September 9: 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? We will 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 before class):
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 16: Visiting a community historical museum: How do they differ?

Preclass site visit: Texas Music Museum
Address: 1009 East 11th Street
Hours: http://www.texasmusicmuseum.org/temporary-change-in-museum-hours/
There are two special exhibits on here: "Contribution of East Austin African-American Musicians to Texas Music" and "Texas Country Western Music Legends." This museum has also hosted capstone projects.

Optional site visit: South Austin Museum of Popular Culture (familiarly, "SouthPop"--mostly music posters and amazing art cars etc., as well as an outdoors display of former performers in Austin; you can also easily volunteer here)
Address: 1516B South Lamar
Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 1-6 PM (and "by appointment or chance")
Website: http://southpop.org/ There is even a wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Austin_Popular_Culture_Center
Entrance fee: Membership in the museum is $25 but they will take any tiny amount of donation at the door.

Exercise: Evaluate the layout of at least the TMM using Carr's advice.

Lecture/Discussion: How do you physically visit a museum? Discuss the visit to the Texas Music Museum and the Southpop Museum if you went there. Who makes history museums? Why? For whom do they make them? How can you tell? How does a community museum differ from an "official" museum?

Readings:
Wendy Pollock and J. Shipley Newlin, Wild Music: Making the Most of Sound in an Exhibition (blog post): http://www.astc.org/astc-dimensions/wild-music-making-the-most-of-sound-in-an-exhibition/

Steffi de Jong, "Sound and Silence in History Museums." Available on Canvas.

Advent designers of a guitar museum: http://adventresults.com/projects/belmonts-gallery-of-iconic-guitars/

September 23: Understanding historical museum practice

Preclass site visit: Bob Bullock Museum of Texas History. Located across MLK from campus. Note that there is an $11.00 student admission charge for this museum (you'll need your student ID) unless you visit on September 23, Austin Museum Day, when it is FREE. This is the largest and most professional museum we will visit, so take your time and see all three floors of the permanent exhibits; it should take you about 2-2.5 hours or even more. I realize that the exhibits "Cowboys in Space and Fantastic Worlds" and "Sister Suffragists" may be tempting, but see the main museum first. 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

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.

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.

September 30: 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.

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.

Readings:
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.

October 7: Artifacts II: What's left after living?

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

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.

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, 394-434. Available on Canvas.

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.

October 14: Historical texts in museums: Who is speaking?

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

While you are there, there are two other museums to visit on Brush Square:
Susannah Dickinson Museum at 411 East Fifth Street
Open Wednesday-Sunday, noon to 5
http://www.austintexas.gov/department/susanna-dickinson-museum

If you go to visit on Saturday or Sunday, from noon to 5, you should also visit:
The Austin Fire Museum at 401 East 5th Street
http://www.austintexas.gov/department/austin-fire-museum
This is a tiny special-interest museum that was first created some years ago with the assistance of firemen and iSchool capstones; it should take about 15-30 minutes.

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?

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.

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.

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. Available on Canvas.

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.

October 21: Communicating histories I: physical

Preclass site visit: Jourdan-Bachman Pioneer Farms.
Address: Pioneer Farms is located at 10621 Pioneer Farms Drive in northeast Austin, just east of Interstate 35. Exit I-35 at Braker Lane, go east and follow the signs. From Parmer Lane, a mile north of Braker, go east to Dessau Road (third traffic light), turn right and go to Braker Lane East (first traffic light). Turn left and follow the signs. There are multiple exhibits within the houses, which you can brief yourself on using their website.
Hours: Thursday-Sunday, 10AM-5PM (but admissions close at 4 PM

Note: They haven't yet posted the Halloween celebrations, which are in the evening, but it costs more.
Entrance fee: $8 for adults, $6 for children 3 and over
See the website at http://www.pioneerfarms.org/

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?

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 Kaufman, "The Architectural Museum from World's Fair to Restoration Village," Assemblage No. 9 (June 1989), 20-29. Available on Canvas.

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:

There is a sort-of flyover of Jourdan-Bachman available from the website https://www.pioneerfarms.org/aerial-tour-video

The classic typological museum: Pitt Rivers Museum http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/pittrivers/

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

October 28: 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

Exercise: Making objects into stories: how do the different exhibits at the Visitor Center do that? How does it affect the story that the Center is next door to the Capitol?

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

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

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 Karp and Levine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures, 42-56. Available on Canvas.

Baxandall, Michael. "Exhibiting Intention: Some preconditions of the visual display of culturally purposeful objects." Online at https://butisitart.wikispaces.com/file/view/Baxandall+Exhibiting+Intention.pdf.

November 4: 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 close attention to the new technology and its effectiveness. There is a Motown exhibit that you will also want to see.

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? Bearing in mind that the museum was reconstructed recently, what is the impact of such an effort on a major museum? What will it mean that the documentation that backs up President Obama's museum will be entirely online?

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," History and Theory, Vol 36, No 4, pp.44-63. Available on Canvas.

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. Available on Canvas.

Tamie Glass, "Exhibition Design" slideset from lecture on the new exhibit upcoming at the Ransom Center February 9-July 14, 2019, on the Arts and Crafts Movement. Available on Canvas under Other Class Materials.

November 11: Designing a museum exhibit: How does this work for a community museum?

Preclass site visit: Texas Department of Public Safety Historical Museum and Research Center
Address: 5805 North Lamar Boulevard, Building A, Lobby
Hours: Monday-Friday, 8AM-5PM
Entrance fee: Free
Website: http://www.txdpsmuseum.com/

Lecture/Discussion: How is a possibly troubling museum different from an ordinary historical museum? How is this museum a community museum? What might it also do?

Readings:
This is worth looking at (only the one page; none of the links work) because of what it reveals about police museums in general: https://phxpdmuseum.org/event/2018-international-conference-of-police-museums I happened to find the program for this meeting, which you can find on Canvas with much more detail (2018ConferencePoliceMuseums...)

Matthew Ferguson, Justin Piche, and Kevin Walby, "Representations of detention and other pains of law enforcement in police museums in Ontario, Canada," Policing and Society, Vol. 10 (2017), 1-15. Available on Canvas.

Diarmaid M. Harkin, "The police and punishment: understanding the pains of policing," Theoretical Criminology, vol. 19(1) (2015): 43-58. Available on Canvas.

Janet Pieschel, "Telling it Like it Is: The Calgary Police Service Interpretive Centre," in Robert R. Janes and Gerald T. Conaty (eds.), Looking Reality in the Eye: Museums and Social Responsibility, pp. 175-186. Available on Canvas.

November 18: 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, and possibly to undergo an ID security check (be sure you have your ID).
Hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 10AM-4PM
Entrance fee: free
Website: http://texasmilitaryforcesmuseum.org/
Note that I enquired and was told that it is allowed to take photos, but be sure to ask anyway

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? What might be missing?

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

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.

Sonya Atalay, "No Sense of the Struggle: Creating a Context for Survivance at the NMAI," The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 30, Number 3&4, Summer/Fall 2006, pp. 597-618. Available through PCL.

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

Kirsten F. Latham, "Museum Object as Document: Using Buckland's information concepts to understand museum experiences." Journal of Documentation, vol. 68, Issue 1, 2012, pp. 45-71.

November 25: Communities II: Visitors

Preclass site visit: Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center
Address: 600 River Street
Hours: Monday-Thursday 10am to 6pm; Friday 10am to 5:30pm; Saturday: 10am to 4pm
Website: http://www.austintexas.gov/esbmacc

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? Who do you think might not feel at home in the Elisabet Ney Museum? Who do you think visits it?

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. Available in Canvas.

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.

Nancy J. Fuller and Suzanne Fabricius, "Native American Museums and Cultural Centers: Historical Overview and Current Issues," Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, vol 117 (1992), 223-237. Online through PCL catalog.

December 2: 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

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 nontraditional historic sites and how much in control of their visit are they? How do museums try to find out? AND: 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? What did you discover that surprised you?

Readings:
Elaine Heumann Gurian, "Noodling around with exhibition opportunities," in Karp and Lavine (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures, 176-190. Available through Canvas; for more of her work, see online http://www.egurian.com/omnium-gatherum

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

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

December 9: 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.

Term papers due (should be sent to me via email, galloway@ischool.utexas.edu); take-home exam questions passed out