How do you interpret a historic house associated with a well-known woman while also telling the stories of the other women who lived and worked there?
At the Surratt House Museum in Clinton, Maryland, the question is particularly interesting. Mary Surratt is infamous for her involvement in the conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, but that story largely unfolded elsewhere. By 1864, Mary had moved to a boardinghouse she owned in Washington, D.C., and rented the Maryland property to tavernkeeper John Lloyd. The Washington boardinghouse became a meeting place for John Wilkes Booth and his fellow conspirators. The Maryland house played a different role: weapons and other supplies were hidden there and retrieved by Booth and David Herold as they fled Washington after the assassination.
Our guide made that distinction clear. Booth never entered the house, and we were essentially told to “check your Booth at the door.” Instead, the tour concentrated on the house and the people who had lived and worked there.
Mary and her husband, John, lived here with their children from 1852 to 1864. Their home also operated as a tavern, post office, polling place, and lodging place for travelers. In addition, the Surratts enslaved men, women, and children whose labor supported both the household and its businesses. The tour was most effective when it used the house itself to show how differently women experienced the same place.
Mary Williams exhibit at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum. Photograph courtesy of Ken Turino.
How can a historic site interpret a woman when no diary, letters, or other substantial body of her writing survives? While attending the joint AASLH/NCPH conference in Providence, Rhode Island, I joined a three-site tour, Mary Williams, Making History in Providence, that demonstrated one approach: return to the available evidence and ask different questions of it.
Historian Charlotte Carrington-Farmer led the tour with National Park Service Ranger Andrew Schnetzer. We began at the Rhode Island Historical Society’s John Brown House Museum, where we viewed an exhibit Carrington-Farmer created from her research into Mary’s life—the first public history exhibit to tell Mary’s story. From there, we traveled to the Charter Museum at the Rhode Island State House and then to Roger Williams National Memorial, which encompasses part of the original settlement, including the Williams house lot and the site where Roger was first buried. Together, the three sites helped us explore the Providence Mary knew.
Banished from Massachusetts Bay for his religious dissent, Roger Williams founded Providence in 1636 as a place offering greater religious liberty. Mary Williams was his wife of nearly half a century and often headed their household during his long absences. Historical accounts of Providence and Rhode Island have long focused on Roger’s ideas and accomplishments. That emphasis has left Mary at the edges of the story, in part because most of the surviving documents concern him.
The absence of Mary’s own writings does not mean there is little to say about her. The problem may not be missing evidence but the questions historians have asked of it. What I found most important about the tour was seeing Charlotte put that idea into practice. She had not discovered a new collection of Mary’s papers. Instead, she approached familiar records with questions centered on Mary rather than Roger.
Most of us see only a small fraction of the exhibitions being produced by museums around the country. Experience Oregon, the permanent exhibition at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland, offers one example of how a state history museum can combine collections, media, immersive environments, and interactive experiences to tell a broad and complicated story.
Opened in February 2019, Experience Oregon occupies the museum’s entire third floor and explores Oregon history from human settlement to the present. Rather than relying entirely on a chronological narrative, the exhibition makes connections across time through subjects such as home, movement, and water, while emphasizing the relationships among people, communities, and the land. More than 300 objects and archival materials from the Oregon Historical Society’s collections appear throughout the exhibition.
The exhibition offers many different ways to encounter that history. Visitors begin with a panoramic theater introducing Oregon’s landscapes, people, and major themes. Elsewhere they can walk through a covered wagon, explore maps, listen to personal narratives, encounter historic photographs and artifacts, participate in debates about historical issues, and learn about subjects ranging from Indigenous cultures and treaty-making (or treaty-breaking!) to migration, racism, immigration, civil rights, industry, transportation, politics, and social change. OHS described more than twenty interactive stations when the exhibition opened, including sensory experiences that use smells associated with salmon, hazelnuts, and wheat.
The exhibition was designed by The Design Minds and fabricated by 1220 Exhibits. Digital media is integrated throughout rather than concentrated in a single area. North Shore Productions developed the exhibition’s media, including the panoramic introductory film, archival documentaries, audio narratives, and a film about the revitalization of Chinuk Wawa. Upswell developed several of the interactive experiences, including map-based explorations, stations where visitors consider issues from Oregon’s past, and a digital “Memory Blanket” that allows visitors to assemble a personal record of their experience.
The exhibition received a 2020 Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History and a 2020 Special Achievement – Informed by Community Voices Award from the American Alliance of Museums.
Note: I revised this post on October 2, 2026 to clarify the terminology: Outcome Levels changed to Outcome Types. Outcome Types describe the kind of change an experience is intended to encourage. Ambition Levels describe the degree of change it is reasonable to expect.
A few months ago, I shared a preliminary framework for rethinking learning outcomes at historic sites. I was trying to solve a problem I had encountered repeatedly: educational taxonomies developed for classrooms do not always translate well to historic sites and house museums. Visitors are not students enrolled in a semester-long course. They arrive with different motivations, prior knowledge, amounts of time, and degrees of interest. I proposed a framework organized around two ideas—Outcome Levels and Ambition Levels—that better reflect the visitor journey and the practice of interpreting history.
Since then, I’ve continued testing and refining those ideas. One part of that work has been developing a more practical vocabulary for writing outcomes at each level. The result is a new six-page handout, What You Want Visitors to Know, Feel, or Do: Five Outcome Types for Historic Sites and House Museums, which I’m sharing with this post (and subject to change!). I also realized that using “levels” for both is confusing and that Outcome Levels may suggest that a higher level is better than a lower one, thus I changed to Outcome Types (I’ll restate this again later to reinforce the distinction).
Historic sites and house museums often begin planning interpretation by asking what stories they want to tell, which objects they want to display, or what activities visitors should experience. Those are important questions, but they don’t define success.
A stronger starting point is:
What do we want visitors to know, feel, or do as a result of this experience?
That shift—from what the museum presents to what happens for the visitor—can make interpretation much more intentional.
The parlor in the Frary House at Historic Deerfield in Deerfield, Massachusetts. C. Alice Baker restored the house in the 1890s as her Colonial Revival home.
For years, I have heard the same frustration from people working at historic sites: “It is so hard to find information about the women who lived here.” But finding women is only part of the challenge. Even when information about them exists, interpreting their lives can be difficult. Too often, interpretation emphasizes familiar domestic roles and spaces—the kitchen, nursery, or parlor—without exploring the fuller range of women’s experiences.
Earlier this year, I heard many of these same concerns during an American Association for State and Local History (AASLH) discussion on women’s history. Participants described women appearing only in passing in historical records or being found through records associated with men. Others pointed to museum collections that historically documented women’s domestic lives more readily than other aspects of their experiences. The discussion raised two related questions: How do we find the women, and what do we do with what we find?
These questions lie at the heart of a book I am now writing, Interpreting Women’s Lives at Historic House Museums. The challenge is not simply finding more evidence about women. It is reconsidering the approaches we use to find and understand their lives and then bringing that understanding back to the historic places where their stories are told.
Learning from Women’s History
Traditional methods of historical research were largely developed around the activities through which men exercised public power: politics, government, military service, property ownership, and business. Those approaches have produced an enormous body of historical knowledge.
But historians of women discovered decades ago that those same approaches could not simply be applied to women and expected to produce the same results. If we look for women only where we have traditionally found men, women can appear marginal to the historical story. And if we measure women’s lives against men’s experiences, we risk overlooking the ways women exercised power, earned money, maintained relationships, acquired and transferred property, participated in communities, moved through the landscape, and shaped the world around them.
The problem therefore requires more than adding women’s names to an existing story. It requires drawing on methods developed by historians of women to examine women’s lives on their own terms. Those methods have shaped the practical approach I am developing for historic house museums.
Drawn entirely from the library’s extraordinary collections, the exhibition presents rare books, photographs, manuscripts, posters, and other historical documents in two long display cases. Rather than telling a chronological story, it explores patriotism through a series of themes, including absolutism, inclusion and exclusion, American exceptionalism, and patriotism as ideology. The introductory label reads:
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:
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.
Note: This essay is part of an ongoing exploration of how museums and historic sites can define meaningful visitor experiences. I continue that work in “Beyond ‘Learn’ and ‘Appreciate’: Writing Better Visitor Outcomes,” which builds on these ideas by introducing five Outcome Types and a more structured approach to writing interpretive outcomes.
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.
Screenshot from “The Clip Economy is Eating Everything” by the Atlantic.
I was recently listening to a podcast from The Atlantic—“The Clip Economy is Eating Everything”—where Charlie Wartsall interviews business writer Ed Elson about the rise of short-form video. Their argument is straightforward: the dominant unit of media is no longer the article, the podcast, or even the YouTube video. It’s the clip.
That stuck with me and I’m uncomfortable.
Much of what rises to the top in this “clip economy” is not especially thoughtful or constructive. And yet, it’s how many people are now consuming information—not through television, books, newspapers, museums, or even longer-form digital content, but through YouTube Shorts, Instagram, and TikTok. Whether we like it or not, this is the environment our audiences are living in.
While I’ve been producing content for this blog for more than fifteen years, a few years ago I began producing YouTube videos. Based on research on the attention span of viewers, I aimed for a six-minute length but yikes, those take me days to produce. I don’t do it frequently so editing is slow, narration has to be re-recorded when I inevitably trip over a sentence, and assembling images into something coherent takes real effort.
