I was sitting in the guy’s back yard, listening to him talk.”
With so many on-camera chats, it’s not uncommon for a piece of information to pop up and send the story in a new and unexpected direction requiring rewrites, reshooting and winging it. That’s the “dirty hands” part, and it can throw a wrench into a segment that has been heavily vetted from the start.
PBS and the producers review potential segments after researchers gather initial information. Historical consultants join the vetting process when the approved stories undergo editing.
An upcoming segment on the 1963 sinking of the USS Thresher, a nuclear submarine with 129 people aboard, presented an unusual challenge to the producers. A man found a document that linked his deceased great-
uncle to the sub, but information about the Cold War incident, most of it previously classified, is hard to come by. “The Navy is still sensitive about the Thresher,” Bryson says, “and they told us so.”
Wilson says PBS’s vetting of the Thresher story was routine. “We are surrogates for the audience in identifying the need for more information or clarification, and we also ensure that content meets PBS’s editorial standards,” he says.
Some viewers questioned the network’s standards after the July broadcast of a story about a racially integrated post-Civil War veteran’s organization. In the interstitial segment that followed, Cowan presented a capsule history of veterans and politics, ending with a mention of the Swift Boat Veterans controversy that roiled the closing weeks of the 2004 presidential election campaign. The piece said that the veteran’s group “funded by a wealthy Republican campaign donor smeared Kerry’s military record and possibly cost him the election.”
PBS ombudsman Michael Getler questioned the “appropriateness” of the statement, writing in his PBS.org column that it seemed “to come out of nowhere, be irrelevant to the segment viewers had just watched, and jumped out as sort of a gratuitous political shot . . . ” Getler said he received a “heavy flow of critical mail” about the remark. One viewer wrote: “In the future, please confine yourselves to telling about history, not rewriting it.” Another called the comments “breathtakingly inane.” A third wanted “a return to the ‘fairness doctrine’ to counteract folks like Wes who get paid with public funds to spread his opinions.”
Bryson said TV shows about history must deal with “some of the most incendiary and conflicted episodes of our past” and defended the Swift Boat statement as a summary of “a great deal of objective reporting by established media organizations, respected media watchdog groups, and an official Pentagon investigation.”
But neither Getler nor Bryson mentioned that Cowan, who took much of the heat for the remark, was reading a script written by others. Cowan has since rerecorded the interstitial’s narration to change the emphasis for future airings.
Cowan needn’t worry about the flamethrowers. He still enjoys the unconditional love of three Anaheim, Calif., fans who call themselves the Cowan Divas at “the site devoted to all things Wes” (cowandivas.historydivas.com).
It’s just more evidence that the history detectives are finding it harder to avoid the trappings of their growing stardom. They get noticed at the grocery store, in airports, at restaurants.
Not long ago, Wright got a call from a Renaissance historian at Princeton who wanted to suggest a story for the show. That same day, the driver of an 18-wheeler leaned out of his rig on a Manhattan street and yelled (here Wright switches to a Brooklyn accent) “Hey, history detective! I love your show!”
“I just danced!” says Wright. “The notion that I could be reaching both of these kinds of people, and a lot in between, was wonderful.”
Matt Coates is a writer and designer based in Washington, D.C. A longtime producer and reporter for WAMU-FM, he also created syndicated radio programs and was broadcast editor for SpeakOut.com, a news and information website.
Web page posted April 7, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
