Columbia Professor Investigates History on Popular PBS Show

When a British television producer called Gwendolyn Wright a decade ago to ask if she would be interested in hosting a new TV show, she quipped, “You do realize I’m a 55-year-old woman?” Age, it turns out, did not matter. The producer wanted her for her expertise in American architecture and urbanism.

In season two, Wright, with an archaeologist, investigates 17th-century artifacts, including this clay tobacco pipe, found atop a dead body discovered in an old basement.

The show was History Detectives, which is entering its ninth season. It is consistently among the three most-watched shows on PBS each summer, along with Antiques Roadshow.

“It’s terrific,” says Wright, a professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “It has been a nice opportunity for me to actually bring scholarship into a medium that often doesn’t follow it and to discover there’s a sizeable public who really likes it.”

Wright is a co-host with four other experts in history, sociology, anthropology and art history, helping to trace the history of a wide selection of artifacts, houses and even locations. Series producer Jennifer Silverman says Wright’s “knowledge and enthusiasm” is key to the show’s success. “It is her incredible curiosity—for history, for accuracy and for ways to tell a story—that make her a great detective,” she says.

The show illustrates the process of historical investigations including how you track down the provenance of a specific object. In one episode of History Detectives, Wright investigated the history of a small ceramic tile that contained drawings by six prominent artists, including Andy Warhol, who wanted to have it sent to the moon with the Apollo 12 mission. After interviewing three witnesses including the launch pad foreman of the mission, Wright concluded that the tile likely made it to the moon, though she emphasized that she had only circumstantial evidence that it was smuggled aboard the spaceship.

The ceramic chip holds six small drawings and was purchased at an online auction by a Florida art curator.

Each hour-long show has three segments, each based on a question about a particular object. A recent story focused on a three-page document dated 1791 that was tied to the Universal Friends, the first religious group founded by an American-born woman. The document was submitted by a viewer in Maine whose family had kept it for over two centuries. Another investigated a ceramic jug made by potters from the Congo who were the last illegal slaves to arrive in the South.

Wright says the challenge includes not just finding evidence, but also showing the audience different ways to evaluate a subject and competing points of view about an event. She brings in other experts for every story, including fellow Columbia faculty members like historian Eric Foner , who appeared in the show’s first season.

Wright’s TV stardom has been an unexpected addition to an academic career that includes six books, scores of articles and Guggenheim and Getty fellowships. The first woman at the architecture school to receive tenure in 1985, she also holds appointments in the departments of history and art history.

It was her research on American housing and the cultural history of buildings that caught the attention of producers. At the time they wanted to shoot a pilot about the history of artifacts found in various American homes. When Wright signed on, she convinced the producers to include all types of dwellings, including apartment buildings and even the space that a homeless person considers home.

When Wright decided to take on the TV project, some colleagues warned it would hurt her academic reputation. But she sees the medium as yet another vehicle for education, and an exceptional way to reach a wide range of people. “I’ve done enough work in my life that I am taken seriously for,” she says. “I pride myself on showing people how you do history and how you ask questions about the past. In fact, many historians are enthusiastic about this historical outreach.” And, she adds, her TV career has made her a better teacher.

Doing the show “is expanding my commitment to scholarship and the things that Columbia is so good at doing,” she says. “We’re not just training future sociologists, historians and physicists; we’re training people in the world to think critically and to like doing it.”

—by Melanie A. Farmer

David Helfand, chair of the Department of Astronomy, was elected president of the American Astronomical Society, the professional organization for astronomers, astrophysicists and planetary scientists in North America.

Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, has received the 2011 Lincoln Prize for his book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery. The $50,000 prize, awarded annually by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, recognizes the finest scholarly work in English on Abraham Lincoln, the American Civil War soldier or a subject relating to their era.

Read the February 2011 Columbia Alumni Association Newsletter

This month’s edition includes President Bollinger’s letter to alumni and information about upcoming Cafés Columbia.