History museums, like the National Museum of American History and Colonial Williamsburg, attract millions of visitors each year. Lesser known institutions such as the California Afro-American Museum and the Oneida Historical Society also draw substantial audiences. These museum experiences are largely driven by exhibitions, which present the past to their visitors and provide a richness of content that cannot be matched by scholarly monographs or popular books. As such, these exhibitions serve a distinct function in our society and must be critically examined and assessed in ways that are separate from the ancillary products such as catalogues, videotapes, public programs, and living history presentations.
An important part of this critical evaluation is the examination of the intellectual underpinnings of these exhibitions. How do they reflect and refract the scholarly debates on their subject? Do they break new ground? Do they succeed in communicating their claims to a wide audience? This column will take up these questions in a series of reviews of histolircal exhibits.
The histolircal is an exhibition that uses art, objects, photographs, and narratives to explore a specific period in history. These exhibits often challenge traditional notions of what constitutes historical evidence. While some historians are skeptical of the histolircal, others argue that it offers a valuable tool for interpreting the past.
This exhibition examines the social, cultural, and political changes that shaped Florida in the 1920s. Visitors will discover the fashion, music, architecture, and social movements that characterized this decade.
While the museum’s permanent collections have been well documented in catalogs, many of the most significant historical exhibitions are temporary and travel to other venues. These traveling exhibitions can introduce an entirely new audience to important ideas and events in history, while providing an opportunity for the museum to expand its scholarly reach.
In addition, traveling exhibitions can be used to test the validity of a museum’s research. They can also help to generate interest in a particular topic and foster collaboration between academic scholars and museum professionals.
Despite these potential benefits, there are some limitations to reviewing history exhibitions. Unlike a scholarly monograph, exhibitions have a limited life and cannot be easily revisited. While exhibition review is becoming more common in scholarly journals, it is still rare for these reviews to be shared with museum professionals. This column aims to bridge this gap by publishing joint exhibition reviews written by both an academic and a museum professional. By sharing these reviews, this column will contribute to the growing body of scholarship on history exhibitions and provide a forum for dialogue between academics and museum professionals. These exchanges will hopefully encourage greater recognition of the vital contribution that history exhibitions make to our understanding of the past. Each review will examine the intellectual underpinnings of the exhibition, as well as how it is conveyed to its visitor. This will be done through a careful analysis of the exhibits’ claim and how they are supported by the research that supports it.