Musing about the narrative of Washington DC

An old friend and her family were in town, so I spent some time with them over the past couple days going to museums. It's always good to do this, because you look at the various institutions, services, the way people are treated, etc., with fresh eyes.

So this forced me to run around the Smithsonian National Museum of American History before it closed for renovation. And I hate to admit I hadn't been to the Transportation exhibit, "America on the Move."

I think it was pretty good, although not much different from the exhibit a few years ago on transit at the National Building Museum (maybe 2002?), except that the NMAH exhibit goes beyond the Washington region.

But a chunk of the exhibit focuses on Washington, DC, around 1900, on how people got around (streetcars, carriages) how goods were transported, the Center Market and "farm to market" issues, as well as the beginnings of suburban development.

The NBM exhibit of a few years ago organized the narrative in four phases of development in the region: the walking city; the transit city; the suburban city; and the regional city; looking at how people organized their lives around mobility, and the land use patterns that developed.

In some respects the NMAH exhibit uses the same kind of narrative, although it looks at these issues nationally as well as at the dimension of travel and migration--so you get shipping and container ships, development of the national road system and the Interstates, travel and tourism, Route 66 kind of stuff.

I raise this because I wonder if that kind of narrative is the way to organize exhibits about Washington, DC and the region, and its history--around mobility and land use patterns, addding various dimensions and threads, from schooling and education to race and civil rights.

I have been thinking about how such issues relate to a revitalized "city museum" and how it can and should interpret the history of the city.

I also poked around the National Museum of the American Indian, which has been criticized for the tribal-cultural-centric manner of its narrative. But it works, and there is no question that this is a perspective that tends to be missed in looking at the historiography of Native Americans in the more traditional fashion of history as told by the winners. E.g., an exhibit on guns had a subhead "Dispossession and resistance."

Index Keywords: cultural-heritage-tourism