A History of Museum Resilience: Q&A with Author Samuel Redman
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UMass Amherst history professor Samuel Redman, author of the 2022 book "The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience," was recently interviewed by the American Alliance of Museums to discuss how the museum field has met, responded to, and moved forward following periods of disaster and crisis.
Below, read an excerpt from the interview.
Adam Rozan (AR): You’ve written several books, including Bone Rooms, Prophets and Ghosts, and The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience, which came out last year. While each book is different, they all discuss aspects of museum history. What’s your interest in museums, and how would you describe the kind of museum-based storytelling you do?
Samuel Redman (SR): I’ve always been fascinated by museums, and I became seriously interested in the history of museums as an undergraduate. At around the same time, I worked in a variety of roles at the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Field Museum of Natural History, and History Colorado. During my journey as a museum professional, I learned a good deal about museum methods, all while becoming even more compelled by the story of how these places came to be. Eventually, I left my work in the museum world to pursue additional training as a historian.
In graduate school at Berkeley, I had access to an extraordinary museum archive as well as a stand-alone anthropology library. This allowed me to continue to dive deeper into museum history and the history of anthropology. I’ve become fascinated by working to understand how museums and other cultural institutions speak to important themes in American life. This includes stories about colonialism, science, popular education, and civic life. During my time in graduate school, I was also fortunate to work in museum archives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. By exploring these archives and drawing stories with objects, newspapers, fiction, oral histories, and a host of other sources, the story of how people in the United States have thought about museums becomes much richer and more complex than people often understand it to be.
AR: In your latest book, The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience, what historical moments do you explore?
SR: The book opens with a terrible 1865 fire at the Smithsonian Institution. I note that the fire, while devastating in part, also provided an impetus to modernize the museum in all sorts of important ways. From there, the opening chapter of the book, and the story that inspired the entire investigation, is the history of museums during the 1918 influenza epidemic (more commonly known as the “Spanish Flu”). The second chapter explores the Great Depression’s ramifications on the Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley (then the University Museum). The next chapter traces the story of the Smithsonian as it responded to the Second World War. From there, the book takes a look at the 1970 Artists Strike, an event where artists in New York City banded together to stage protests at museums across the city, especially The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Culture Wars of the 1980s and 1990s, with many flashpoints surrounding museums, felt deserving of a chapter of its own. And finally, a chapter on recent museum controversies and disasters, from the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing racial reckoning, brings the story closer to the present day.