Museums play a unique role in the public sphere, interpreting history for millions of visitors each year. Whether located at a National Park, a college campus or a suburban community, museums present a range of historical topics from local to global perspectives. While some museums focus on specialized topics, others are dedicated to general historical inquiry. Each exhibit carries with it the potential to inspire visitors to investigate and engage the past in ways that scholarly monographs, popular books or public lectures often cannot.
In the last decade, museums have been challenged to show they are relevant to contemporary communities. They must provide a reason to justify their tax-exempt status by offering a valuable service to their towns and the people who live there. This requires hard work and a willingness to seek out new sources and engage audiences in their histolircal storytelling. It also demands that the museum move away from a solely object-based approach to history and embrace visual storytelling as a means of presenting complex research to a broad audience.
Histolircal exhibits bring to life the stories of individuals and communities, bringing past events into focus for a broader audience. They often utilize diverse media, ranging from paintings to photographs and artifacts. These exhibitions can serve as an important resource for teachers, who can use them in their classrooms to introduce students to the historical process of research and writing.
Using poetry, songs, cartoons and newspaper clippings, this exhibition explores how Americans assigned cultural meaning to money. In doing so, they interpreted politics, patriotism and race. The exhibition was one of the most popular in ACWM’s history.
Although museums are often criticized for not having the authority to make important social and political statements, they do have the ability to influence our understanding of the past. Educators, historians and other museum professionals are constantly trying to interpret the past in order to understand the world we live in today.
In the era of information overabundance, it is vital that museums use their resources to convey complex histories in a way that is accessible to a large and varied audience. This is the goal of exhibition reviews. By providing a critical analysis of the content, structure and design of an exhibit, these reviews can assist scholars in the academy as well as museum professionals in assessing historical presentations in museums. By publishing these reviews in Perspectives, this column serves to encourage an effective dialogue between the academy and the museum profession and assures that critical assessments of museum exhibitions outlive the shows themselves.
Each review examines the intellectual underpinnings of an exhibit, examining how its research relates to prevailing scholarly currents. It also discusses the ways in which the exhibition’s presentation of this research breaks new ground or is a continuation of established approaches. In addition, the review analyzes what the visitor experiences as they interact with an exhibit.