Living
History Museums: An Overview
Throughout the U.S. my
wife Carla and I have been able to visit a bountiful number of museums and historical
sites that capture the history of our country, finding them engaging
and educational experiences.
For sixty-four years we have traveled extensively,
even more often as we are now both retired psychologists. For the
past nineteen years I has written a
weekly Venture Bound travel column for the Columbia Daily Tribune. For the last ten years Carla has been
co-author.
One of the benefits of
this kind of traveling is that adults along with children (we have four) learn
more about our history--the struggles and the progress we have made to reach
this point in history-- and also to appreciate in many ways how fortunate we
are in living at this time.
At Conner Prairie we interacted with authentic
member of the Delaware tribe who spoke the original Delaware language.
The
staff at living history museums strive
for authenticity as they drop us back into the past. Many of the museums are
original buildings, often transported in from around the state at considerable
expense. They are filled with original
furniture and tools, and if more artifacts are needed, they are made on the
grounds using original techniques. Most
living history museums limit themselves to one period in history.
We are impressed by the variety in the
approaches taken by the staffs to entertain and teach us. We especially enjoy talking with re-enactors
who take on the characteristics and dress of someone from the past and discuss
with us what their lives were like--what they were proud of, what problems they
were struggling with, and what dishes, tools,
and equipment they used.
We enjoyed seeing how the children were
treated, for example, the Conner Prairie Interactive History Park in Indiana,
where children can drop back to the 1830s to dip candles, play with hoops, and
get a chance to pump an old fashioned lathe to help a wood worker make table
legs. Children can pet the animals, the
only jarring feature from the future was the hand sanitizer to use after the
petting.
In Old Bedford, Pennsylvania,
we went back to the 1820s where we discussed burial customs with the cabinet
maker, watched the pharmacist mix his meds for the day and attended a church
service.
Most of the museums focus on a particular time
period. There is a great deal of
interest among over 50-year-olds in studying their family history. They are able
to get a very clear picture of how those ancestors lived and the kind of problems they
faced.
We were delighted to
talk to the costumed re-enactors from different
periods of time at the American Frontier Culture in Staunton, Virginia. Farm buildings had been brought in from five
foreign countries and showed how their cultures and way of life converged to
create an American farm of the 1850s.
Eight state history museums
or sites, on the other hand, presented a
broad view of the states' histories using a variety of modern techniques for
educating and entertaining visitors. Most states have magnificent displays of original
artifacts often in striking new buildings that also include the states'
historical archives.
At various sites we
saw costumed manikins who could talk, listened to audio tours, watched short
movies that captured real events in the state's history, and saw newspaper
clippings, posters, and even an occasional holograph that made the figures more
real than 3D.
For more recent
history we are now presented with oral recordings and movies made since the
twenties that inform us about life in the depression, laborers revolting
against management and the problems with race relations.
Most state history museums take us back in
time to at least the time of Native Americans, and some like the Indiana State
History Museum go back in time to the development of coal and a museum in Arizona goes back to the age of the
dinosaur.
Other history museums
took us to a specific critical event in our history such as the development of
the atomic bomb at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka, Kansas. These also use a multitude of devices and
methods to bring us into a sense of the past so we leave feeling we really understand
what happened there.
Some like BitterSweet
Cabin Village in Kentucky and The Pioneer Women Museum in Oklahoma confine
themselves to a narrow range of history. The John Deere Museum in Illinois and
the McCormick Farm in Virginia deal with a specific inventions that changed the
nature of agriculture in America.
Making History Real for Children
Experiences with
people and life from the past will broaden a child's ability to understand the
world. Classroom experiences are
frequent in living history museums, but they are often brief being no more than
an hour of two of what the classrooms were like in the past.
One of the best we've seen was in Oklahoma
where the children came for the day, dressed, as their teachers did, in turn of
the century clothes, with a home-packed lunch.
Boys were seated on one side of the room and the girls on the
other. They spent the whole day in class
learning the subject matter of the time with the teacher using the tools and
methods of the time.
At other
places we have met with re-enactors who stayed in role, Abraham Lincoln, Harry
Truman, Andrew Johnson and many common people who could tell us about their
time period.
For these contacts the children need some
preparation so they know who they are dealing with and can ask the appropriate
questions. It helps if these experiences
are intergraded into their classroom studies.
Actually getting involved and doing something is better than watching
someone do it, and watching someone do something is better than reading about
it.
We have visited one
excellent site where children lived for
five or six days to get an immersion experience in what life was like for their
ancestors, but we will probably talk about that in another book.
We have been very pleased
about what we have learned by traveling to living history museums and
historical sites.
At Conner Prairie we watched a re-enactor, make
moccasins. As we admired the size and quality of a beaver skin he was working
with, he explained the process the Native Americans used to prepare it.
At the Ark Encounter a manikin Noah tells the visitor about his
work.
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