National history museum

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A national history museum or national historical museum is a history museum dedicated to presenting artifacts and exhibits reflecting the history of a particular nation, usually its home country. The earliest public museums, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford [1] and the Louvre Museum in Paris, [2] were focused on natural history and art, respectively, and not necessarily on subjects related to the history of any nation. Following Napoleon's use of the Louvre as a center of national pride during his reign, other countries began to use museums not just to store artifacts of aesthetic or educational value, but to portray the country itself in a positive light.

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Historically, some national history museums have been used purely as propaganda tools through which governments attempt to convey an official history. For example, "the Nazi regime employed the museum as a deliberate tool of propaganda and 'public education'". [3] It has further been argued that "the very idea of an officially sponsored national history museum is simply outdated" in light of the trend towards pluralistic interpretation of artifacts. [3] On the other hand, it has been argued that: "To create a national history museum that discards unitary national narratives as well as causal trajectories (the teleology of the nation)—in effect to subvert the form—is probably impossible". [4] One concern of national history museums, therefore, is how to fairly and neutrally depict negative periods in a nation's own history.

Examples

National history museums include:

See also

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References

  1. Swann, Marjorie (2001), Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  2. "History of Louvre". History of Louvre. Retrieved 14 November 2013.
  3. 1 2 Dirk Verheyen, United City, Divided Memories?: Cold War Legacies in Contemporary Berlin (2010), p. 37.
  4. Paul Ashton, Paula Hamilton, "Unfinished Business", in Daniel J. Walkowitz, Lisa Maya Knauer, eds., Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation (2008), p. 88.