Curating America's Painful Past
Subtitle: Memory, Museums, and the National Imagination
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2021
Language: eng
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9780700632398
Description: "This book argues that acknowledgment of painful pasts at the geographic and ideological center of American national identity is crucial for addressing inequities in the present. The study analyzes four major museums on the National Mall that are dedicated to traumatic histories: the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Paying close attention to museum narratives and visual displays, Gruenewald explains how even some of the most harrowing and disturbing aspects of America's history have been and are still framed to support core American ideologies"--