Progressive American Museum

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While Museums changed their approach during this progressive turn, academic historians were not actively involved in the beginning. John Cotton Dana, founder and curator of the Newark Museum, called for a change in focus for all museums in his 1920 book A Plan for a New Museum: The Kind of Museum It Will Profit a City to Maintain. He stated, “A museum is good only in so far as it is of use.” A museum’s value did not lay in beautiful, rare, and objects from long ago and far away places, but in objects and displays that both reflect the current population and educates them. Marjorie Schwarzer notes, “Museums would do better to create activities that catered to everybody, he (Dana) declared, especially the factory workers who were building …show more content…

This object-based epistemology expanded upon the ideas of earlier museums but now conveyed a level of personalism and usefulness. Their museums reflected the lives of common people, not just great men who did great things. Henry Ford believed “his museum (the Henry Ford Museum) and village (Greenfield Village) would tell the story of American history more thoroughly and more accurately than any textbook or scholarship.” Ford and Mercer, like the progressive and “new” academic historians, viewed history as egalitarian and contextually relevant to the present. Mercer was heavily influenced by the work of social historian John Bach McMaster, who also worked at the University of Pennsylvania. Mercer believed “history should tell the stories of common people and that it should provide easily accessible insights into the present” and to “make historical objects significant to the present, to demonstrate a seamlessness between the past and the …show more content…

Several New Deal public policies were enacted to both put Americans back to work and to preserve its history and culture. They also brought many academic historians and recent graduates into the public sphere. Roosevelt placed the supervision of all federal historic sites under the National Park Service in 1933. These included the Historic American Building Survey, the Historical Records Survey, and the Historic Sites Act. The HRS enlisted historians to survey the holdings of state and local archives. This flurry of research activity catalyzed the campaign from J. Franklin Jameson and Waldo Leland for a National Archives. The HABS surveyed the country’s architectural heritage and served as boon for the historic preservation movement. The HSA prioritized sites of national importance and enlisted the expertise of historians. These programs and the university training was still rooted in scientific historical professionalism. The interpretations were conservative, as they left out a lot of the contextual issues of the site and did not challenge their visitors to connect the past to the present condition. Professionalism, unlike the personalistic preservation efforts at Mount Vernon, emphasizes the narrative history of the site rather than the sentimentalism and romanticism the preservationists attach to it. This methodology also

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