Karie Diethorn, AS ’84M, chief curator for the museum branch of Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, remembers the exact moment she knew she wanted to become a historian.

“It was the afternoon in fifth grade when we learned about the Civil War battle of Gettysburg,” she says. “I can still see the dusty sunlight falling across my desk and the crisp fabric of my teacher’s pink-and-white striped dress as she explained the causes of the war and how those causes tore families and towns apart. Suddenly, the people who inhabited the past were real, not characters in a story.”

From that moment on, Diethorn, a graduate of UD’s Museum Studies Program, has been devoted to understanding the past, and her job as curator of the Independence Park’s museum collections has given her ample opportunity to do just that.

Spanning approximately 45 acres, Independence Park has 20 buildings open to the public—including Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were created, and the Liberty Bell Center. The park also interprets events and the lives of the city’s diverse population during the years 1790-1800, when Philadelphia served as the capital of the United States. Another section of the park, where Benjamin Franklin’s home once stood, is dedicated to teaching about Franklin’s life and accomplishments.

As curator, Diethorn is responsible for 3 million 18th-Century objects, including 2.5 million archeological objects and all of the furnishings, textiles, prints, fine arts and 80,000 items continually on display in the Independence Park buildings. She says she considers these historical objects “conduits to the past.”

Her mother and father are physicists with analytical minds and approaches she says rubbed off on her. “My mother and father encouraged me to investigate, pursue, think and read,” she says.

When she was a child, she loved studying ancient Egypt and Greek and Roman mythology.

Diethorn entered UD’s graduate program in American history and museum studies after receiving her bachelor’s degree in history and medieval studies from Penn State University.

Her first position after graduate school was as curatorial intern at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, and then she spent two years as curator of collections for Old Economy Village, the 19th-Century home of the Christian communal group, the Harmony Society.

“I found I wasn’t interested in working where objects were in cases,” she says. “I was more interested where objects were in their original settings.”

When she joined the National Park Service in 1988, she first was made curator at the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in Cambridge and the John F. Kennedy House in Brookline, Mass. The following year, she rejoined the staff at Independence Park as staff curator, becoming chief curator in 1994.

Her life was filled with scholarly pursuits until the winter of 2003, when she became embroiled in a controversy that changed the way she looks at history.

As curator of Independence Park, she was employed by the National Park Service while it was in the process of constructing a new home for the Liberty Bell. The Park Service had intended to put the new structure next to the site of the President’s House, where George Washington and John Adams lived and where Washington maintained slaves in the 1790s when he served as first president of the United States. A controversy flared up when the Park Service decided to preserve the site under the the new Liberty Bell structure, with no mention of the President’s House slaves.

Civic leaders and activists were outraged that such a significant part of black history was to be ignored forever. After months of discussion, protests and public outcry, the Park Service agreed to commemorate the location of the house and the lives of its occupants. Park Service personnel were accused of racism at a public meeting unveiling the plans for the site memorial.

“I had never been called a racist before, and I was horrified. I came away from this community conflict realizing that there are different perceptions of truth,” she says.

“An emotional perception of a place can’t be challenged,” Diethorn says. The Liberty Bell site controversy made her see that there can be more than one interpretation of historical fact, she says. In this case, there were those who felt that the Liberty Bell, the symbol of a people’s right to fight for freedom, shouldn’t be allowed to conceal an artifact of that struggle.

When she’s not on the job, Diethorn collects artifacts from the 1950s or post-World War II.  Her collection includes Fiesta Ware, advertising signs made of tin and “anything clunky” like colored-glass frogs (used for floral arrangements).

Diethorn says, “Bernie Herman [Edward F. and Elizabeth Goodman Rosenberg Professor of Art History] helped me understand that good scholarship includes having a sense of humor.”