MUSINGS ON HISTORY AND MUSEUMS:

In No Particular Order
Steven Conn

Just a few thoughts and questions which I hope will be of interest and might stimulate
some conversation or debate.

1) It could be argued that we are in the midst of a kind of “golden age.” While
Americans 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 cable
TV channel would be devoted to history, or that “John Adams” would be “The
Thornbirds” of our generation??!! But I wonder how or whether the older historical
institutions 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 new
media age.

2) Even before the advent of The History Channel, there was an enormous institutional
history infrastructure in this country, especially at the local level. One could argue that
there is now entirely too much of it – too many county historical societies, too many
historic house museums, too many road-side markers. Whether or not that’s true at some
abstract level, it is certainly true at a financial level: too many places with too little
money. It has been relatively easy to start museums, harder to maintain them, very
difficult to close them. Should we think more fully about the life-course of museums so
we 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 sites
around the state – from the Serpent Mound site to the Warren Harding House. Clearly, it
can’t do both (in fact, given the state of things, it probably can’t do either) and in this
sense the OHS faces the same problem that many other institutions have or will face: how
to balance a library/archive/research function with a public museum function. How best
to make such Solomonic decisions?

4) Broadly speaking and vastly over-generalizing, history museums take two routes as
they try to convey knowledge about the past the public: objects and places. Often these
are combined, but it seems to me that increasingly history museums rely less and less on
the use of objects and more on more the use of places – real and created – to give visitors
an “experience” of the past. Since museums traditionally have used objects to convey
knowledge and tell stories I wonder what implication there are in this shift away from
historical 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 to
tell 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) – in
old-fashioned ways, ie: This is the bed where George Washington slept. History
museums seemed indifferent or hostile to the social history of the 1960s and 1970s
(though in fairness I suspect there was less conspiracy and more inertia here since
changing exhibits, interpretations etc etcis expensive and time-consuming and many
places simply didn’t have the resources). In any event, that has surely changed. Not only
do older museums incorporate – or attempt to – “bottom up” social history, but whole
new institutions have been built upon the very premise of telling history this way. But
this had led to an interesting dilemma: We are now comfortable telling the story of
history’s “victims” (Native Americans, slaves etc). But largely absent in these (largely)
celebratory displays is much specific discussion of history’s victimizers. Do we need to
include that, and if so how to do that?

6) Likewise, at some level almost all museums are in fact historical projects: the history
of science; natural history; the history of art etc. To what extent has newer historiography
shaped what goes on in those museums? Should it? What kind of synergies might be
created if historians/history museums had more interaction with natural history or art
museums?

6a) And while I’m at it, academic art historians regularly make use of art museums for
teaching and research; academic historians rarely make use of museums (at least not the
ones I know). Why is this and what can be done about it?

7) Much has been written about the relationship between history and memory; our analog
might be the relationship between history museums and memorials. It strikes me that
several of the new “history” museums really serve the role that memorials used to: to
ensure that we don’t forget. But I wonder what happens to a culture whose landscape is
increasingly cluttered with this institutions designed to make sure we never forget. Are
we creating encumbrances for the future? Isn’t there a value, collectively, in forgetting?