Were You Expecting to Smell Tito Puente’s Timbales?

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One of the pleasures of visiting museums is discovering something you didn’t expect.

When I visited ¡Puro Ritmo!, the exhibition produced by the National Museum of the American Latino in Washington, DC, I expected energetic music, dance, and interactive experiences. Those were certainly there, but one exhibit offered a completely different kind of surprise.

Standing before Tito Puente’s timbales, I assumed the museum might invite visitors to explore rhythm, play cowbells, or watch archival footage of the legendary bandleader. Instead, a small label read: “Places and scents are connected. Push the lever to smell the scent and imagine a night of dancing. What do these smells remind you of?”

Beside it was a small black cylinder. I pressed the lever, and a complex blend of gardenias, leather, and a hint of tobacco drifted upward. For a brief moment, it felt less like standing in a museum and more like walking into a crowded ballroom on a warm evening as Tito Puente’s orchestra prepared to play.

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The House of the Seven Gables: More Than a Historic House Museum

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The House of the Seven Gables, Salem, Massachusetts.

What is a historic house museum supposed to do? Preserve an important building? Tell the story of the people who once lived there? Re-create a particular moment in history? Most historic house museums are organized around one primary purpose with the house serving as the central artifact through which that story is told.

The House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts challenges that assumption. By the time I finished my visit, I realized that the woman who transformed the house into a museum had imagined something much larger. Caroline Emmerton, a Progressive Era reformer and preservationist, transformed a celebrated historic house into an institution that combined preservation, literary tourism, education, and social reform. More than a century later, that integrated vision still defines the site.

In 1668, Salem sea captain and merchant John Turner and his wife, Elizabeth, built the house that would become known as the House of the Seven Gables. Three generations of the Turner family lived there before the property passed to the Ingersoll family in 1782. One of its later residents, Susanna Ingersoll, welcomed frequent visits from her cousin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose experiences at the house inspired the setting and title of his 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion was already famous as both a remarkable survivor of colonial Salem and the home most closely associated with Hawthorne’s classic novel.

By the early twentieth century, however, the property’s future was uncertain. When the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion came up for sale, Emmerton purchased it in 1908. She was already deeply involved in the Progressive Era settlement house movement and saw an opportunity to accomplish far more than preserving a historic building. Working with architect Joseph Everett Chandler, she restored the house to what they believed reflected its seventeenth-century appearance while simultaneously establishing the House of the Seven Gables Settlement Association. Rather than operating the house simply as a museum, she used its popularity to support a settlement house which offered educational and social programs for Salem’s immigrant community.

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Clearer Rules, Better Results: An Updated Photography Policy at Bayou Bend

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When I examined museum photography policies in my recent post, “Can I Take a Picture?,” I included a sign I photographed at Bayou Bend Collection and Gardens during a November 2024 visit. Jennifer Hammond, Bayou Bend’s Head of Learning and Interpretation, subsequently contacted me to explain that the museum had replaced much of that signage since my visit and that its photography policy has continued to evolve.

The new signs do not appear to have been prompted by my post. Instead, they offer a useful follow-up: museum policies and visitor communications should not be static and permanent.

Bayou Bend’s revised entrance signs are clearer and more welcoming. “Personal photographs are encouraged,” the photography sign begins, before outlining restrictions on commercial shoots, equipment, drones, climbing, and other potentially disruptive activities (I ‘m sure there’s a story behind the policy that visitors must keep their clothes on!). A separate sign prepares visitors for the historic house, explaining limits on group size, bag storage, barriers, fragile objects, and food and drink.

The revised approach has also produced an unexpected benefit. Hammond noted that quinceañera groups have become staff favorites and that the photographs they share have generated more effective publicity for Bayou Bend than some of its paid advertising. The experience suggests that a carefully managed photography policy can support visitation and visibility without turning the museum into an uncontrolled photo venue.

Bayou Bend’s experience suggests that museums should review whether their photography rules address demonstrable risks or simply preserve inherited restrictions. Clear conditions can protect collections, landscapes, and visitors while allowing uses that may also increase the institution’s public visibility.

Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House: Revealing More Than Little Women

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Louisa May Alcott’s desk in her bedroom at Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Courtesy of Orchard House.

Many visitors come to Orchard House because they love Little Women. The museum embraces that connection. As it notes on its website, visitors often remark that a tour is “like a walk through Little Women!” It is easy to understand why. The house inspired the setting of the March family home, and many of the people who lived there found their way into Louisa May Alcott’s novel.

After touring Orchard House, however, I came away with a different realization. The house certainly rewards visitors who come looking for Little Women. But its greatest contribution is something deeper: it reveals the creative world that shaped Louisa May Alcott as a writer.

That distinction became clear as the tour unfolded. Rather than treating Louisa as the sole focus, the guide introduced each member of the Alcott family through the rooms they occupied and the activities that took place there. Instead of presenting a series of biographical sketches, the house gradually revealed a household alive with writing, theater, art, education, reform, conversation, and, at times, financial struggle.

By the end of the tour, Little Women seemed less like the work of an isolated author than the literary expression of a remarkable family’s shared experiences. The rooms themselves reveal the different ways creativity found expression within the Alcott family. The dining room and parlor evoke oldest daughter Anna’s family theatricals, younger sister May’s rooms preserve the work of an aspiring artist, and Louisa’s bedroom centers on the desk where she wrote much of Little Women. Together, these rooms reveal a household where writing, art, and performance were all part of everyday life.

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A Terrific Guide for Community Conversations During America’s 250th

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The U.S. Semiquincentennial offers history organizations an important opportunity to help communities reflect on the past while considering the future they want to build together.

To support that work, the American Association for State and Local History and NxtLevel have developed Building the Next 250 Years: Hosting Community Conversations at Your History Organization, a free facilitation guide designed to help museums, historic sites, and other history organizations convene thoughtful, community-driven discussions.

The guide is terrific: clear, practical, and unusually easy to use. It grew out of a 2025 pilot project involving six history organizations and more than 120 community participants from nearly every region of the country. Turns out that people valued opportunities for deep, intentional conversation rooted in mutual respect and hosted by trusted local history institutions (that’s you!).

Rather than prescribing a single program, the guide provides a flexible framework that organizations can adapt to their mission, audience, resources, and community. It walks users through the entire process, including:

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The Emily Dickinson Museum: A House That Reveals a Poet

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Emily Dickinson’s writing table, preserved in her bedroom at the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Before visiting the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, I knew surprisingly little about Emily Dickinson. The Museum encompasses two historic houses: the restored Homestead, where Dickinson was born, died, and wrote most of her poetry, and the unrestored Evergreens, the neighboring home of her brother Austin, his wife Susan, and their family. Although the Museum includes both houses, it was the Homestead that demonstrated how a historic house can become the key to understanding a poet.

I knew Emily Dickinson was one of America’s greatest poets, that she published very little during her lifetime, and that she lived much of her adult life in relative seclusion. I was also familiar with a few of the recurring stories surrounding her life—her correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her close relationship with her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and the questions surrounding her withdrawal from society. Beyond that, she remained something of a mystery. What I did not expect was that the house itself would become the key to understanding her.

Many literary house museums preserve the places where authors lived and worked. The Emily Dickinson Homestead does something more ambitious. Rather than treating the Homestead simply as the place where Emily Dickinson lived, the guide used the house as a framework for understanding the person behind the poet. Each room served as a setting for exploring a different aspect of her life. This was done not through dates and events alone, but through her own poetry, her education, her family relationships, her intellectual curiosity, and her creative choices. In doing so, the house became not simply the setting for Dickinson’s story but an essential part of telling it.

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From Critique to “Clean House”: Evaluating Mike Gonzalez’s Testimony on the Smithsonian

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At a congressional hearing on July 21, Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation accused the Smithsonian’s leadership of subverting its national purpose and called upon Congress to “clean house.” He also urged lawmakers to deauthorize the proposed National Museum of the American Latino and Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum before either institution has opened a permanent building.

His statement is important—not because it provides an independent or particularly rigorous evaluation of the Smithsonian, but because it reveals how quickly the argument has moved from criticizing exhibitions to demanding the removal of museum leaders.

The July 4 White House report, properly titled Saving America’s Story, accused the National Museum of American History of “ideological capture” and concluded that the Smithsonian could not be trusted under its current leadership. Gonzalez largely repeats that report’s assumptions and examples, but goes further by calling explicitly for a purge.

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The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center: What Only A Writer’s House Can Reveal

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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s writing desk in her Hartford home.

When we visit the home of a famous writer, what are we hoping to discover? The works have already been written. Their biographies have been published. Their letters have been collected. So what can walking through the rooms where they lived add to our understanding?

Those questions were on my mind as I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut. The Center asks visitors to look beyond Uncle Tom’s Cabin and consider how Harriet Beecher Stowe became one of the nineteenth century’s most influential antislavery writers. It is an ambitious interpretive approach, one that emphasizes the firsthand accounts of enslaved and formerly enslaved people, abolitionist networks, and the many individuals whose experiences, testimony, and activism shaped Stowe’s writing.

As I reflected on the tour afterward, however, I found myself asking a different question: What can a historic house contribute to this story that no biography, lecture, or documentary can?

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Models, Mementos, and Maddening Stairs: Final Notes from Swiss Museums

Model of a Bronze Age village at the Bern History Museum.

After writing about art museums and history museums in Switzerland, I still had a set of smaller observations that did not quite fit into either post. They are not really small, however. They shaped the visitor experience again and again.

After visiting more than fifty museums and historic sites across Switzerland, I found that some of the most revealing differences appeared not in the major exhibitions, but in the supporting details: models and miniatures, museum stores, souvenirs, and stairs.

These features affect how visitors understand buildings, remember their visits, and physically move through museum spaces. They also reveal how museums think about access, retail, interpretation, and audience needs.

An exhibition at Chillon Castle shows how the unrestored murals would appear in the medieval period.

Models and Miniatures

Swiss museums and historic sites make frequent and effective use of models and miniatures. At their best, these are not decorative add-ons or simplified versions for children. They are interpretive tools that help visitors understand things that are otherwise difficult to see.

At Chillon Castle, a miniature showed how a room would have looked in the medieval period because the murals have faded over time. That is exactly the kind of interpretive problem a model can solve. The historic fabric is still present, but time has made it difficult to perceive. A miniature allows visitors to imagine the original visual effect without repainting, over-restoring, or asking visitors to make sense of nearly invisible evidence on their own.

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Beyond Chronology: Interpretation at History Museums in Switzerland

A period room at the Bern History Museum in Switzerland.

We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. In the art museums of German-speaking Switzerland, I noticed a strong tendency to organize galleries around named private collections, or Sammlungen. In the history museums and historic sites, I noticed something different: interpretive practices in transition.

Some sites still rely on familiar approaches: chronological narratives, object identification, and basic descriptions of place. But many museums are clearly rethinking their exhibitions. They are experimenting with new interpretive layers, broader contexts, difficult histories, and more ambitious questions about identity, science, colonialism, and national memory.

The results are uneven, but they are worth attention. Swiss history museums seem to be moving beyond “what happened?” and “what is this object?” toward more complex questions: What systems produced this wealth? How did a person’s life connect to larger social and technological changes? How is national identity constructed? What should be done with inherited installations that no longer speak clearly to visitors?

For museum professionals elsewhere, the Swiss examples offer several useful lessons.

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