0 Score and 7 Years Ago

I'm back! Life has moved fast since my last post. Back in 2012, I started working as the Educator/Assistant Curator at the Schenectady County Historical Society. I was with SCHS for five years before moving to the Arkell Museum in 2017 as the Curator of Education & Public Engagement. In March of this year, I was made the Director of Education & Public Engagement.

On a more personal note, in 2014 I married my wonderful, history loving, exhibit panel reading husband, and last December we welcomed our daughter MiniMuse to our family, which already included two cats and a very exuberant dog. In mid-March, our family relocated to just outside of Kansas City, Kansas for my husband's job. I am still job searching and am introducing MiniMuse to the awesome museums in our new community.

Hubby & MiniMuse checking out a Monet at the Nelson-Atkins

I love getting to hang out with the baby, but I really miss work. So, I thought this would be a good time to dust off the keyboard and get back in the blogging game. My plan is to look at the trends and news impacting our field, and there is certainly plenty of material!

Happy 4th!

Well okay, now its the 5th, but Happy Extended Celebration of American Independence! I worked in the Chandlery yesterday, and it was really interesting seeing how another museum celebrated the day. Mystic Seaport's roleplayers are set in 1876 (one year after Walnut Hill at Living History Farms). While the Farms is 3rd person, not 1st person, it is still fun to get pretty into the day. There is always a parade, in which two years running I got to be a suffragist, a medicine show, a speech, lots of decorations everywhere and of course good food. In Tangen last year we had fried chicken, German style potato salad and a sour cherry pie I made myself. All cooked on a wood stove, of course.

Yesterday at Mystic followed some of the same themes. There was a grand parade, where squad dressed in costumes like Neptune and the Grim Reaper, the actors lugged the giant fire engine around, a band played, some "vets" marched, and though I couldn't see their flag, a group of finely dressed ladies strolled in a dignified manner. My guess is either temperance or suffrage. There was also, of course, the mandatory parade of adorable children, led down the route by my roommate Ginger. I love kids, and I love watching how excited they are to be able to participate in something like a parade. All of this came right by my stoop at the Chandlery, but unfortunately we are very much stationary during the day so I didn't really get the chance to wander around and see what else was happening. According to the schedule my first visitor of the day "borrowed" (isn't that always the way!), there were Civil War reenactors,  a game of croquet on the village green, a picnic, and ice cream making, along with the normally scheduled squad demonstrations. Normally I will try to find a way to interpret the holiday within whatever site I am stationed at, but yesterday was mostly answering questions about the blast gun, baggywrinkle, and oakum. It was a good day, not as busy as the first weekend but not slow either.

One thing I have on my list of big life goals is to visit the other big living history/open air museums and see how they portray the 4th of July. Do we make it one big party with a red white and blue theme, or do we still work to reach out and teach our visitors what that day meant to a particular group in a particular time? I know the roleplayers at Mystic talk all year long about the Centennial celebration in Philadelphia, and what the nation's 100th anniversary meant to them and their neighbors. I would really love to see even more of that incorporated into all of the lh/oa museums, and not just for the roleplayers. But, in the meantime, there is nothing wrong with cherry pie and a good game of hoop and stick!

Emotions

Is it the job of a museum to try to inspire in its visitors particular emotions? I am talking about the step beyond "hey this whaling ship is awesome!" sort of thing.


"The USS Constitution Museum serves as the memory and educational voice of USS CONSTITUTION, by collecting, preserving, and interpreting the stories of "Old Ironsides" and the people associated with her. We seek to create a positive, memorable experience for both children and adults by inspiring within them a love for the freedom that CONSTITUTION symbolizes. We will share CONSTITUTION's contributions with a global audience, and we will strive to be the best museum possible based on scholarship and innovative ways of sharing CONSTITUTION's stories." (emphasis added)


This is, as you can probably tell, the mission statement of the USS Constitution museum. I talked a little bit about the museum a couple of posts ago, but in our follow-up seminar this was something that came up. Some of us were uncomfortable with the phrase I highlighted above, especially considering that the museum itself is a privately run institution. If the mission of the ship herself had included that phrase, we would have been a little more okay, because she is run by the Navy. Do not take this as a criticism of the museum itself or as my opinion of American freedom, it is not my intent to negatively portray either. I just am unsure how a museum goes about inspiring those particular feelings in a person. If I were British, and came to the museum, I believe I would have very different feelings about the meaning of the USS CONSTITUTION. 


I'm not sure if there is a right or a wrong answer here. A lot of museums will be spending this weekend celebrating the 4th, and I know that all three of "my" museums have special events planned. Those celebrations, in their essence, lift of the tenets of our American identity. So the Constitution Museum is not alone in celebrating freedom, but I am still not sure if that fits as the central mission of a museum. 

Modern Town in the Old Town

Yesterday was my first day interpreting at Mystic Seaport. I was in the chandlery, and although going in I was extremely nervous, I shouldn't have been. It went very, very well. One of the things that surprised me was the number of international visitors. I talked with at least have a dozen Britons, a woman from Japan, a pair of Quebecois, and three other groups from France. I got the chance to interpret my interpretation to one lone Frenchman from small-town Brittany, and with a couple from the southern part of the country. That was fun, but made my brain hurt. The best visitor of the whole day was an employee of Dengameleby, a Danish open air/living history museum. The gentleman was in town "spying" on all of the New England open air museums, as well as attending the recent ALFHAM conference. Apparently his museum is opening a new section of their town, including a 1920's and a 1970's section. How cool is that? It is my understanding that LHF, if it ever has a fabulous donor who makes it possible, wants to start a 1950's farm. So often we act extremely retroactively, and are trying to gather artifacts from hundreds of years ago. We'd be able to put together a much better approximation of what happened only 60 years ago compared to two hundred or more. This Danish museum is now going on my list of places to visit!

Boston

Last week, the interns took our first field trip of the summer. There are some great ones lined up, but we started off with a bang. We got up early and made the trip to Boston's USS Constitution Museum, the USS Constitution herself, and the Museum of Science. It was an intense but really great day. The woman who toured us through the Constitution was a naval historian, and is quite possibly the best interpreter I have ever heard. Everything she said she related back to our own experiences at the Seaport. When talking about the dimensions of the Constitution, she compared it to the ships we have. And as she was doing this, she name and date dropped like she was a walking textbook of United States and British history. It was fantastic.

Two things really struck me as interesting during the Constitution portion of our trip. First, the ship itself is maintained and toured by the Navy. The museum, next door, is a private institution. And all of it sits on the wharf owned by the National Park Service. We didn't really have time to get too deeply into the complications that causes, but I am sure there are a few. I would love to dig more into those relationships and see how they work.

The second thing that was interesting was the top floor of the museum. In this exhibit, I believe opened a year ago, the museum is really aiming to engage families. Their goal is to create an opportunity for inter-generational conversation. Now, we interns are not a family. We're a group of 20-30 somethings. We, in general, did not feel that the exhibit was something we would have particularly gotten into as visitors. It was very child oriented. That is not a bad thing, at all. Kids often don't feel comfortable in museums, so it is great to be able to show them there is a place for them to be. But as a group of adults, we weren't as engaged by the exhibit as we would have liked to be. I would be interested to go back with my own family, or with another peer group that is perhaps a bit closer. Maybe we would have had a different experience. There was also a school group there at the same time, and while I only saw them briefly, I would be very interested to hear how that particular type of visitor engages the exhibit. I would have loved more time to see the downstairs, which we really only walked by, but that will have to wait for another day.

The second half of the trip took us to the Boston Museum of Science. They have a new traveling exhibit on whales from New Zealand, including some great info on the Maori people and their interactions with the whales. I think this exhibit probably ranks in the top ten I've seen so far. It was beautifully done, had a great blend of artifacts and interactives, and was just a pleasure to look at. I only wish we would have had more time. The rest of the museum I didn't spend as much time going through as I did last fall, but I had the same impression again. It was much more of a kid-focused space, without much real structure to it. It makes me wonder if this is the way all museums are going? Are we doomed to be either stiff and boring on one hand or catering exclusively to children on the other? I wish we could find some common ground.

Bring Some Fun Into It

So my friend Clarissa is pretty cool. She is out in Colorado being an awesome grad student, and often guilts me into remembering that I don't post often enough. Today she posted kind of a fun picture hunt, where you open your 8th picture folder, pull up the 8th picture in it, and write about it. As my folder is sorted by years then categories, I went an extra layer here, but this is my picture.

Long story short, in 2005, right after graduating high school, I got the chance to perform in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Edingburgh, Scotland. My high school theater club did "All I Really Know I Learned in Kindergarten", adapted from the book by Robert Fulghum with the same title. If you have never read anything of his, I highly, highly recommend it. This picture was taken at the foot of Arthur's Seat, a dormant volcano in the middle of Edinburgh. We had an afternoon off, and went on a hike. And, this blog is focused on museums, here is the tie-in.

Sometimes, even though I do love museums, I wish they were a little more fun. This picture comes from a free afternoon we had in Edinburgh. We had toured around a lot, visited several historic sites, but it was fun to do something just a little goofy. I think this is the big reason why my passion is in living history. At living history museums, instead of walking slowly and reading signs, I get to touch, try, and play. And yeah, maybe sometimes its more formulated for kids, but at 23 I still think I get to play around a bit. Science museums are also a good way to give it a try, though those that I have been to have really focused only on kids and very basic science principles that I luckily learned awhile back. That being said, my boyfriend and I quite enjoyed playing with the weather front machine at the Minnesota Science Museum.

So, and I know this has already been debated to death, but really, why can't history be fun? When Nate and I toured through the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit, it was like walking through a library with the stereotypical extra strict librarian. Nobody spoke a word. I think it would have been a great place to really get conversation going, especially since both Nate and I are historians and really like to discuss things like that. Instead, we waited until we were back out into the main part of the museum. Would something as simple as having music piped in have helped? I'm not sure. So think about it. What museums have you been to that could use some "funning" (yes I know that isn't a real word) up? What do you think would help? Could it be as simple as encouraging more discourse while visitors are still in the museum?

Ethnic Studies

As you may know, Arizona's governor recently signed into law a bill that "prohibits public schools from including courses or classes, which promote the overthrow of the U.S. government or resentment towards a race or class of people, and specifies rules pertaining to pupil disciplinary proceedings are not to be based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin or ancestry."1 Critics, including the United Nations, argue that this prohibits individuals from learning about their own culture and origins. 


At the same time, the state of Texas has been working to revise its social studies curriculum. Historians have blasted these proposed changes, and with the amount of impact Texas has on textbooks (which in turn impact other states education levels), I am inclined to agree. 


I have to be honest. In every history class I've taken since high school, there has been a topic covered that made me unhappy with the United States government. In college I took a class on Social Justice and learned about our governments preference for dictatorial, sometimes cruel leaders, as long as they weren't socialists. I read about the Iran-Contra Crisis, and wondered what actions today we are taking today. No, I have no desire to overthrow the government, other than the part where I consider it my civic duty to vote. Through that means, I do take a stand against those in power who I feel are not best representing our nation's interests. But I digress. 


My big question is: What is a museum to do? If you are a museum in either state, or in another where you believe there to be a problem with the education system, is it your museums responsibility to try to fill the void? Do Kansas science museums have a responsibility to present the evolution side of things? Will Arizona's history museums put up exhibits highlighting its ethnic groups, or the Mexican side of the Mexican-American War? I've been tossing this idea about museums and social responsibility a lot lately, as my thesis topic could have some overlap. Is it our job as museum professionals to effect change? To right wrongs? Or is that overstepping our role in the community? Are we instead better suited to teaching, preserving, and protecting? I'm really not sure. I think, for me personally, I'd like to do both.


Arizona State Senate, "Fact Sheet for Bill H.B.2281", Arizona State Legislature. (http://www.azleg.gov/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/legtext/49leg/2r/summary/s.2281ed_caucus-floor.doc.htm) (accessed May 25, 2010).