Heritage, Commerce, and Museal Display: Toward a New Typology of Historical Exhibition in the United States

Abstract

Recent social and economic trends in the United States, most importantly the increased marketability of local heritage and the national dialogue on identity, have contributed to the proliferation of historical exhibits in the United States, often in nonmuseum spaces like retail and service settings. Scholarship on historical exhibition, however, has largely focused on exhibits in large, professionalized museums. Dividing exhibit types into categories of academic, corporate, community, entrepreneurial, and vernacular, this article explores the diverse ways in which the exhibition medium emerges from different settings, social conditions, and epistemologies.

Making Punishment Memorialization Pay? Marketing, Networks, and Souvenirs at Small Penal History Museums in Canada

“…Morin (2013, p. 10) argues that small-scale and local heritage sites, such as decommissioned jails and lockups, although possessing “no particular capital-generating potential,” should still be included in social histories of the carceral. Gordon (2008) likewise insists that these sites should be examined in tourism studies despite their size and relative popularity. Gordon uses the idea of “community exhibitions” to refer to cultural sites put together by local people and historical societies primarily for small numbers of visitors who may venture to their rural area.…”