Who should guide the guides?

Starting in the fall, if you want to guide tourists in the historic district of Philadelphia, you'll need a license, meaning you've passed a test to show that you know what you're talking about and forked over $300.

Some libertarians have decried the new rule as an infringement of your right to prattle on about the Founders, whether or not you know squat about them. But Tim Burke, a Swarthmore historian, raised some larger historiographic questions on Cliopatria, a group blog that's part of the History News Network:

[T]he problem with the proposed regulation in Philadelphia is not just the question of what kind of standard the city will end up establishing. It is also that the city is going to try to regulate fabulisms and retellings out of existence, to be a positivist nanny. I trust in the tumultuous processes by which stories about the past come into being, and through which stories about the past are evaluated by audiences (including tourists). Sure, I don't expect that the patter of your average tour guide in Philadelphia would pass peer review for publication in The Journal of American History, but that's not what we ask of stories told and retold in a horse-drawn buggy bumping over the cobbled streets around Independence Hall.

It takes effort, he notes, to get budding Swarthmore historians to realize that "how the past is known and imagined, told and retold, is something to understand and think about, not simply correct or repair," and Philadelphia's new rule works precisely against that principle.

Boston has no such licensing system, so I asked Cheryl Tobey, a board member of the Greater Boston Tour Guide Association, what she thought of Philadelphia's approach. "Would I like to see licensing? Absolutely," she said -- so long as, Tobey stressed, it involved having to prove knowledge rather than simply forking money over to the city for a piece of paper. "You see people from out of state come in and they don't know what they're doing, or people in costumes, actors, who don't know their historical knowledge." Visitors to Boston feel ripped off and tourism suffers.

The most ludicrous example she's seen of a guide faking his way through a tour? One group was "going by the duckling statues in the Public Garden," Tobey recalls. "The guide said, 'This was a gift to the people of Boston by Raisa Gorbachev and Barbara Bush -- who went to college together.'" Most of the audience murmured appreciatively. Tobey, unwilling to let that fabulism pass by into the tumultuous world of competing historical narratives, told a few people within earshot that they were being had.