Sarah Jones Weicksel (#3: Democratic Institutions)

(American Historical Association)

I come to this topic from my perspective at the American Historical Association, as well as both an academic and a public historian. I have worked in institutions ranging from the university to the AHA, which was founded in 1884 and chartered by the United States Congress in 1889 for the promotion of historical studies in the United States. But prior to coming to the AHA, I worked at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. From my office window I would see lines of school groups waiting to enter the museum, especially eighth graders who were there to learn about the American past, but also families from across the United States and around the world. It’s history museums like those that play a critical role in sustaining democracy. They help to sustain democracy by providing people with access to the full history of their nation, to the full history of their communities and ultimately of themselves. And, in fact, we know that the American public places a very high level of trust in museum’s portrayals of the past. 

In 2021 the American Historical Association, in collaboration with Fairleigh Dickinson University, and with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities conducted a survey called “History, the Past, and Public Culture.”  It corroborated other research that details the public’s engagement with history and in the AHA survey we found that museums and historic sites were among the most trusted sources for accurate accounts of history. They outranked documentary films. They outranked college professors. They outranked non-fiction books and high school teachers. So, the question was: Why? Well in part it’s because of the historic artefacts that are on display in those museums. Artefacts that are, of course, interpreted by historians and curators. People connect with history at museums, often through physical artefacts and to a considerable extent because of the artefacts. People place a striking level of faith in the apparent authenticity of the physical thing – this idea that an artefact witnessed the past in a way that a historian did not.

We noted in that report that objects in museums are perceived as not only representing history but as being history. They’re assumed to be unbiased links to the past. As historians we know that none of our sources are unbiased, but mobilizing that faith in objects is critical to how people understand connections between past and present. Those historic artefacts are a link to the past, but it’s only by researching and interpreting them within a much broader body of historical sources that we gain a more complete understanding of the past. It’s through museums that we can connect with the public. We ourselves need access to that broad understanding of the past. We need the successes to understand the shortcomings and even the utter failures of our past. We have to understand the unvarnished history if we’re going to understand what democracy is, what it has been, what it may be. We have to understand it so that we can value it and understand our roles in preserving and realizing the ideals upon which it was created. There are many different kinds of institutions that we’re talking about here today – universities, courts, and a wide range of institutions with which we engage on a daily basis in our lives, including museums.

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