Tag Archive

museums

Intimate lives on display: Monticello and Mount Vernon

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Jennifer Tyburczy’s brilliant observation that all museums “have played an important but often overlooked role in the institutionalization of categories of sexual ‘normalcy’ and ‘perversity’” can also be applied to house museums and historic sites. House museums, as sites for interpreting private lives, are engaged in complex ways with presentations of sex and sexuality. Read More

An experiment for generation Y: "aMUSE: Exhibits Unleashed"

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Like many community museums, we’ve had a difficult time encouraging and maintaining a young adult audience. We know that members of generation Y love information, history, museums, and artifacts. We also know that members of generation Y sometimes like to focus more on presentation style, technology, and media than on content. Read More

Public history on the American Historical Association conference program

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As part of its ongoing efforts to highlight the diversity of career opportunities for historians, the American Historical Association has organized an offsite workshop at the National Museum of American History during its conference this week.  The workshop offers a chance to hear from leaders from some of the foremost history museums in the United States. Read More

Reading the artifact: From inquiry to interpretation

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Continued from Part 1 and Part 2.

On the final day of Reading Artifacts Summer Institute (RASI), each group was required to present its artifact to an audience of other participants, museum staff, and volunteers. Throughout the morning, artifacts that had initially seemed ambiguous and daunting at the start of the week were slowly separated into layers of meaning and their hidden histories were recounted. Read More

Reading the artifact: A stove from a transitional moment

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In August 2012, a group of 26 doctoral students and museum professionals from different disciplines and multiple countries gathered at the Canada Science and Technology Museum (CSTM) in Ottawa, Canada, for the fourth annual Reading Artifacts Summer Institute (RASI). The one-week program, guided by staff and volunteers from the museum with guest scholar Dr. Read More