MUSINGS ON HISTORY AND MUSEUMS:In No Particular Order Steven ConnJust a few thoughts and questions which I hope will be of interest and might stimulatesome conversation or debate.1) It could be argued that we are in the midst of a kind of “golden age.” WhileAmericans have always been accused of having little interest in or appreciation of their own history, now more Americans seem engaged with the past in more ways than ever before. Who among us, after all, would have predicted 20 years ago that an entire cableTV channel would be devoted to history, or that “John Adams” would be “TheThornbirds” of our generation??!! But I wonder how or whether the older historicalinstitutions have a) participated in this fascination with the past; b) whether they have been the beneficiaries of it somehow; c) or have been entirely left behind by the newmedia age.2) Even before the advent of The History Channel, there was an enormous institutionalhistory infrastructure in this country, especially at the local level. One could argue thatthere is now entirely too much of it – too many county historical societies, too manyhistoric house museums, too many road-side markers. Whether or not that’s true at someabstract level, it is certainly true at a financial level: too many places with too littlemoney. It has been relatively easy to start museums, harder to maintain them, verydifficult to close them. Should we think more fully about the life-course of museums sowe can better face the inevitability that some will not make it?3) The State of Ohio, where I teach, once had an exemplary Historical Society. Years of budget cuts have left it a shell of its former self. In addition to its important (and large)archival holdings, the OHS also runs and public museum and all kinds of historical sitesaround the state – from the Serpent Mound site to the Warren Harding House. Clearly, itcan’t do both (in fact, given the state of things, it probably can’t do either) and in thissense the OHS faces the same problem that many other institutions have or will face: howto balance a library/archive/research function with a public museum function. How bestto make such Solomonic decisions?4) Broadly speaking and vastly over-generalizing, history museums take two routes asthey try to convey knowledge about the past the public: objects and places. Often theseare combined, but it seems to me that increasingly history museums rely less and less onthe use of objects and more on more the use of places – real and created – to give visitorsan “experience” of the past. Since museums traditionally have used objects to conveyknowledge and tell stories I wonder what implication there are in this shift away fromhistorical objects in history museums. (Full disclosure: I am about to publish a book titled “Do Museums Still Need Objects?)5) For nearly a generation, one rap against history museums was that they continued totell an old-fashioned historical narrative – great men doing great things (or in the case of the Warren Harding House, a pretty mediocre man doing largely mediocre things) – inold-fashioned ways, ie: This is the bed where George Washington slept. History
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