Tag Archives: House museums

Historic House Museum Summit This Week

This small selection of historic sites operated by The National Society of The Colonial Dames reveals the enormous diversity of house museums and historic sites in the United States.

In 2007, I helped organize the Forum on Historic Site Stewardship in the 21st Century, which resulted in an influential issue of Forum Journal that laid out the major challenges and opportunities, including the need for financial sustainability, a willingness to change in response to the needs of the community, and a balance between the needs of buildings, landscapes, collections, and the visiting public. It also recognized that museum standards may not be the best practices for historic sites and that the profession “must develop new measures, beyond attendance, that document the quality of visitor engagement at sites and the extent of community outreach beyond the bounds of historic sites.”

So what has happened in the 16 years that followed? We’ll find out this week as the American Association for State and Local History hosts a virtual summit on the Sustainability, Relevance, and the Future of Historic House Museums on July 11-12. Sessions will address measuring the impact of house museums, broadening interpretation, care of buildings and landscapes, and the evolution of mission statements.

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March Webinars for House Museums and Historic Sites

It’s a webinar bonanza at Engaging Places this month! We’ll be participating in two different back-to-back webinars in March for house museums and historic sites, one on interpreting women’s history and the other on management and strategy.

On Thursday, March 25, 2021 at 10:00 am Central, the Wisconsin Historical Society is hosting a free panel discussion on “Sharing Women’s History: Exploring New Stories and Formats for Engaging Audiences“. Panelists include Mary van Balgooy, Vice President of Engaging Places, LLC and Executive Director of the Society of Woman Geographers; Meredith S. Horsford, Executive Director, Dyckman Farmhouse Museum; and Brooke Steinhauser, Program Director, The Emily Dickinson Museum. House museums, historic sites, and other cultural organizations can share women’s history through special programs, tours, and other storytelling formats. From a broad view of new directions for interpretation to strategies for virtual engagement, panelists will share examples of innovative programming and best practices for interpreting complex stories that engage new audiences. For more details, visit https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/Records/Event/EV8032

On Friday, March 26 at 3:30 pm Eastern, Stenton, The National Society of The Colonial Dames of American, and Historic Germantown are hosting, “Historic House Museum in the 21st Century: Reimaginings and New Solutions“. Stenton Curator Laura Keim will moderate a discussion with Donna Ann Harris (author of the recently updated New Solutions for House Museums) and Kenneth C. Turino and Max A. van Balgooy of Engaging Places (editors of Reimagining Historic House Museums), who will provide overviews of their recently released publications, share lessons they’ve learned from the field and their researches, and explore the nature and future of historic house museums. Cost is “Pay What You Can” and register in advance at www.stenton.org/programs. Visit http://www.rowman.com to purchase both books and use code 4S21MUS30 for a 30% discount.

Review: Historic House Museums in the US and UK by Linda Young (2017)

Young House MuseumsHistoric House Museums in the United States and the United Kingdom: A History by Linda Young. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. v + 299 pp.; bibliography, index; clothbound, $85.00; eBook, $80.00.

Historic house museums are one of the most popular ways that the public experiences history in the United States, although we only have a fragmentary understanding of their history. Linda Young tackles this topic not only for the United States but also the United Kingdom, with occasional examples from her homeland in Australia.

Linda Young is a senior lecturer in cultural heritage and museum studies at Deakin University in Melbourne, trained as a historian focused on nineteenth-century Britain. She has also worked as a curator at several house museums. After completing a survey of house museums in Australia, she expanded her scope to include the United Kingdom and United States in order to develop transnational comparisons that would reveal patterns in the motivations for transforming private houses into public museums (a process she calls ‘‘museumization’’). Furthermore, she wanted to distinguish house museums from other types of museums, giving them a distinctiveness and prominence that the museum field rarely considers. In a sense, she is giving house museums their own history and identity.

Her research into guidebooks, directories, Wikipedia entries, articles, and books, as well as field trips, convinced her that there are Continue reading →