August 29: Historical Museums: what are they?

Housekeeping: Syllabus, books, visits, etc.

Lecture/Discussion: "My most memorable historical museum"--What makes them memorable? What is a "good" historical museum? Discuss history museums students have visited, reflect on the ways in which history museums may be contested spaces, and look at a critical framework for visiting and discussing history museums.

Handout (download from Canvas):
David Carr, "Appendix B: To Observe," in The Promise of Cultural Institutions (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2003), 193-200 (on Canvas). This reading provides one tool for a reflective museum visit and you will test it on your preclass site visit for next time.

September 12: Visiting a historical museum

Preclass site visit: Daughters of the Republic of Texas Museum
Address: I-35 and 183 junction/access road
Hours: Wednesday-Friday 10AM-3PM, closed Labor Day. Since we lose a class to Labor Day, you will have two weeks to find this museum and visit it.
Entrance fee: $2 for students with ID
Website: http://www.drtinfo.org/preservation/drt-properties/republic-of-texas-museum

Alternate: South Austin Museum of Popular Culture
Address 1516B South Lamar
Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 1-6
Website: http://southpop.org/

Reading:
Jessie L. Embry and Mauri Liljenquist Nelson, "'Such is our Heritage' Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museums," In Amy Levin (ed.), Defining Memory: Local Museums and the Construction of History in America's Changing Communities (Altamira, 2007), 161-176. Available on Canvas.

Exercise: Observing museum layouts

Lecture/Discussion: How do you physically visit a museum? Discuss the visit to the DRT Museum. Who makes history museums? Why? For whom do they make them? How can you tell?

September 19: Understanding historical museum practice

Preclass site visit: Bob Bullock Museum of Texas History. Located across MLK from the Sanchez building. Note that there is an $8.00 student admission charge for this museum (you'll need your student ID) unless you visit on September 18, Austin Museum Day, when it is FREE. Be sure to take your time and see all three floors of the permanent exhibits; it should take you about 2 hours. Visit the background webpage for the Bob Bullock museum and review the website before the visit so you can compare the presentations in both places: http://www.thestoryoftexas.com/about
During Austin Museum Day the Austin Fire Museum at 401 East 5th Street http://www.austinfiremuseum.org/ will also be open from about noon until five but will probably not be open otherwise, so you may want to drop by there (they have fun stuff and usually treats for kids and grownups) to see a tiny special-interest museum that was first created some years ago with the assistance of iSchool capstones; it should take about 15 minutes.

Readings:
Michael Belcher, Exhibitions in Museums (Washington: Smithsonian, 1992), Chapters 7 and 8, "Museum Exhibition Policy and Planning" and "The Museum Exhibition Brief," 69-95. Available on Canvas.

Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," New Formations 4 (1988), online at http://www.amielandmelburn.org.uk/collections/newformations/04_73.pdf

Lonnie Bunch, "Fueled by Passion: The Valentine Museum and its Richmond History Project," in Ames, Franco, and Frye, Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits, 283-311. Available on Canvas.

Patricia Galloway, "Mississippi 1500-1800: Revising the South's Colonial History for a Postcolonial Museum Audience," in Galloway, Practicing Ethnohistory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 377-387. See also "Mississippi 1500-1800: Final Draft Exhibit Script." Both available on Canvas.

Randolph Starn, "A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies," The American Historical Review, Vol. 10, Issue 1 (2005). Online through PCL catalog.

Lecture/Discussion: We'll discuss the visit to the Bullock with special emphasis on artifact management and design and the requirements of all the stakeholders in a big museum, but all the features of the Bullock museum as a dominant official voice are open for discussion and our discussion of it will not stop with today's class.

September 26: Artifacts I: What's in a thing?

Show-and-tell: Students will bring an "old" artifact with a personal connection to be discussed in class; no preclass museum visit this week.

Readings:
Spencer D. Crew and James E. Sims, "Locating Authenticity: Fragments of a Dialogue," in Karp and Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991), 159-175.

Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural biography of things: Commoditization as process," in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), 64-91. Available on Canvas.

Elaine Heumann Gurian, "What is the Object of this Exercise?" Daedalus (special issue "America's Museums"), Vol. 128, no. 3, Summer 1999. Online through PCL catalog.

Abby Clouse, "Narratives of Value and the Antiques Roadshow: 'A Game of Recognitions'," Journal of Popular Culture 41(1), 2008, 3-20. Online through PCL catalog.

Lecture/Discussion: The production and meaning of historical artifacts and how artifacts fit into personal narratives. What is the importance of "the real thing"? How do you make sense of an object if it isn't yours?

Essay topics announced; between now and the next meeting you will need to prepare a paper proposal based on one of these topics, stating the selected topic and your plan for researching it.

October 3: Artifacts II: What's left after living? (housephotos)

Preclass site visit: George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center
Address: 1165 Angelina Street
Hours: MWF 9:30-6:00, Sat 1-5; also see website, http://www.austintexas.gov/department/george-washington-carver-museum-and-cultural-center
Entrance fee: free

Readings:
James Horton and Spencer Crew, "Afro-Americans and Museums: Towards a Policy of Inclusion," in Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff, eds., Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles (University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 215-236. Available on Canvas.

Clement Alexander Price, "Been So Long: A Critique of the Process that Shaped 'From Victory to Freedom: Afro-American Life in the Fifties'," in Kenneth Ames, Barbara Franco, and Thomas Frye (eds.), Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 1997), 9-30. Available on Canvas.

Fath Davis Ruffins, "Revisiting the Old Plantation," in Karp et. al., Museum Frictions.

Ruth J. Abram, "History is as History does: The Evolution of a Mission-Driven Museum," in Robert Janes and Gerald Conaty (eds.), Looking Reality in the Eye: Museums and Social Responsibility (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2005), 19-42. Available on Canvas.

Lecture/Discussion: Artifact survival and the effect on meaning; in the museum visit this week pay special attention to material culture as owned and used by ordinary people. How does the using-up of objects affect what can be shown or said in the museum? How does the restriction to artifact-centric display practice disadvantage certain communities? And what issues are raised by "identity" museums as opposed to inclusion of neglected communities in "mainstream" museums?

Paper proposals are due to be turned in at this class meeting.

October 10: Historical texts in museums: Who says?

Preclass site visit: O. Henry Museum
Address: 409 East 5th Street
Hours: Wednesday-Sunday 12PM-5PM
Entrance fee: free
Website: http://www.austintexas.gov/department/o-henry-museum

Readings:
O. Henry, "The Gift of the Magi." Yes, you should read it (or read it again), as most of the other visitors to this site will have done so. Available all over the Web; here's a very cool source that points to the clean text from Project Gutenberg and also offers an audiobook version: http://librivox.org/the-gift-of-the-magi-by-o-henry/

Giovanni Pinna, "Introduction to Historic House Museums," Museum International 53 (2001), 2, pp. 4-9. Online through PCL catalog.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), Chapter 1, "The Power in the Story," 1-30. Available on Canvas.

Thomas Schlereth, "Collecting Ideas and Artifacts: Common Problems of History Museums and History Texts," in Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies.

Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," Representations 26 (Spring 1989), 7-24. Available online through the PCL catalog and JSTOR. If you haven't read this, for good or ill, you should.

Tami Christopher, "The House of the Seven Gables," in Amy K. Levin, Defining Memory: Local museums and the construction of history in America's changing communities (Lanham: Altamira, 2007), pp. 63-76. Available on Canvas.

Lecture/Discussion: "Reading" paper-borne culture, voice, images, other cultural productions: how do they all affect the "story"? What are the textual sources for historical museums? How are they used? How do they compare to material sources?

October 17: Communicating histories I: physical

Preclass site visit: Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farm. Note that if you visit on September 20 it will be free but will be $8.00 otherwise. See the website at http://www.pioneerfarms.org/

Readings:
Handler, Richard, and Eric Gable. The New History in an Old Museum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998). The whole book is OPTIONAL; it covers a study of Williamsburg by two anthropologists and constitutes an anthropological approach to visitor studies; available at PCL. For a shorter introduction to the project you should read for class paired articles from the Journal of American History, June 1994 (available through the PCL catalog), the first one a summary of the book:
Eric Gable and Richard Handler, "The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums," JAH 81(1), June 1994, 119-136.
followed by a response from Williamsburg:
Cary Carson, "Lost in the Fun House: A Commentary on Anthropologists' First Contact with History Museums," JAH 81(1), June 1994, 137-150.

Kulik, Gary. "Designing the Past: History-Museum Exhibitions from Peale to the Present," in Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 2-37. Available on Canvas.

Edward Kaufmann, "The Architectural Museum from World's Fair to Restoration Village," in Carbonell, Museum Studies, pp. 273-289.

Marc Weber, "Exhibiting the Online world: A Case Study," Making the History of Computing Relevant, pp 3-24. IFIP Advances in Information Communication and Technology vol. 416, 2013. Available on Canvas.

Virtual tours:

Typological: Pitt Rivers Museum http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/pittrivers/

In-Situ: Julia Child exhibit at Smithsonian http://amhistory.si.edu/juliachild/

Lower Eastside Tenement Museum http://www.tenement.org/Virtual_Tour/index_virtual.html

Lecture/Discussion: How do space and movement within the museum setting affect the story? What are standard display modes in closed museums? How can an outdoor museum control the movement of visitors through space? What can an outdoor history museum offer that an indoor one can't? What are its drawbacks?

October 24: Communicating Histories II: Conceptual

Preclass site visit: Capitol Complex Visitor Center (Land Office Building)
Address: 112 East 11th Street
Hours: M-Sat, 9:00-5:00, Sun 12:00-5:00
Entrance fee: free
Website: http://www.tspb.state.tx.us/CVC/home/home.html

Readings:
Mark Leone and Barbara Little, "Artifacts as Expressions of Society and Culture," in Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies.

Susan Pearce, "Objects as Meaning; or narrating the past," in Pearce, ed., Interpreting Objects and Collections (London: Routledge, 1994), 19-29. Available on Canvas.

Stephen Greenblatt, "Resonance and Wonder," in Carbonell (ed.), Museum Studies.

Baxandall, Michael. "Exhibiting Intention: Some preconditions of the visual display of culturally purposeful objects," in Karp and Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991), 33-41.

Exercise: Making objects into stories

Lecture/Discussion: How does a story become a visit, an experience? How is the constituent meaning of objects put together into a narrative?

October 31: The Work of the Exhibit Team

Preclass site visit: LBJ Library museum exhibits (UT campus)
Address: 2313 Red River, on UT campus
Hours: Every day except Christmas, 9AM-5PM
Entrance fee: free; parking also convenient and free
Website: http://www.lbjlibrary.org/about-us/plan-your-visit.html
NOTE: This museum was completely overhauled in 2011-12 to replace the 1987 design; to quote the new director of the Library, "Now is our opportunity to present this story using 21st century technology with state-of-the art interactive elements." In class we will look at a slideshow of the old design, and you will visit the now new-ish permanent exhibits and pay attention to the new technology and its effectiveness.

Readings:
Eco, Umberto. "Travels in Hyperreality," in Travels in Hyperreality (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 3-58. This one is optional, chiefly for the little section on the LBJ exhibits called "Fortresses of Solitude." Find this via Google Books, which has the whole essay along with a lot of the book.

Candace Tangorra Matelic, "Forging a Balance: A Team Approach to Exhibit Development at the Museum of Florida History," In Ames, Franco, and Frye, Ideas and Images: Developing Interpretive History Exhibits, 187-209. Available on Canvas.

Susan Crane, "Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum," in Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies.

Wallace, Mike. "Museums and Controversy," in Mickey Mouse History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 115-129. Available on Canvas.

Martin Hall, "The Reappearance of the Authentic," in Karp et al., eds., Museum Frictions, 70-101.

Isto Huvila, "How a Museum Knows? Structures, Work Roles, and Infrastructures of Information Work," JASIST 64(7):1375-1387, 2013. Available online through PCL journals.

Lecture/Discussion: What makes the visitor's experience in a historical museum? Does the experience differ if there is no "identity" element for the visitor? What does it take for the visitor to recognize enough to feel part of the story? And, bearing in mind that the museum is being reconstructed, what is the impact of such an effort on a major museum?

November 7: Communities I: story-bearers, communities of memory

Preclass site visit: Texas Military Forces Museum, Camp Mabry
Address: Camp Mabry, off 35th Street; drive past the closed-up entrance just west of MOPAC, to the new post-9/11 gate and ask directions there. Be prepared to state that you want to visit the museum, to undergo a security check and have your car searched. Dress conservatively.
Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, 10AM-4PM
Entrance fee: free
Website: http://www.texasmilitaryforcesmuseum.org/about-us
Note that I enquired and was told that it is allowed to take photos, but be sure to ask anyway

Readings:
Joseph Masco, "5.29.45 AM," in Museum Frictions, pp. 102-106.

Joe Skeen, "The Buffalo Soldiers Museum: One Man's Passion Operates a Legacy for African American Soldiers," Houston History 7.2 (2010), 29-33. http://houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/Skeen-Buffalo-Solders-Museum.pdf

David Thelen, "History after the Enola Gay Controversy: An Introduction," The Journal of American History 82 (3--December 1995), 1029-1035. Available through PCL, Journals.

Mike Wallace, "Visiting the Past: History museums in the United States," Radical History Review 25 (1981), online through PCL catalog.

Lecture/Discussion: Collecting, maintaining, and displaying are at the center of traditional museum practice, but changes have been coming for some time, as more attention is being paid to the communities museums serve and what they expect. What are the assumptions of traditional practice? Do all historical museums really follow them? What are the issues raised by military museums: what communities support and visit them? What to people expect to see? How do traditional practices, funding, and expectations play out in the Texas Military Forces Museum?

November 14: Communities II: Visitors

Preclass site visit: Elisabet Ney Museum
Address: 304 East 44th Street (in Hyde Park)
Hours: Wed-Sat 10-5, Sun 12-5
Website: http://www.austintexas.gov/elisabetney

Readings:
Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), read Chapter 1 (15-36) and 4 (89-114); if you have time also read "Afterthoughts," 177-208. This book is available as an e-book through the UT Library catalog. Note that the stunning results of this project make it an extremely important book for those who wonder how they could ever care about doing quantitative research.

Ciraj Rassool, "Community Museums, Memory Politics, and Social Transformation in South Africa," in Karp et al., eds., Museum Frictions, 286-321.

Ruth B. Phillips, "Community Collaboration in Exhibitions, toward a dialogic paradigm: Introduction," in Laura Peers and Alison Brown, eds., Museums and Source Communities (London: Routledge, 2003), 155-170. Available on Canvas.

Steven D. Lavine, "Audience, Ownership, and Authority: Designing relations between museums and communities," in Karp, Kreamer, and Lavine (eds.), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian, 1992), 137-157.

Lecture/Discussion: Working with communities: How do people use history and care about it? Why do they work really hard to express it in museums? Who are the story-bearers who speak in the museums we have seen and those we have discussed today? What community do they represent and what community to they address?

November 21: Historical museums and informal learning

Preclass site visit: Texas State Cemetery
Address: 909 Navasota
Hours for visitor center and gallery: M-F, 8-5; Sat 8-1 (maybe); cemetery itself is open seven days a week
Entrance fee: free
Website: http://www.cemetery.state.tx.us/directions.asp

Readings:
Elaine Heumann Gurian, "Noodling around with exhibition opportunities," in Karp and Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991), 176-190.

John Falk, "Museums as Institutions of Personal Learning," Daedalus (special issue "America's Museums"), Vol. 128, No. 3 (Summer 1999), pp. 259-275. Online through PCL catalog.

Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross. "Decoding the visitor's gaze: rethinking museum visiting," in Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe (eds.), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 127-150. Available on Canvas.

Lecture/Discussion: Reception of meaning in the historical museum or historic site, especially by community audiences: can David Carr's ideal of informal learning be met? Why do people visit and how much in control of their visit are they? How do museums try to find out?

November 28: Austin's historical landscape and museums

Preclass site visit: French Legation Museum
802 San Marcos Street  Austin, TX 78702
Admission $5; telephone (512) 472-8180
Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. (10:00-5:00 and free on Museum Day, September 20)
Tours are given at 1:15, 2:00, 3:00, and 4:00pm
Website:http://frenchlegationmuseum.org/

Readings:
Constance Perin, "The Communicative Circle: Museums as Communities," in Karp et al., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington: Smithsonian, 1992), 182-220.

Peter Gould and Rodney White, Mental Maps (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), 15-49. Available on Canvas.

Lecture/Discussion: How do the group of historical museums in Austin bias the way Austinites view history? Who goes to what museums? What museums in Austin would you never have gone to without the requirements of this class?

December 5: Presentations and summative discussion

Lecture/Discussion: Summary of take-home points from the course, discussion of issues raised by student papers, speculations on the future.

Student Presentations: Each student will present a five-minute summary of research for the term paper. Students will be expected to be prepared to answer questions on the research and to discuss other students' papers. Each paper will be allowed a ten-minute time slot to allow for five minutes' discussion afterwards. This is your chance to hone your paper's ideas a little and get feedback on it from your classmates.

Term papers due; take-home exam questions passed out