At the Intersection of Public History and Public Diplomacy

Museums Connect stands at the intersection of public history and public diplomacy and in so doing represents a new kind of transnational public history.14 With its origins in the United States, Museums Connect grew out of changes in U.S. museums and grant making in the twenty-first century. Between 1980 and 2007, the American Association of Museums (AAM changed its name to the American Alliance of Museums in 2012) partnered with the DOS to operate the International Partnership among Museums (IPAM). This robust program connected U.S.-based museum professionals with counterparts in other countries, with the goal of sharing best practices and engaging in individual cultural diplomacy. As Erik Ledbetter, then senior manager of international programs at AAM recalled in a 2007 interview, “[a]ll these exchanges were conducted in the straightforward conviction that museum professionals operating with complete academic freedom are among the most effective ambassadors between cultures.”15 U.S. museum professionals conducted 245 projects with partners in 85 other countries that were superficially labeled as “successful”; yet when the program was reviewed in 2007, limitations were identified in IPAM’s reach and scale. The lack of a wider ripple effect beyond the individuals who were directly working on IPAM projects led AAM and DOS to review and revise their international collaboration. DOS considered how to expand the impact of its cultural and public diplomacy programs in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and AAM recognized the need to align this program with the broader trend of museums engaging more deliberately in community engagement. With dual goals of producing more meaningful and sustainable partnerships among museums rather than among individual staff members as well as creating broader community engagement with these projects—and thus expanding their public diplomacy impact—Museums Connect (originally called Museum and Community Collaborations Abroad) was launched in 2008 as the successor to IPAM.

Museums Connect was designed with the objective of engaging wider communities and more people. Individual museums in the United States and abroad were free to originate, create, and apply for Museums Connect grants. If selected through a peer-review system that included museum professionals, past participants, and AAM staff with oversight from DOS’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA), participating museums were given latitude to operate according to the performance-based outcomes agreed upon during the application and selection phase. Grants were $50,000 to $100,000, with a 50 percent cost share from the participating museums. Because the program’s main funder (DOS) is part of the U.S. government and the administrator (AAM) is a U.S.-based organization, each grant was managed by a lead U.S. museum, which was responsible for the grant’s financials, compliance, and periodic reporting. This dynamic ensured that the dominant language of the projects’ activities and reporting would be American English. Although some changes to the grant program subsequently occurred—including the reduction of project length from two years to one and a name change to Museums Connect in 2011—its principles and aims remained consistent until its final grant cycle concluded in 2017.

As the main funder, DOS ECA intended Museums Connect to operate as one part of a larger public diplomacy agenda grounded in ideas of the nation-state and the promotion of the United States internationally. Unlike shorter-term traditional diplomatic activities between politicians and ambassadors, the goals of U.S. public diplomacy programs such as Museums Connect, Fulbright student and scholar exchanges, DanceMotion USA (which sends U.S. dance groups overseas), and the American Film Showcase (which showcases U.S.-made documentaries around the world) are oriented toward the long-term goal of building good will and affinity toward the United States. DOS states, “The mission of American public diplomacy is to support the achievement of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security by informing and influencing foreign publics and by expanding and strengthening the relationship between the people and Government of the United States and citizens of the rest of the world.”16 Museums Connect focused on youth as a strategic audience in countries and regions that DOS deemed to be strategically important for economic and geopolitical reasons and reflected the belief that influencing non-U.S. youth would have a positive long-term effect on the “national interest” of the United States.

Alongside these public diplomacy goals, AAM, which administrated the program, established clear museological goals that made Museums Connect seem distinctly new and ambitious compared to previous domestic programming and IPAM’s limited reach. Identifying a lack of wider community engagement as a central limitation of IPAM, AAM reported, “The Museums Connect program strengthens connections and cultural understanding between people in the United States and abroad through innovative projects facilitated by museums and executed by their communities. The program’s mission is to build global communities through cross-cultural exchanges while also supporting U.S. foreign policy goals, such as youth empowerment, environmental sustainability and disability rights awareness.”17 These goals emerged not only from the evaluation and reconsideration of the IPAM program but also from changes in how U.S. museums and historic sites engaged with communities and their publics in the twentieth century.

From Cabinets of Curiosity to Dialogic Museums and International Public History

Museums Connect represents one example of a much larger and more gradual shift in the theory and practice of U.S. museums.18 History museums here grew in number during the nineteenth century—“the Century of History.”19 The period was marked by the accumulation of collections and specimens and a growing appreciation for the past, which had the result of dramatically increasing the number of museums around the nation. This idolatry of the past, however, occurred only within elite circles, often in urban society. Museums in the nineteenth century were places where the wealthy wielded interpretive and intellectual authority, which they used as an ideological tool and an instrument of power.20 The display and collection of international specimens and peoples were a vehicle of nation-state power. Even the international contexts within World’s Fairs traveling exhibitions had the goal of nation making and the reinforcement of societal power hierarchies.21

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, American museums began to consider their role as public institutions, and the idea of “the democratic museum” emerged.22 One of the earliest instances of this shift was recorded in an 1872 New York Times article about the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was attempting to encourage working people to take advantage of a free weekend day at the museum. Although the article’s language makes the paternalism of this venture obvious, the goal of the scheme centered around the consumption of the aesthetic and thus its meaning. “Yesterday,” the article reported, “the experiment was tried of throwing [the museum] open to the public, without restriction, on Saturdays, and it was expected that there would be a great rush, and that those whose occupations confine them to the desk, or the room, or the counter all the week would joyfully profit by the privilege and attend . . . Unfortunately this result was not arrived at.”23 Similarly, in the 1880s the Smithsonian Institution’s assistant secretary in charge of the National Museum, George Brown Goode, embraced the belief that museums could be places to benefit society and serve educational roles. Under Goode’s guidance, museum personnel, while maintaining the institution’s collection of artifacts, specimens, and art that had once been thought to exude meaning by their presence alone, began to consider what larger knowledge museum objects and artifacts might convey.24

The rise of public education was a significant national political issue during the Progressive era at the turn of the twentieth century, and this debate encouraged American museums to use their collections more deliberately and thoughtfully for the education of their audiences.25 In his 1917 essay “The Gloom of the Museum,” John Cotton Dana, founder and director of the Newark Museum, insisted, contrary to conventional thinking, that museums should consider their public function: “Now seems to come the demand that the museum serve its people in the task of helping them to appreciate the high importance of manner, to hold by the laws of simplicity and restraint, and to broaden their sympathies and multiply their interests.”26

In the early twentieth-century museum, however, this sentiment was only beginning to gain credence. While the impulse to educate was becoming a larger trend, it was not ubiquitous and remained enmeshed in museums’ wider ideological and political functions. Many urban historical societies continued to act as gathering places and social clubs for elites long into the twentieth century.27 As interest in history continued to flourish in the early twentieth-century United States, other types of interpretive sites emerged, including outdoor museums such as Colonial Williamsburg and Greenfield Village as well as units of the National Park Service.28

The seeds of change that began in Progressive era art museums faded as American museums began to reflect the economic, political, and societal shifts that took place between the 1930s and 1950s: the economic disarray of the Great Depression, attempts to appeal to traditional art museum visitors who had moved to the newly developed suburbs, and fears of being associated with “the taint of socialism.”29 In response to the civil rights movement and the new social history paradigms of the 1960s, however, as well as to the fracturing of the liberal consensus and the associated culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, museums—and public historians more broadly—did begin to address the need to democratize the interpretation and exhibition of history and engage others in the history-making enterprise.30

These changes were not homogeneously embraced in all U.S. museums. The 1960s and 1970s were also a time when many community and neighborhood African American museums—connected to the politics of the civil rights and black power movements and to larger shifts in African American political and economic power—opened and began to challenge what the African American poet June Jordan lambasted as “ultimately meaningless temples of Euro-American hegemony.”31 These contestations to the dominant, mainstream, national museum culture mirrored similar challenges by Native Americans that manifested in “the Native American Museum movement” and serve as cautions against painting trends in U.S. museums with too broad a brush.32

The move to revise traditional museum power relationships gained broader momentum in the final decades of the twentieth century, providing practical and theoretical contexts for the Museums Connect program and the three U.S. museums featured in this book’s case studies. In his study of the reconceptualization of power among public historians and museums in the 1980s and 1990s, the oral and public historian Michael Frisch has coined the term a shared authority, a phrase that has come to form a central tenet of the practice and study of public history.33 Grounded in broadly democratic assumptions about the public sphere, Frisch’s thesis is a potent descriptor of the way in which historical knowledge became understood in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and it challenged public and oral historians to consider their own position vis-à-vis their power and the public. Yet while his argument is still central to the practice of oral historians, his notion of a shared authority has been adapted and employed differently by public historians. Contrary to Frisch’s original argument—that authority is inherently shared—the assumption that a public historian has authority to share and thus should be sharing it with the public has become common in the field and a central part of public history practice. The subtle distinction between Frisch’s conception and the prescriptive use that now pervades the public history field reflects different understandings of where the authority in history making lies. Sharing authority may seem to be a benevolent way to include others in the practice of history making, yet it reflects an assumption on the part of public historians that they possess the authority to interpret the past: that it is theirs to share. As a result, exhibitions, community forums, and community-based programming are often conducted on the terms of the professional public historian, who retains control over the practice of meaning making. Although different public historians apply the concept in different ways and in different contexts, few analyze or interrogate the idea of sharing authority as a paternalistic practice.

Frisch has recognized the misuse of his original conception and has since revisited the idea.34 Nonetheless, as a mode of public history, sharing authority has been widely embraced and has shaped the field as well as the scholarship and practices that informed the 2008 creation of Museums Connect. In the decades since Frisch published his original study, many museums and historic sites have incorporated his ideas and have attempted to move toward the idea of the forum—a seminal notion that Duncan Cameron introduced twenty years before Frisch’s theory of shared authority—and beyond institutional legacies in which museums act as the sole author of the past. In so doing they engage their publics in many different ways—for instance, by considering their interpretations and perspectives of the past and allowing dialogue and dispute to occur within an institution’s once-hallowed walls.35 One important outcome of this larger rethinking of the intellectual underpinnings of museums has been a shift in the way in which museums think about and engage with their local communities and the role that they play in fostering an inclusive civil society.36 The focus on communities has also influenced the highest levels of the profession in the United States, resulting, for instance, in the AAM’s 1998 Museums and Community Initiative, a signal of the importance that communities had gained in the language of museums. This was accompanied by a range of new guidelines and scholarship that considered the opportunities, challenges, and implications of reorienting public history and museum practices toward communities.

One tangible outgrowth of this shift has been a growing acceptance of the concept of the dialogic museum. The idea of a public historian as a facilitator rather than a knowledge giver decenters institutional authority, placing dialogue at the center of public history and requiring public historians to bring a different set of skills to their practice.37 The Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York City, for example, has transformed its practice and relationship to expertise and knowledge and has introduced dialogic programming to connect visitors to the history of immigration that the site interprets. Small facilitator-led dialogic programs encourage visitors to challenge their preconceived stereotypes and consider the contemporary ramifications of New York’s immigrant history.38 Around the United States, a number of other historic sites have also attempted to rethink the relationship between place and the immigrant communities that those places represent.39 According to the scholars Katharine Corbett and Dick Miller, “shared inquiry” should be at the center of reflective public history practice. That is, all participants should be able to share questions, guide the direction of inquiry, and truly practice a communal exploration of the past, even if they desire different outcomes from the process.40 These theoretical changes have directly affected public history practice and are changing power relationships between public historians and the public. Yet even though the trend is now dominant in the United States, the evolution of practice and the way in which museums and public historians view history making vis-à-vis the public should not be misunderstood as a homogeneous shift among all U.S. museums. Rather, this evolution is occurring sporadically as museums respond to their local political, social, and economic landscapes.

Toward a New Set of Transnational Public History Practices

In recent years a developing body of scholarship around public history in postcolonial contexts has merged these new modi operandi for public historians with the recent internationalization of the field.41 These studies have energized the nascent field of scholarship that seeks to analyze, categorize, and take stock of the international turn.42 This book joins that field in its focus on Museums Connect. Growing out of the American museological and public history contexts, the program stood, during its existence, at the intersection of the current international turn in public history and the movement of public history sites, institutions, and practitioners toward engaging more inclusively and democratically with community partners. Museums Connect partnered U.S. and non-U.S. museums and their communities and demonstrated unique community engagement dynamics both locally and transnationally that starkly highlighted embedded power differentials. In this way, it revealed the challenges and potential of strategies developed and implemented to mitigate entrenched hierarchies of power in community-focused public history programming.

Increasingly, museums, historic sites, university faculty, classes, and public history institutions are searching for projects and programming that attempt to co-create the past with historically marginalized individuals, groups, and communities and to overcome historical-institutional silences. I argue that history making—through exhibitions and programming—can minimize and mitigate international hierarchies and barriers of power through deliberately reflective practice that interrogates individual and institutional authority—codified in sharing authority—from the outset. Care is required, however, to ensure that this important but hard-to-navigate work is handled delicately and that historical hierarchies of power are not reinforced.

Given the heterogeneity of the museum field and the diverse range of institutional, local, and individual contexts informing Museums Connect projects, these strategies neither claim to be definitive nor to be the only ways to negotiate transnational public history power hierarchies. Rather, they represent a range of strategies that institutions, their staff, and their community partners deliberately—and sometimes accidentally—employed to successfully respond to different local contexts and situations within their projects to mitigate hierarchies of power baked into Museums Connect and created by the actions and decisions of the participating institutions and their staff, especially the assumption of authority by U.S. museum professionals and public historians.

In studying the opportunities and potential pitfalls of strategies used to navigate these power differentials, our understanding of how best to challenge, negotiate, and mitigate museums’ and public historians’ institutional authority is advanced. Shining a light on museum-community collaborations within a wider transnational frame demonstrates effective strategies to overcome power hierarchies in local and domestic contexts where political, social, and economic differentials may be less immediately obvious. At the core of Museums Connect and institutional public history work more broadly, however, is the negotiation of institutional behaviors and actions by marginalized communities. Understanding and embracing the exciting possibility that comes from this recognition—and allowing for negotiation in institutional practices—open our practice to become more relevant to communities, to gain greater community buy-in, and to continue to de-center the authority and power of public history practitioners and institutions in community history making. In so doing, our institutions, knowing that the barriers to a truly democratic institution-community relationship exist and will never be truly eradicated but continuously challenged and pushed against from within and without, can move further down the road toward becoming inclusive, democratic, and more relevant to historically marginalized communities.

This book focuses on three Museums Connect partnerships between museums in the United States and museums in Afghanistan, Morocco, and South Africa, using them as case studies for analyzing the practical and theoretical implications of transnational public history. An examination of their diverse geographical and geopolitical contexts as well as their different public history practices allows us to understand the multifaceted social, political, and economic imperatives that shaped and directed Museums Connect projects and to assess their successes and shortcomings. Chapter 1 elucidates the specific conditions in the fields of public history and public diplomacy that gave rise to the program. Chapter 2 looks at the way in which local political contexts and public history and memory-making practices shaped Museums Connect collaborations between the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Chapter 3 focuses on the use of transnational public history pedagogy in the projects shared between the Museum of History and Holocaust Education at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and the Ben M’sik Community Museum at University Hassan II in Casablanca. Chapter 4 considers the International Youth Legacy Leadership project conducted between the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama and the Nelson Mandela House Museum and the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg. The book concludes with a discussion about how these programs shed light on Museums Connect as a new type of transnational public history that can help us understand the essential democratic and inclusive underpinnings of museum-community partnerships.