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Writing about the past, thinking about the future: National Museum of American History

Writing about the past, thinking about the future: National Museum of American History

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My article on the history and philosophy of collecting at the National Museum of American History has been published in the Federal History Journal. The issue is freely available, here, and my essay is here. It’s a good issue: I especially recommend the article by Margo Anderson, “Public Management of Big Data: Historical Lessons from the 1940s.” My essay was inspired by the 50th anniversary of the NMAH. I used to work there, and a former colleague asked me to write something. The director was…

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“Ethnographical busts”

“Ethnographical busts”

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This plaster cast is one of eight in the collection of the Haffenreffer Museum. They’re a bit of a mystery; there’s no paperwork on them. And they’re not the sort of thing the museum traditionally collected. They came from the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, in the 1980s. That’s about as much as we knew. As much as we knew from the object, anyway. As historians, anthropologists, and curators, we knew that these figures of “races of…

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