Download or read book U S Museum Histories and the Politics of Interpretation written by Laura Schiavo and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: U.S. Museum Histories and the Politics of Interpretation is the first collection to examine the history of museums in the United States through the lens of the political and ideological underpinnings at the heart of exhibitions, collecting, and programming. Including contributions from historians, art historians, anthropologists, academics, and museum professionals, the book argues that museums have always been embedded in the politics and culture of their time – whether that means a reification of hegemonic notions of race, gender, and progress or a challenge to those normative structures. Contributions probe the political nature of collection and interpretation as concept and practice, and museum work as both reflective of and contributing to the politics and circulation of power in different historical moments. As a whole, the volume provides detailed readings of museums that demonstrate the ways in which these trusted cultural institutions have intervened in shifting concepts of nation, community, indigeneity, race, citizenship, inclusion, identity, localism, and memory. U.S. Museum Histories and the Politics of Interpretation makes arguments about the historically and politically rooted nature of cultural production in museums that apply to institutions across the globe. It is essential reading for students and scholars of museum studies, public history, cultural history, art history, and memory.
Download or read book Museums and Migration written by Laurence Gourievidis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent decades have seen migration history and issues increasingly featured in museums. Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration. It presents the latest innovative research from academics and museum practitioners and offers a comparative perspective on a global scale bringing to light geo- and socio-political specificities. It includes an extensive range of international contributions from Europe, Asia, South America as well as settler societies such as Canada and Australia. Museums and Migration charts and enlarges the developing body of research which concentrates on the analysis of the representation of migration in relation to the changing character of museums within society, examining their civic role and their function as key public arenas within civil society. It also aims to inform debates focusing on the way museums interact with processes of political and societal changes, and examining their agency and relationship to identity construction, community involvement, policy positions and discourses, but also ethics and moralities.
Download or read book History Museums in the United States written by Warren Leon and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every year 100 million visitor's tour historic houses and re-created villages, examine museum artifacts, and walk through battlefields. But what do they learn? What version of the past are history museums offering to the public? And how well do these institutions reflect the latest historical scholarship? Fifteen scholars and museum staff members here provide the first critical assessment of American history museums, a vital arena for shaping popular historical consciousness. They consider the form and content of exhibits, ranging from Gettysburg to Disney World. They also examine the social and political contexts on which museums operate.
Download or read book Exhibiting Cultures written by Ivan Karp and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2012-01-11 with total page 481 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debating the practices of museums, galleries, and festivals, Exhibiting Cultures probes the often politically charged relationships among aesthetics, contexts, and implicit assumptions that govern how art and artifacts are displayed and understood. The contributors—museum directors, curators, and scholars in art history, folklore, history, and anthropology—represent a variety of stances on the role of museums and their function as intermediaries between the makers of art or artifacts and the eventual viewers.
Download or read book Museum Politics written by Timothy W. Luke and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites written by Julia Rose and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-05-02 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites is framed by educational psychoanalytic theory and positions museum workers, public historians, and museum visitors as learners. Through this lens, museum workers and public historians can develop compelling and ethical representations of historical individuals, communities, and populations who have suffered. It includes various examples of difficult knowledge, detailed examples of specific interpretation methods, and will give readers an in-depth explanation of the psychoanalytic educational theories behind the methodologies. Audiences can more responsibly and productively engage in learning histories of oppression and trauma when they are in measured and sensitive museum learning environments and public history venues. To learn more, check out the website here: http://interpretingdifficulthistory.com/
Download or read book Domesticating History written by Patricia West and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celebrating the lives of famous men and women, historic house museums showcase restored rooms and period furnishings, and portray in detail their former occupants' daily lives. But behind the gilded molding and curtain brocade lie the largely unknown, politically charged stories of how the homes were first established as museums. Focusing on George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, and the Booker T. Washington National Monument, Patricia West shows how historic houses reflect less the lives and times of their famous inhabitants than the political pressures of the eras during which they were transformed into museums.
Download or read book Radical History and the Politics of Art written by Gabriel Rockhill and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders. Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.
Download or read book Who Owns America s Past written by Robert C. Post and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When preserving our history, what do we choose to value, why, and who decides? Honorable Mention for the National Council on Public History Book Award of the National Council on Public History In 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest such complex in the world, the Smithsonian cares for millions of objects and has displayed everything from George Washington's sword to moon rocks to Dorothy’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Why did this particular object arouse such controversy? From an insider’s perspective, Robert C. Post’s Who Owns America’s Past? offers insight into the politics of display and the interpretation of history. Never before has a book about the Smithsonian detailed the recent and dramatic shift from collection-driven shows, with artifacts meant to speak for themselves, to concept-driven exhibitions, in which objects aim to tell a story, displayed like illustrations in a book. Even more recently, the trend is to show artifacts along with props, sound effects, and interactive elements in order to create an immersive environment. Rather than looking at history, visitors are invited to experience it. Who Owns America’s Past? examines the different ways that the Smithsonian’s exhibitions have been conceived and designed—whether to educate visitors, celebrate an important historical moment, or satisfy donor demands or partisan agendas. Combining information from hitherto-untapped archival sources, extensive interviews, a thorough review of the secondary literature, and considerable personal experience, Post gives the reader a behind-the-scenes view of disputes among curators, academics, and stakeholders that were sometimes private and at other times burst into headline news.
Download or read book Activist Biology written by Regina Horta Duarte and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-11-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Activist Biology is the story of a group of biologists at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro who joined the drive to renew the Brazilian nation, claiming as their weapon the voice of their fledgling field. It offers a portrait of science as a creative and transformative pathway. This book will intrigue anyone fascinated by environmental history and Latin American political and social life in the 1920s and 1930s.
Download or read book Museums and Communities written by Ivan Karp and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contributors to this volume examine and illustrate struggles and collaborations among museums, festivals, tourism, and historic preservation projects and the communities they represent and serve. Essays include the role of museums in civil society, the history of African-American collections, and experiments with museum-community dialogue about the design of a multicultural society.
Download or read book Interpreting American Military History at Museums and Historic Sites written by Marc K. Blackburn and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Across the country, museums and historic sites welcome visitors into a world long gone but fundamental to America today. Military history in particular is etched into our country’s culture and the public’s imagination. The trouble, though, for museums and historical sites lies in continuing to make it both accessible and relevant to today’s audiences. Through Interpreting American Military History at Museums and Historic Sites, Marc K. Blackburn tackles the difficult task of helping those institutions charged with the care of sites, collections and stories that relate to our past relatable while still maintaining the dignity and reverence of their rich history. Looking at the various components of American military history such as battles and famous figures, Blackburn provides alternatives to the traditional museum experience. The 21st century is a culmination of the past and it is more important than ever to remember and learn from the triumphs and failures, and this guide provides and explains those strategies for making our stories and collections relevant to modern audiences. This books acts as a primer for those unfamiliar with academic trends of the last forty years. Historiography of American military history, like that of other sub-fields, shifts as new information surfaces or as perspectives change. Blackburn modernizes this area through new interpretative methods, as well as through case studies of museums and historic sites that have created programs, interpretive media, outreach strategies, and mission goals updated to meet the needs of today’s patrons. Armed with these strategies, historic institutions will have the foundation to provide compelling, relevant, and engaging experiences for the 21st century audience.
Download or read book Museum Bodies written by Dr Helen Rees Leahy and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012-11-01 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Bodies provides an account of how museums have staged, prescribed and accommodated a repertoire of bodily practices, from their emergence in the eighteenth century to the present day. As long as museums have existed, their visitors have been scrutinised, both formally and informally, and their behaviour calibrated as a register of cognitive receptivity and cultural competence. Yet there has been little sustained theoretical or practical attention given to the visitors' embodied encounter with the museum. In Museum Bodies Helen Rees Leahy discusses the politics and practice of visitor studies, and the differentiation and exclusion of certain bodies on the basis of, for example, age, gender, educational attainment, ethnicity and disability. At a time when museums are more than ever concerned with size, demographic mix and the diversity of their audiences, as well as with the ways in which visitors engage with and respond to institutional space and content, this wide-ranging study of visitors' embodied experience of the museum is long overdue.
Download or read book Museum Activism written by Robert R. Janes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only a decade ago, the notion that museums, galleries and heritage organisations might engage in activist practice, with explicit intent to act upon inequalities, injustices and environmental crises, was met with scepticism and often derision. Seeking to purposefully bring about social change was viewed by many within and beyond the museum community as inappropriately political and antithetical to fundamental professional values. Today, although the idea remains controversial, the way we think about the roles and responsibilities of museums as knowledge based, social institutions is changing. Museum Activism examines the increasing significance of this activist trend in thinking and practice. At this crucial time in the evolution of museum thinking and practice, this ground-breaking volume brings together more than fifty contributors working across six continents to explore, analyse and critically reflect upon the museum’s relationship to activism. Including contributions from practitioners, artists, activists and researchers, this wide-ranging examination of new and divergent expressions of the inherent power of museums as forces for good, and as activists in civil society, aims to encourage further experimentation and enrich the debate in this nascent and uncertain field of museum practice. Museum Activism elucidates the largely untapped potential for museums as key intellectual and civic resources to address inequalities, injustice and environmental challenges. This makes the book essential reading for scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will be a source of inspiration to museum practitioners and museum leaders around the globe.
Download or read book Defining Memory written by Amy K. Levin and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2007-03-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining Memory uses case studies of exhibits from around the country to examine how local museums, defined as museums whose collections are local in scope or whose audiences are primarily local, have both shaped and been shaped by evolving community values and sense of history. Levin and her contributors argue that these small institutions play a key role in defining America's self-identity and should be studied as seriously as more national institutions like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Download or read book Where Are the Workers written by Robert Forrant and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-06-28 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The labor movement in the United States is a bulwark of democracy and a driving force for social and economic equality. Yet its stories remain largely unknown to Americans. Robert Forrant and Mary Anne Trasciatti edit a collection of essays focused on nationwide efforts to propel the history of labor and working people into mainstream narratives of US history. In Part One, the contributors concentrate on ways to collect and interpret worker-oriented history for public consumption. Part Two moves from National Park sites to murals to examine the writing and visual representation of labor history. Together, the essayists explore how place-based labor history initiatives promote understanding of past struggles, create awareness of present challenges, and support efforts to build power, expand democracy, and achieve justice for working people. A wide-ranging blueprint for change, Where Are the Workers? shows how working-class perspectives can expand our historical memory and inform and inspire contemporary activism. Contributors: Jim Beauchesne, Rebekah Bryer, Rebecca Bush, Conor Casey, Rachel Donaldson, Kathleen Flynn, Elijah Gaddis, Susan Grabski, Amanda Kay Gustin, Karen Lane, Rob Linné, Erik Loomis, Tom MacMillan, Lou Martin, Scott McLaughlin, Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Karen Sieber, and Katrina Windon
Download or read book Gender and the Politics of History written by Joan Wallach Scott and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interrogation of the uses of gender as a tool for cultural and historical analysis. The revised edition reassesses the book's fundamental topic: the category of gender. In arguing that gender no longer serves to destabilize our understanding of sexual difference, the new preface and new chapter open a critical dialogue with the original book. From publisher description.
