History Museums in the United States

History Museums in the United States PDF Author: Warren Leon
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252060649
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
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.

History Museums in the United States

History Museums in the United States PDF Author: Warren Leon
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252060649
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 364

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Living History Museums

Living History Museums PDF Author: Scott Magelssen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0810858657
Category : Historic sites
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance examines the performance techniques of Living History Museums, cultural institutions that merge historical exhibits with costumed live performance. Institutions such as Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg are analyzed from a theatrical perspective, offering a new genealogy of living museum performance.

Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom

Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom PDF Author: Linda Young
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442239778
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Historic House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History addresses the phenomenon of historic houses as a distinct species of museum. Everyone understands the special nature of an art museum, a national museum, or a science museum, but “house museum” nearly always requires clarification. In the United States the term is almost synonymous with historic preservation; in the United Kingdom, it is simply unfamiliar, the very idea being conflated with stately homes and the National Trust. By analyzing the motivation of the founders, and subsequent keepers, of house museums, Linda Young identifies a typology that casts light on what house museums were intended to represent and their significance (or lack thereof) today. This book examines: • heroes’ houses: once inhabited by great persons (e.g., Shakespeare’s birthplace, Washington’s Mount Vernon); • artwork houses: national identity as specially visible in house design, style, and technique (e.g., Frank Lloyd Wright houses, Modernist houses); • collectors’ houses: a microcosm of collecting in situ domesticu, subsequently presented to the nation as the exemplars of taste (e.g., Sir John Soane’s Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum); • English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained thanks to primogeniture but threatened with redundancy and rescued as museums to be touted as the peak of English national culture; English country houses: the palaces of the aristocracy, maintained for centuries thanks to primogeniture but threatened by redundancy and strangely rescued as museums, now touted as the peak of English national culture; • Everyman/woman’s social history houses: the modern, demotic response to elite houses, presented as social history but tinged with generic ancestor veneration (e.g., tenement house museums in Glasgow and New York).

The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way

The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way PDF Author: Colin Davey
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823287076
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
Tells the story of the building of the American Museum of Natural History and Hayden Planetarium, a story of history, politics, science, and exploration, including the roles of American presidents, New York power brokers, museum presidents, planetarium directors, polar and African explorers, and German rocket scientists. The American Museum of Natural History is one of New York City’s most beloved institutions, and one of the largest, most celebrated museums in the world. Since 1869, generations of New Yorkers and tourists of all ages have been educated and entertained here. Located across from Central Park, the sprawling structure, spanning four city blocks, is a fascinating conglomeration of many buildings of diverse architectural styles built over a period of 150 years. The first book to tell the history of the museum from the point of view of these buildings, including the planned Gilder Center, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way contextualizes them within New York and American history and the history of science. Part II, “The Heavens in the Attic,” is the first detailed history of the Hayden Planetarium, from the museum’s earliest astronomy exhibits, to Clyde Fisher and the original planetarium, to Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and it features a photographic tour through the original Hayden Planetarium. Author Colin Davey spent much of his childhood literally and figuratively lost in the museum’s labyrinthine hallways. The museum grew in fits and starts according to the vicissitudes of backroom deals, personal agendas, two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War. Chronicling its evolution―from the selection of a desolate, rocky, hilly, swampy site, known as Manhattan Square to the present day―the book includes some of the most important and colorful characters in the city’s history, including the notoriously corrupt and powerful “Boss” Tweed, “Father of New York City” Andrew Haswell Green, and twentieth-century powerbroker and master builder Robert Moses; museum presidents Morris K. Jesup, Henry Fairfield Osborn, and Ellen Futter; and American presidents, polar and African explorers, dinosaur hunters, and German rocket scientists. Richly illustrated with period photos, The American Museum of Natural History and How It Got That Way is based on deep archival research and interviews.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

National Museum of African American History and Culture PDF Author: Nat'l Museum African American Hist/Cult
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
ISBN: 158834570X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 66

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Book Description
This souvenir book showcases some of the most influential and important treasures of the National Museum of African American History and Culture's collections. These include a hymn book owned by Harriet Tubman; ankle shackles used to restrain enslaved people on ships during the Middle Passage; a dress that Rosa Parks was making shortly before she was arrested; a vintage, open-cockpit Tuskegee Airmen trainer plane; Muhammad Ali's headgear; an 1835 Bill of Sale enslaving a young girl named Polly; and Chuck Berry's Cadillac. These objects tell us the full story of African American history, of triumphs and tragedies and highs and lows. This book, like the museum it represents, uses artifacts of African American history and culture as a lens into what it means to be an American.

Teaching History with Museums

Teaching History with Museums PDF Author: Alan S. Marcus
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136487182
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Teaching History with Museums provides an introduction and overview of the rich pedagogical power of museums. In this comprehensive textbook, the authors show how museums offer a sophisticated understanding of the past and develop habits of mind in ways that are not easily duplicated in the classroom. Using engaging cases to illustrate accomplished history teaching through museum visits, this text provides pre- and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and museum educators with ideas for successful visits to artifact and display-based museums, historic forts, living history museums, memorials, monuments, and other heritage sites. Each case is constructed to be adapted and tailored in ways that will be applicable to any classroom and encourage students to think deeply about museums as historical accounts and interpretations to be examined, questioned, and discussed.

Museums in Motion

Museums in Motion PDF Author: Edward Porter Alexander
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
ISBN: 9780759105096
Category : Museums
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
In 1979, Edward P. Alexander's Museums in Motion was hailed as a much-needed addition to the museum literature. In combining the history of museums since the eighteenth century with a detailed examination of the function of museums and museum workers in modern society, it served as an essential resource for those seeking to enter to the museum profession and for established professionals looking for an expanded understanding of their own discipline. Now, Mary Alexander has produced a newly revised edition of the classic text, bringing it the twenty-first century with coverage of emerging trends, resources, and challenges. New material also includes a discussion of the children's museum as a distinct type of institution and an exploration of the role computers play in both outreach and traditional in-person visits.

The Future of Natural History Museums

The Future of Natural History Museums PDF Author: Eric Dorfman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315531879
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Natural history museums are changing, both because of their own internal development and in response to changes in context. Historically, the aim of collecting from nature was to develop encyclopedic assemblages to satisfy human curiosity and build a basis for taxonomic information. Today, with global biodiversity in rapid decline, there are new reasons to build and maintain collections, while audiences are more diverse, numerous, and technically savvy. Institutions must learn to embrace new technology while retaining the authenticity of their stories and the value placed on their objects. The Future of Natural History Museums begins to develop a cohesive discourse that balances the disparate issues that our institutions will face over the next decades. It disassembles the topic into various key elements and, through commentary and synthesis, explores a cohesive picture of the trajectory of the natural history museum sector. This book contributes to the study of collections, teaching and learning, ethics, and running non-profit businesses and will be of interest to museum and heritage professionals and academics and senior students in Biological Sciences and Museum Studies.

Riches, Rivals & Radicals

Riches, Rivals & Radicals PDF Author: Marjorie Schwarzer
Publisher: American Alliance of Museums
ISBN:
Category : Museums
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"As author Marjorie Schwarzer tells us, a look at the past century of America's museums reveals a captivating if slightly imperfect real-life masterpiece, flowing with a vibrant palette of wealth and ambition, accented by bold patches of jealousy, generosity and rivalry, artfully woven together into an elegant tapestry of passion, mystery and intrigue. During the past century, U.S. museums have transformed themselves into cultural landmarks of our society; institutions that educate, inspire, and lead their communities. The story of that transformation is one that mirrors the history of the nation itself. It includes many notable, and some notorious, characters. And it involves some of history's most prominent American families: Getty, Rockefeller, Ford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie and many others. Published by the American Association of Museums to commemorate the "Year of the Museum" in 2006 and mark AAM's Centennial, Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America traces the rise of the American museum over the past century. "The history of museums in this country is one of America's greatest stories but it is a story that has never been told in its entirety until now," said Edward H. Able, Jr., President and CEO of the American Association of Museums. "Marjorie Schwarzer has done a superb job of capturing the energy, excitement and significance of 100 years of museums; her book reminds us all just how much museums matter in our lives, and how valuable museums will always be in our culture." -- Publisher.

Natural History Museums of the United States and Canada

Natural History Museums of the United States and Canada PDF Author: Frederick J. H. Merrill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Natural history museums
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description