Week 2

In Defining Memory, Amy Levin presents essays that reveal the specialized importance of smaller, ‘local’ museums. She highlights that they provide a variation from the large-scale, high profile institutions, such as the Smithsonian or the Met, without placing a higher value on one type of museum. Her book gives the smaller museums a presence that the AAM does not recognize.

Levin argues that ‘local’ museums assert their agency through their interpretations and educational approaches. She uses Elizabeth Vance’s ideas about Shwab and Huebner’s Curriculum Theories to discuss how these institutions represent the ‘commonplace’ of education in America. In addition, she also recognizes the importance personal memory has and how it influences learning.

In David Kyvig’s Foreword, he points out that “a contrary view, at once older and more recent, is that anyone who visits a museum should be free to examine the full range of objects preserved there and make whatever connections and interpretations they wish. (4)” This statement illustrates how no individual museum staff member or specifically, educator, can control what a visitor takes away from their experience. Therefore, Levin’s compilation of case studies provides a variety of approaches, both conventional and non-conventional.

The history these institutions provide is intensely specific and usually in abundance, as in the cases of the Geneva History Center and the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum. On the one hand, at the Geneva History Center, Levin points out that the staff has taken considerable care to display and explain the objects they have. This is a stark contrast to the approach staff members at the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum took, where they have chosen to stick with older methods of displaying everything with little or no explanation. In either case, however, the public still has the opportunity of making their own interpretations.

Levin also describes how nostalgia and what people expect to find in museums play an important part in how museum educators approach learning in their institutions. She acknowledges that “nostalgia…affects the knowledge imparted by the museums.(93)” As was the case with CowTown, where what was represented was not a historical truth, however, it still managed to conjure up public memory.

Therefore, Levin’s book illustrates that memory is an important part of public history. As was mentioned last week, it is the public’s personal memories that help them relate to a museum and the objects contained in them or the motivating factor in visiting an archive for genealogical research. However, because memories are not physical documents, the book presents the continuing controversy that memories do not hold the same weight as history or historical documents. If public memory is so important, but still disregarded in the professional arena, what options are left for museum professionals? The answer to this is why I think Levin wrote this book. To provide museum professionals with a guide as to what CAN work, not to necessarily provide a one-size-fits all guide to what does work.