The Proactive Museum and the Public

By Circe de Bruin   The nature of the decision-making process conducted for an museum exhibition has changed, observes Mark Liddiard in his essay “Changing Histories: museums, sexuality and the future of the past”. Based on interviews with staff and visitors of local, national and independent museums in the UK he describes the following trend: […]

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Sex Sells

By Kevin Schram Sexuality in museums. A topic discussed in the last part of Mark Liddiards research essay ‘Changing Histories: Museums, Sexuality and the Future of the Past’ on the changes occurring in museums, concerning technologies and attitudes towards the past. He argues that questions should be asked about the identity and direction of museums […]

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Creating interest or context?

By Corine Bossink   Who haven’t heard of them? Twitter accounts or Facebook pages who pretend to present ‘history’, posting ‘historical’ pictures, like @HistoryInPics. In February 2014 they had 1.02 million followers, which expanded to 2.62 million nowadays [1]. They even have a Tumblr, Instagram and Facebook page. In other words, they are amazingly popular. […]

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A historical façade or historical experience?

“These accounts strip history of the truly fun parts: curiosity, detective work, and discovery” states the academician Rebecca Onion in ‘Snapshots of History’. Her plea focuses on the argument that widely popular Twitter accounts with historical pictures or photographs are bad for understanding history and therefore bad for people. They are failing to provide context […]

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Doing History

The article “I nevertheless am a historian’: Digital Historical Practice and Malpractice around Black Confederate Soldiers” by Leslie Madsen-Brooks centers about the idea that more and more non-academic employed historians are ‘doing’ history and that this is not a bad thing. It is stimulating and it gives hope that so many people want to engage […]

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