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.
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:
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Museums spend a lot of time thinking about how to ask people for support. We spend far less time thinking about what happens after someone says yes.
Recently, I made a gift to President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., in support of Students Opposing Slavery, a project I have long admired. Within a short time, a small box arrived in the mail. Before I even opened it, the package already looked intentional: a Team Lincoln logo with a blue accent on a sturdy thin white box. What could this possibly contain?
Founded in the 1780s, Kunsthaus Zürichnow straddles a busy intersection in two buildings.
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. Among the many differences in museum practice, one pattern was especially noticeable in the art museums of the German-speaking cantons: their organization around named private collections, or Sammlungen.
A wealthy collector may have assembled works of art over a lifetime and later donated or loaned the collection to a museum. Rather than fully integrating those works into a chronological, thematic, or art-historical presentation, the museum often retains the collection as a distinct unit bearing the donor’s name.
There are legitimate reasons for doing this. A named collection preserves its provenance and recognizes the role of private collecting in the formation of public museums. It can reveal an individual collector’s tastes, preferences, ambitions, and blind spots. The collection itself can become a historical document.
This model is not unique to Switzerland. American museums such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Frick Collection in New York preserve, to varying degrees, the identity and vision of their founders’ private collections. In those institutions, however, the collector’s personality, residence, installation choices, or philosophy of looking is central to the museum’s public identity. Visitors generally understand that they are entering a particular person’s conception of art.
The situation becomes more complicated when several named collections coexist within a larger institution. The visitor is no longer encountering one clearly defined collector’s museum but moving among several private visions whose differences are not always explained.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio, following completion of its 2 Era Restoration. The project interprets both the Beecher family residence and the later Edgemont Inn period, revealing the building’s evolving role in the community across generations.
When I visited the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati, Ohio this February, I expected to learn more about Harriet Beecher Stowe’s years in the city and how her experiences there influenced the writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. What I did not expect was to come away thinking as much about the building itself as the woman who once lived there.
The Harriet Beecher Stowe House recently completed what it calls a two-era restoration, interpreting both the Beecher family period (1840) and the later Edgemont Inn period (1940). At first, I wondered whether trying to tell two stories in one house might feel confusing. Instead, I found it to be one of the project’s greatest strengths.
The tour begins with Harriet Beecher Stowe, her family, and the Cincinnati she encountered in the 1830s and 1840s. Visitors learn about Lane Seminary, debates over slavery, the city’s free Black community, and the experiences that shaped Stowe’s understanding of freedom and injustice. These stories unfold in rooms restored to the Beecher era, allowing visitors to imagine the world she experienced as a young wife, mother, and writer living in Cincinnati.
What impressed me most, however, was how the restoration itself became part of the interpretation.
For several years, I have been adapting L. Dee Fink’s taxonomy of significant learning for use in museums and historic sites. Fink’s framework is enormously useful in formal education because it pushes teachers beyond simple content delivery (i.e., foundational knowledge) to application, integration, human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn. That is a helpful corrective in classrooms, where learning unfolds over a semester and where students can be asked to practice, reflect, revise, and demonstrate growth. But I am increasingly convinced that this framework does not translate as easily as I hoped to the interpretation of house museums and historic sites.
The problem is not Fink’s taxonomy itself. The problem is that historic site visitors are usually not students in a course. They are often there by choice, joined by family or friends, have uneven prior knowledge, and motivated by many different reasons: curiosity, leisure, family activity, travel, identity, or a search for meaning. They may spend 45 minutes in a guided tour, 20 minutes in an exhibition, or an afternoon in the gardens. We need a framework that recognizes these distinct conditions.
My earlier handout, “Verbs for Significant Learning Outcomes,” tried to help museums define what they wanted visitors to know, feel, or do and to create relevant, meaningful experiences. That part still feels right. The challenge is that the categories remained too close to classroom learning. Some verbs—apply, execute, operate, practice, monitor—make sense for students or professional training but are less useful for visitors at a historic house. Because house museums and historic sites interpret history, the framework should also reflect the discipline’s core practices: using evidence, recognizing perspective, acknowledging uncertainty, connecting local stories to broader patterns, and inviting public dialogue about the past. More importantly, the framework did not clearly align with the visitor journey from first encounter to deeper meaning.
That’s a lot to juggle and I may be dropping a few balls, so here’s my preliminary draft work-in-progress revised framework organized around two related ideas: Outcome Level and Outcome Ambition.
Outcome Levels
The OutcomeLevel describes the kind of visitor change an interpretive experience is designed to support. In plain terms, it asks: What kind of change are we trying to create in visitors? Imagine levels as a journey on a nature trail: getting oriented at the trailhead; noticing plants, insects, animals, and geology; seeing how parts of the ecosystem connect; pausing at an overlook to understand the larger landscape; and leaving with a clearer sense of what you learned, what matters to you, and what you might do next.
Engaging Places 