Difficult and Different Histories
[Here’s the short talk I gave at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society workshop on Theories, Practices, and Pedagogies of Telling Difficult Histories in Museum Exhibits. A wonderful group! ] There have been a few surveys that are useful for understanding what visitors think about museums as places for difficult histories. The best known is The Presence of the Past, a survey by Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen in 1998. They found that most people believed that…