Misrepresentations of Historybyisabelengel

Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories: Narrating the Past for the Present and Future, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2024. , 2024

Museums and historical sites are created to inform the public about our national heritage, yet the contributions of people of color are often excluded from these narratives. Even when they are included, the researchers found that students' understanding and interpretations are often different based on the racial identity of the viewer. This study should lead to a reexamination of the mechanisms for content delivery in historical sites and museums and serve as a caution for historians and history teachers. If we ignore this racialized difference and refuse to acknowledge diversity in students' racialized historical understanding, minority students' voices are excluded and majority students become miseducated about the past. This study investigated a student trip to southern Indiana where students experienced historical sites from the Underground Railroad and racial segregation. During the trip, students connected to the slave experience in different ways, reported different understandings of the history of segregation, and disrupted or reifyed the progressive (slavery to segregation to civil rights) narrative of American history. This article builds on the work on racialized historical understanding in classrooms by Epstein (Soc Edu 61:28-31, 1997; Curric Inq 28(4):397-423, 1998; Theory Pract 40(1):42-47, 2001) and moves the conversation from the classroom to the public spaces that not only tell our history but show it as well.

Unpublished Dissertation, 2018

In addition to formal education and the media, people learn about different cultures, people, animals, plants, technology, art, and history through museums. Museums provide additional context to art and artifacts through labels and exhibition design. As a result, there is potential to combat or perpetuate stereotypes of different people. The history of mainstream museums is well known and the literature relating to the history of Tribal museums is growing. However, this research has yet to be applied at mound site museums. Many mound sites have museums or interpretive centers to interpret the archaeology of pre-contact Native Americans. This research explores today’s museum visitors beliefs in the Mound Builder myth and similar stereotypes of Native Americans; to ascertain whether their preconceptions changed after a visit through a museum; and finally, to determine if visitors understand that cultures adapt and change (not just disappear or vanish), as ways of understanding descendant groups of mound building Native Americans. This research discusses the history of museums, mound sites, and stereotypes of Native Americans; and how these histories affect museum exhibitions and impact visitor learning. Visitor surveys were conducted at four museums: the Interpretive Center at Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, the Osage Nation Museum, the Chickasaw Cultural Center, and the C.H. Nash Museum at Chucalissa. Results indicated that visitor preconceptions can change and visitors do learn after going through a museum once; however, not everyone’s preconceptions change and some do not learn from the museum. The research is important since it relates to visitor learning at museums, provides a foundation for further research into mound site museums and their impact on the public, and encourages museum professionals to reflect carefully on their presentations of Native Americans.

International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 2009

Benedict Anderson (1983) noted famously that all communities beyond the family are imagined. How, then, do we identify with these communities—becoming, for example, Americans rather than Turks or Britons? My current research examines the nationhood narrative as rhetorical identification , the symbolic means by which we persuade others that we share common substance. Greg Clark (2004) argues that the rhetorical materials of a national place can transform individual experiences into shared, communal truth. I extend Clark's insight by examining national museums, those collections of " treasures " that are ordered into a particular narrative of display. Museums are prime locations for studying the identification Clark describes, and each nation's museum handles this rhetorical process differently. Its textual, architectural, virtual, and visual rhetorics create a nationhood narrative that reflects the collective identity, projects that identity to outsiders, and invites members of the " imagined community " to identify themselves with the values and history represented in the museum. Often the story is incomplete, and so alternative museums fill in the varying gaps left by the national museum. To demonstrate these ideas, I first lay out briefly the overarching theories that frame the argument of museums as rhetorical locations of national identity formation, then I describe a particular feature of the American story—its relation to the Native American story—as it is displayed in both national and alternative museums, and finally I end with a brief application of these national ideas to a new, local museum that is growing in importance.

Museums and Migration, 2020

In this article I explore how museums representing the immigrant past in the States can combat racism in times of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Surveying the most influential U.S. museums and World’s Fairs at the turn of the twentieth century, this study traces the rise and professionalization of museum anthropology during the period now referred to as the Golden Age of American Anthropology, 1875-1925. Specifically, this work examines the lives and contributions of the leading anthropologists and Native collaborators employed at these museums, and charts how these individuals explained, enriched, and complicated the public’s understanding of Native American cultures. Confronting the notion of anthropologists as either “good” or “bad,” this study shows that the reality on the ground was much messier and more nuanced. Further, by an in-depth examination of the lives of a host of Native collaborators who chose to work with anthropologists in documenting the tangible and intangible cultural heritage materials of Native American communities, this study complicates the idea that anthropologists were the sole creators of representations of American Indians prevalent in museum exhibitions, lectures, and publications. In this way, this work attempts to return some of the humanity and individuality to many of the forgotten players in American anthropology’s early years, while also revealing some of the power dynamics involved. Regardless of their sympathy for the hardships suffered by Native American communities, nearly all of the anthropologists portrayed herein ascribed to the common belief that American Indians were a vanishing people, doomed to assimilate to American society or disappear. At the same time, anthropologists also depicted American Indians as existing in an ethnographic present, frozen in time, and thus beyond the bounds of modern society. This study argues that due in part to such anthropological portrayals in museums and World’s Fairs, large numbers of the mainstream public chose to willfully ignore the suffering and marginalization of Native Americans as the federal government corralled them onto reservations, compelled them to attend Indian Boarding Schools, and forced them to abandon their cultures.

Museum Anthropology, 2010

The core argument of this opinion is that in museums focused on Native Americans, staff members must abandon colonial and stereotypic views about Native Americans. They also must challenge notions commonly held by Indians and non-Indians that only Indians can provide authentic information about Indians. Museums can accomplish this by presenting cultural realities that are multithreaded, multivocal, and complicated.

The Urban Review, 2016

Museums and historical sites are created to inform the public about our national heritage, yet the contributions of people of color are often excluded from these narratives. Even when they are included, the researchers found that students' understanding and interpretations are often different based on the racial identity of the viewer. This study should lead to a reexamination of the mechanisms for content delivery in historical sites and museums and serve as a caution for historians and history teachers. If we ignore this racialized difference and refuse to acknowledge diversity in students' racialized historical understanding, minority students' voices are excluded and majority students become miseducated about the past. This study investigated a student trip to southern Indiana where students experienced historical sites from the Underground Railroad and racial segregation. During the trip, students connected to the slave experience in different ways, reported different understandings of the history of segregation, and disrupted or reifyed the progressive (slavery to segregation to civil rights) narrative of American history. This article builds on the work on racialized historical understanding in classrooms by

GeoHumanities, 2018

Perpetuating the Architecture of Separation: An Analysis of the Presentation of History and the Past at the Riversdale House Museum in Riverdale Park, Maryland, 2019

Riversdale House Museum is one of many historic houses in the United States with difficult histories, which curators avoid rather than confront. This evasive tactic goes against recent developments in museological method and theory that advocate for social justice as one of a museum’s primary goals. Exhibits at Riversdale focus on architectural restoration and avoid an overt discussion of many aspects of history unrelated to aesthetics. The presentation of history at this site, in the context of a diverse community, is also at odds with recently developed interpretation methods at historic houses that emphasize connection with a museum’s community and audience. This paper discusses ways that historic sites avoid difficult histories and the nature of the separations that exhibits create. In addition, this paper delves into Riversdale’s exhibitry and examines the presentation of history by curators at the site. The results of this study critique historic interpretation at Riversdale House Museum and make recommendations to foster multivocality and include the voices of slaves and servants.