When asked about Vincent van Gogh, most people answer: he’s the crazy painter that cut off (part of) his ear, right? Although he’s best known for his work, his personal anguish comes a close second. We know a lot about his life because a great deal of the letters that he wrote have been preserved: […]
Tag: public history
Mapping Slavery: making the passive past present
Nowadays street names, statues and buildings are part of a heated debate about how we deal with our slavery history. Activists and some experts plead for more attention to the more controversial side of the persons we named our streets and buildings after and who we have literally put on a pedestal, like Peter Stuyvesant. […]
Unwrapping Slavery
How do you deal with a problem you easily get lost in? You draw up a map! That is what the creators of Mapping Slavery thought of when they launched the internationally known public history project about Dutch history of slavery. Other than the German Stolperstein project which focusses on the victims of national socialism, […]
Can you save Superman? Queer blood could
Art by Jordan Eagles used in the online exhibition Can you save Superman? for the Leslie-Lohman museum In 1981 several, previously healthy gay men got seriously ill from pneumonia or cancer in Los Angeles, New York and California. At the end of the year 270 men suffered from (auto-)immune disease. 121 men died. Some people […]
Bottom-up History – Stories from the Streets
Have you ever wandered through the Amsterdam Red Light District and wondered how these people came to work there? Or maybe you have felt hesitant to approach a homeless person in your city even though their story intrigues you. This interest in life at the bottom of the social ladder is completely normal, since it […]
Afterlives of slavery – a small exhibition with a big impact.
‘Can the Tropenmuseum ever really be decolonized, being a former colonial institute?’, asks Mitchell Esajas himself in his reflection about the exhibition ‘Afterlives of Slavery’ – a semi permanent exhibition that opened in 2017 and is currently still open in the Tropenmuseum till the end of 2020. In the fall of 2017 25.000 people visited […]
Funeral museum Tot Zover is all but dead and buried
How do we deal with death? That is what it is all about at the Tot Zover museum located at ‘De Nieuwe Ooster’ graveyard in Amsterdam. The Funeral museum Tot Zover is celebrated because of its very unique concept and location. To wit, the museum houses itself in the former residence of the graveyard director/undertaker. […]
Bleuland’s babies in bottles
“Quiver with horror at skeletons, organs, foetuses and body parts in formaldehyde!” This caption at the website of the Utrecht University Museum refers to the Bleuland Cabinet, home of the private collection of physician Jan Bleuland (1756-1838). Bleuland lived in an age of change. The development of instruments and technics, in which the physician himself […]
Harnessing the power of history
‘How can the past be of practical value in the present?’ It’s a question we historians hear very often. Well, I could argue ‘of very practical value’, but it’s easier to show that significance by introducing you to the International Coalition of Historic Site Museums of Conscience. Ruth J. Abram, the president and founder of the […]
Gazing at the Rijksmuseum
I think I had to read Decoding the Visitor’s Gaze at least four times before starting to get a sense of what the chapter by Gordon Fyfe and Max Ross is actually about. And even now, I’m not sure whether I understand what their findings truly entail. But I’ll give it a go anyways. In […]