Category Archives: RVA Museum Exhibits

Reimagining of the VHS

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The Virginia Historical Society (VHS) is in the process of spending $38 million on reimagining its museum.  The purpose of this extensive redesign is to better educate people on Virginia’s history and to increase visitors to the museum.  Having the opportunity to visit the exhibit in progress showed the limitation that space places on an exhibit.  Issues dealing with exhibit design, artifact selection, and the ways that Virginian history will be told must be addressed within the given space of the museum.  The ways that the museum space will be utilized will be influenced by the decisions of historians, exhibit designers, and even those on the board of the museum. Continue reading →

Story of Virginia: A Historic Rebirth in the Making

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Over the past few decades, attendance at many historic sites and house museums has declined steadily.  It is arguable that cultural institutions and practices undergo lifecycles and eventually die out, and that history museums may be about to do the same.  The Virginia Historical Society (VHS) faces the same challenging environment.  Cary Carson discusses the culprits for this trend and attempts to offer solutions in his article “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?”  Carson, the vice president for research at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has much first-hand knowledge of the effectiveness of marketing and immersion with respects to generating revenue for historic sites.  The VHS has compiled a list of strategic objectives, its plan B, in order to escape the attendance troubles that have plagued the field.  Can history museums, like the VHS, survive, develop their educational missions, and remain financially viable? Continue reading →

The Library as the Center of Community

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When I walked into the Library of Virginia a few weeks ago, the first thing I noticed was not the books, or exhibition signs but rather, the people themselves. They were both people who had come in from the street to use the atrium as a place to sit and talk and get out of the cold and people there to check out books and review records. When I have always thought of a library I have always thought about scholars finding their materials to write about or the young kid checking out his first library book. What I saw before me that day though was not just that, it was actually so much more.  But what was this something more? Why did it strike me as it did? Continue reading →

Creating History: The Reverence for Family and the Power of the Personal

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As I walked into the “To Be Sold” exhibit at the Library of Virginia, a section of Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s now classic work “The Presence of the Past” describing public opinion on museum and family history moved to the forefront of my thoughts, and I spent much of the tour contemplating how the exhibit and this text related to each other. Interested in the popular uses of history in American life, Rosenzweig and Thelen asked 1,500 Americans to rank the perceived trustworthiness of various sources. The average response put “Personal accounts from grandparents or other relatives” second-highest on the list, just behind “Museums” and well ahead of “College history professors.” Considering the significance that many Americans attach to personal accounts and family histories, I often found myself weighing the exhibit’s significance to family history: How and in what ways does “To Be Sold” incorporate a sense of familial or personal history into the display? Continue reading →

Community-controlled attractions: Locals wield more power than you think

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From the 1830s to the Civil War, Richmond was the second largest slave-trading hub in the nation next to New Orleans. Shockoe Bottom, an area located along the James River, is one of Richmond’s oldest neighborhoods and was central in the slave trade. In a battle to preserve this Historic Slave Trade site, Ana Edwards, head of a coalition of scholars, artists, community activists, has argued recently that putting a minor league ballpark in Shockoe Bottom detracts from Richmond’s ability to come to terms with its slave past. Reasoning that if we do not deal with the slave trade history in Shockoe Bottom, Edwards continued, Richmond “will always struggle through this identity crisis that it has.” A museum in Shockoe Bottom would enable both local and national communities to interpret and examine Richmond’s role in the slave trade, shedding light on stories that deserve telling. In this, a slave trade museum or memorial site is important because it preserves the past and legitimatizes it by keeping the local communities incorporated in the past experiences. Continue reading →

The Story of Virginia 2.0

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In his article, “The End of History Museums: What’s Plan B?,” Cary Carson, former Vice President of the Research Division for the Colonial Willamsburg Foundation, calls into question the challenge faced by many institutions today: Can museums keep up, or are they trapped in the cycle of decline that so many before have fallen prey to? With the internet providing faster and easy access to historical content, it is not enough to simply show the facts, museums must go above and beyond. Continue reading →