Week 3 reading post

The book, Defining Memory, confronts the fact that memory can challenge the direction of museum and argues the question if culture is public or private property. The author makes the argument that, “Memory contests and resists official history (60).” In the chapter about Arthurdale, citizens picture in their mind how the house looked back in the 1930s and contested some of the decisions of the set up of the house, while they missed the bigger mission of the site. It seems when dealing with people’s memory, museum personal continually encounter problems with the local population about the real details of the past. This seems true in the chapter about the Dickson Mounds Museum when the Native Americans in the area had a problem with the archeologist for digging up remains at their burial ground and wanting to put a museum on the site. Communicating and having a say in the display of the museum solved the problem for the Native Americans of the museum along with stopping the digging of the burial grounds. The split in the view of the community of the Native Americans sparked the issue because of the view that Native Americans portrayed as primal. Government groups often bring problems in the creation of an exhibit because of image. The John Dillinger museum and the Enola Gay exhibit proved controversial because it showed the armed forces and the police department in a questioning perspective. Local officials accused the museum of championing John Dillinger as a criminal and therefore changed the museum’s focus to showing that crime pays and lifting up the law enforcement. Similar in the Enola Gay exhibit, the army forced the National Air and Space museum to change it’s exhibit to glorifying the plane whether than questioning it. Therefore nostalgia for the past inhibits museums because the public does not want museums to show the messy past and instead people only tell of the good memories they have in order to show their town in a pleasant perspective.