Museums and the public

 

When I was a child, my parents took my siblings and I to a lot of museums and even in Alaska where I grew up, there were many. I never imagined that museums would become a focus later in life when I decided to become a historian, though as a child, museums were not on the top of the list. The wonderful thing about museums is that they, for the most part, center much more on experience rather than theory. And that is not only a good thing for children, but a good thing for adults as well. Particularly since children are so visual. And some children grow up favoring and understanding the world through the visual aspect of their sensory learning.   

I am often amazed having known nothing about public history (aside from many museums) and having no previous familiarity with it, to learn how truly encompassing it is. It is the sort of informative yet tangible niche I resonate with. Like many people, I tend to think in pictures and often a picture will reach me on a cognitive level when hours of lectures fail to do so. And when people go to a museum, of course, everything they see is visual, and history can take on a new meaning. There might be a little theory, but it is mostly experiential.  

Theory is of course necessary for so many things, and yet in a lot of fields, in many respects, the experience does not begin until the person in question has started the job they went to school for, and the experience, while aided by the theory they learned, is often another ball of wax because it is often a dissimilar counterpart of the actual experience. My mother, unlike myself, has a real scholar’s mind.  She decided to become a nurse at 40 and I embarked on becoming a historian at 41. She said that her experience was that after completing her RN, the actual experience of being a nurse was the real challenge. The theory had prepared her in an informational sense, but much less in the experiential sense.  Theory, by itself, without the experience museums often provide (or good storytelling) can kill history.  

I cannot count the number of times I heard someone say that history was boring. The most common complaint was that the multitude of names and dates and places was a little boggling. I do not consider myself to be a professional when it comes to storytelling, but a good story is so often at the heart of learning and retention, or a tool whereby a concept or situation is understood and appreciated by people to whom the accompanying theory is, in some cases, like salt and pepper on old tv screens. And in my mind’s eye I can see myself as a museum curator helping to oversee the undertaking of an exhibition of some sort. And not to make an exhibition a clone of a child’s storybook, but in the manner and mode of writing, to engage and interest whomever the museum goers or stakeholders are.  

 I do not plan on being a teacher, but if I were, being a good storyteller while keeping the facts the facts would be my preferred and primary mode of learning and retention. Museums and the public represent a mode of preserving history that in some cases bypasses the academic historian. An academic historian in most cases cannot interface with the public since long words like historiography and familiar concepts like historical methods (which are interesting in their own way) might cause the public to begin wondering what is going to be on TV or netflix later in the day. I found the article by Thomas woods to be very interesting because in one specific quote he hit the nail on the head, and when he did so, I was saying to myself, “how right he is!”  

That quote has produced this paper. “The historian James Miller notes, “The mistake most of us academics make is starting with theory rather than experience...A better approach would be to get the people’s attention using a more experience-based approach and then building on that base to introduce analytical concepts.” At this point, if people lose interest in analytics, they have at least learned history, which is why the public and museums are a hand in glove fit.  

 

Sources 

1. Woods, Thomas A. “Museums and the Public: Doing History Together.” The Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1111–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/2945116.