Professor Sally McKee
Department of History, UC Davis
sjmckee@ucdavis.edu
COLLECTING OURSELVES AND OTHERS
Displays of Collective Memory
in Washington, D.C.’s Monuments, Memorials and Museums
Capital cities are urban centers where power is exercised and displayed. Those who
exercise power – legislatures, presidents, judges, wealthy patrons, and even the
electorate – deploy art, monuments, and buildings to reflect or depict historical
narratives that justify or explain the exercise of that power. Sometimes, however, these
sites reflect conflicting or contradictory historical narratives rather than national
consensus. Reading monuments, memorials, and museums as texts helps us
understand how various constituencies seek to be remembered by the nation
collectively. In other words, historical relics, markers, and repositories have political
purposes as well as altruistic and aesthetic ones. This course is designed to guide
students in the interpretation of key symbols of collective memory in the U.S. capital.
Over the quarter, students will visit monuments, memorials and museums on their own
outside of seminar – or with the instructor if desired – in conjunction with assigned
readings and discussion in seminar sessions. I will circulate all articles in PDF form to the
students enrolled in the course.
How the seminar sessions will work:
Each week, the readings will be divided up among teams of two or three students. The
number of teams depends on enrollment, but each student will be responsible for
reading one article a week. Before the session for which the readings are assigned,
teams will prepare a presentation based on their assigned reading that will stimulate
discussion. In effect, each team will teach their assigned reading to the other students
in the seminar. I encourage the teams to create Powerpoint or Keynote presentations
that illustrate the major themes, places, monuments, memorials, and museums
discussed in the article. The team’s performance will be evaluated according to the
quality of the presentation and the success in provoking discussion.
Site visits:
Students must visit each week on their own or with a classmate one site in the list of
monuments, memorials, and museums appended to this syllabus. The more sites a
student proves she or he has visited, the more points the student earns. Proof of a visit
can take the form of ticket stubs and convincing interior camera shots (creativity is
encouraged!), in addition to my questions about the visit and what the student saw
during discussion.
NOT REQUIRED: In addition to our seminar meetings, I invite students to join me on
site visits during most weeks of the quarter, either in the evening or on a weekend day.
We will set a time and place that it is convenient for the majority of those interested in a
group visit to a museum, memorial, or a monument. However, I wish to stress that it is
not obligatory or expected for you to accompany me. We’ll just make it more fun that
way.
Written work:
In addition to weekly short oral presentations of their reading assignments, students
will prepare short critiques of two monuments, memorials, or museums on the list at
the end of the syllabus. The first will be due halfway through the course. The last will be
due at the end of the course. Details about page length and writing guidelines will be
provided separately. In general, each student will choose from two approaches. Either
the critique will identify and discuss a past controversy involving the monument,
memorial, or museum and evaluate how or whether the controversy was resolved. Or,
the student will critically evaluate a museum exhibit, a museum wing, the didactic
labels on a memorial or monument, or the iconographic and decorative program of a
public building, in order to highlight an historically interesting or disputable agenda.
Students will work closely with me in preparing these critiques.
Course Evaluation
Oral presentations (the number of which depends on enrollment) 30 points
Ten visits to course sites for up to 10 points for participation.
Short critical essay (25 points)
Short critical essay (25 points)
Participation (10 points, one for each week)
WEEKLY READINGS
This list of readings is not set in stone. I will continue to add and subtract readings until
a few weeks before the beginning of the Spring quarter.
In every presentation, the presenter must address the following questions:
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What is the ostensible purpose of the monument, memorial, museum, or
exhibition?
What is the problem/issue/questions that the author sets out to
solve/address/answer?
What is the author’s central argument?
What methods does the author use to analyze the exhibit/museum/subject
matter?
How convincing is the author’s argument?
What issues (if any) are left unresolved by the author’s approach and argument?
Week One: History and Memory, A Primer.
This session serves as an introduction to the course, highlighting major themes that we
will address over the semester. We will begin by considering concepts of the collection,
the relationship between institutions and authority, and the place of cultural capital.
What, other words, are museums for?
Choose from the following:
 Svetlana Alpers, “The Museum as a Way of Seeing,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The
Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine,
Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 25-32.
 Steven Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics
and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Washington
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991, 42-56.
 Susan A. Crane, “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum,” History and
Theory, 36, no. 4 (December 1997), pp. 44-63.
 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Tradition,” in The Invention of
Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983), 1-14.
Study Questions:
The first article is one of the most positive perspectives you will encounter on this
course and provides a useful foundation. Alpers, an art historian, makes the case for the
museum by suggesting that it offers a very particular ‘way of seeing’. What does she
mean by this? Are museums the best place to look at things, or is it better to see them
in their original locations? In the second piece, Stephen Greenblatt, discusses broadly
approaches of displaying collections in museums, which he describes as evoking a
sense of ‘resonance’ or ‘wonder’. How does he use these terms and what are the
implications for what we as viewers take away from museum visits?
Week Two: Displaying the Nation.
Museums are not neutral sites that protect and exhibit artifacts for the public, but are
powerful agents that change how we actually view them. Through its architecture,
spatial organization, and display, the museum is conceptualized as a setting in which
viewers participate in a kind of ‘performance’ or as Carol Duncan terms it ‘rituals of
citizenship.’ These strategies were first developed in London for didactic purposes
during the new culture of public museum building in the early nineteenth century, but
they soon crossed the Atlantic.
Choose from the following:
 Annelise K. Madsen, “Mural Painting’s New Education at the Library of
Congress,” American Art, 26/2 (2012), 68-97.
 Sharon J. Macdonald, “Museums, national, postnational and transcultural
identities,” Museum and Society 1/1 (2003), 1-16.
Week Three: Art for the Nation: The National Gallery and the Smithsonian
Institution.
Since the eighteenth century, national government have taken pride in the
accumulation of art pieces – paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts – as evidence
of the nation’s high level of cultural refinement. In the United States, art museums
reflect an American ambivalence towards European cultural standards. Americans have
and continue to measure refinement and civilization by European cultural norms, but
from an early period in the Republic’s history have sought to create and display art that
is uniquely American and reflective of so-called American political values. Museums
could educate the people, create good citizens, and lift their spirits. At the same time,
museums could also promote American interests, both cultural and economic. We will
begin by looking at the role of art in this enterprise, as it was thought in particular to be
‘good for you’, but we will then turn to other developments in the public museum and
its place in a changing world. Throughout we will be looking at the ideologies of
museums, whether they’ve changed over time, and how those ideologies are
communicated.
Choose from the following:
 James Clifford, “On Collecting Art and Culture,” repr. in The Cultural Studies
Reader, ed. Simon During, 2nd edn, London: Routledge, 1999, 57-76.
 Carol Duncan, “The Art Museum as Ritual,” in Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art
Museums, London: Routledge, 1995, 7-20.
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Neil Harris, “Period Rooms and the American Art Museum.” Winterthur Portfolio
46, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2012): 117–138.
Linda Merrill, “Whistler’s Peacock Room,” pamphlet, Smithsonian Freer Gallery
of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery.
Steven Conn, “Where is the East? Asian Objects in American Museums, from
Nathan Dunn to Charles Freer,” Winterthur Portfolio, 35/2-3 (2000), 157-173.
Donald Preziosi, “In the Temple of Entelechy: The Museum as Evidentiary
Artifact,” Studies in the History of Art 47, Symposium Papers XXVII: The
Formation of National Collections of Art and Archaeology (1996), 165-171.
Week Four: The Capital City as Living Museum
Washington, D.C. could be called a ‘living museum,’ in that the nation’s history is
embedded in the city’s built environment. Murals on exterior and interior walls depict
scenes from the nation’s past. Monuments dedicated to former presidents remind
passers-by of the political legacy of important past presidents.
Choose from the following:
 David Fleming, “Making City Histories,” in Making Histories in Museums, ed.
Gaynor Kavanagh, London: Leicester University Press, 1999, 131-42.
 Steven Conn, “Museums, Public Space, and Civic Identity,” in Do Museum Still
Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 197-232.
 Jeffrey L. Durbin, “Expressions of Mass Grief and Mourning: The Material
Culture of Makeshift Memorials,” Material Culture, 35/2 (2003), 22-47.
 Holly Tank, “Dedicated to Art: William Corcoran and the Founding of His
Gallery,” Washington History 17/1 (2005), 26-51.
 Michael G. Rhode, “The Rise and Fall of the Army Medical Museum and Library,”
Washington History 18/1-2 (2006), 78-97.
 Stephen H. Grant, “A Most Interesting and Attractive Problem: Creating
Washington’s Folger Shakespeare Library,” Washington History 24/1 (2012), 221.
Week Five: Redressing the Past: The Holocaust Museum.
In this session we will consider the blurring of history and memory by exploring galleries
at the the Holocaust Museum and the MLK Memorial. Museums that deal with conflict
are a phenomenon of the modern age, and, increasingly, memory plays an important
part in the histories they convey. What roles do personal experience and empathy play
in narrating history? How does nostalgia affect what these institutions are trying to do?
We will be drawing on Crane’s text from last week, applying her ideas to several
installations, while […] text for this week encourages us to think about the nature of
evidence used and the limits of objectivity.
Choose from the following:
 Anna Reading, “Digital Interactivity in Public Memory Institutions: The Uses of
New Technologies in Holocaust Museums,” Media, Culture & Society, 25 (January
2003), 67-85.
 C. Greig Crysler, “Violence and Empathy: National Museums and the Spectacle
of Society,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 17/2 (2006), 19-38.
 Andrew Hoskins, “Signs of the Holocaust: exhibiting memory in a mediated
age,” Media, Culture & Society 25 (2003), 7-22.
Week Six: Whose Past Is It? Global Culture and Repatriation.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the urge to collect art and objects to satisfy
the growing interest in ethnography and non-western cultures led to the sale, theft,
and donation of many pieces belonging or found in other countries. To whom do those
objects – especially the ones long-established in US collections – belong? Who has the
authority to adjudicate ownership? How direct does ownership have to be for members
of a nation to claim objects in U.S. and European museums?
Choose from the following:
 “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums: “Museums
Serve Every Nation”’, reprinted in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global
Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et al, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.
 Mark O'Neill, “Enlightenment Museums. Universal or Merely Global?” Museum
and Society, 2 (2004), 190-202
 James Cuno, “Identity Matters,” in his Who Owns Antiquity?, Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2008, 122-45.
 Neil G. W. Curtis, “Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The
Tangled Stories of Things,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed.
Bettina M. Carbonell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), 73-81.
 Adrienne Kaeppler, “Two Polynesian Repatriation Enigmas at the Smithsonian
Institution.” Journal of Museum Ethnography 17 (2005): 152–162.
 Steven Conn, “Whose Objects? Whose Culture? The Contexts of Repatriation,”
in Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2010), 58-85.
Week Seven: Monuments and Memory
This week, we examine the relationship between history, time, and memory in the
museum. We take for granted that when we visit history museums we will learn
something about the past, but history, of course, is not simply something ‘that
happened’; it is something that has happened, which has been written about and
interpreted, often in different ways. This is especially important when we’re talking
about controversial events that some people still remember, such as war. How do
museums negotiate collective versus individual experiences? What is the role of
memory in reconstructing the past? Should museums convey experiences that are
highly personalized and individualized or offer a collective, unified version of events?
Perhaps more to the point, are museums guilty of distortion?
Choose from the following:
 Karal Ann Marling and Robert Silberman, “The Statue Near the Wall: The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Art of Remembering,” Smithsonian Studies
in American Art, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1987), 4-29.
 Roger D. Launius, “American Memory, Culture Wars, and the Challenge of
Presenting Science and Technology in a National Museum.” The Public Historian
29, no. 1 (Winter 2007): 13–30.
Week Eight: Inscribing African Americans and Native Americans into US
Monumental History.
Until very recently, no monument or memorial has been contemplated or planned to
commemorate two of the most traumatic, violent periods in US history: the
suppression of the indigenous people of North America and slavery. Now two museums
are in the process of completion or being built. Both have aroused controversy. The
readings for this session will examine the politics of putting both groups into the
capital’s monumental landscape.
Choose from the following:
 Kristin Ronon, “Native Empowerment, the New Museology, and the National
Museum of the American Indian,” Museum & Society 12/1 (2014), 132-147.
 Janet Catherine Berlo and Ruth B. Phillips, “Our (Museum) World Turned Upside
Down: Re-presenting Native American Arts,” The Art Bulletin, 77/1 (1995), 6-23.
Week Nine: The Politics of Display: Hiroshima and 9/11
How does a nation commemorate war and trauma?
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David Simpson, 9/11: The Culture of Commemoration, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 2006.
Excerpt from Edward Linenthal, The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the
American Past (New York: Holt Paperbacks).
Matthew T. Witt, “America’s Palimpsest: Ground-Zero Democracy and the
Capitol Mall,” Public Administration Review 65, n. 5 (Sept-Oct 2005), 517-533.
Week Ten: Museum Futures
In our final class we will consider the future of museums, especially in light of new
technologies. The concept of a ‘museum without walls’ is now more possible than ever.
With the advent of the internet, social media, and digital mobile devices, the museum
itself now extends beyond the physical confines of a building and enters into our
everyday lives, challenging traditional notions of time and space. These developments
afford greater personal experience on the part of viewers through interactive media but
also the means to capture and relate those experiences. What are the benefits and
drawbacks of this new technology?
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Anna Reading, “Digital Interactivity in Public Memory Institutions: The Uses of
New Technologies in Holocaust Museums,” Media, Culture & Society, 25 (January
2003), 67-85.
Konstantinos Arvanitis, “Museums Outside Walls: Mobile Phones and the
Museum in the Everyday,” in Museums in a Digital Age, ed. Ross Perry, London:
Routledge, 2010, pp. 170-76.
Steven Conn, “Do Museums Still Need Objects,” in Do Museums Still Need
Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 20-57.
Stephen E. Weil, ‘From Being About Something to Being For Somebody: The
Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum, in Making Museums
Matter, Washington D.C.: Smithsonian, 2002, pp. 28-52.
During this session we will try out several recent mobile apps – the newest
technological development by museums and the heritage sector. If you have an iPhone,
iPad, or smartphone using Android, you should try them out beforehand, as the most
exciting ones utilize GPS to link your movements with the museum content. It’s a great
alternative way to experience the city! If you don’t have the kit, don’t worry, we will try
some of them out in class, but the experience will be different within the confines of the
classroom.
Check out the following:
Monuments & Memorials: Washington, D.C.
AIA Guide: AIA DC Guide to the Architecture of Washington, D.C.
Museum Guide: Washington, D.C.
iTraveller: The Smithsonian, Washington, D.C.
It Happened Here: Washington, D.C. ($0.99)
NPS App (National Park Service App)
LIST OF MONUMENTS, MEMORIALS, AND MUSEUMS TO BE VISITED FOR CREDIT
African American Civil War Memorial Museum
At the corner of Vermont Avenue, 10th St, and U Street NW
http://www.nps.gov/afam/index.htm
Anderson House
2118 Massachusetts Avenue, NW (Dupont Circle district)
http://societyofthecincinnati.org/anderson_house/history
Art Museum of the Americas
201 18th Street NW
http://museum.oas.org/
Corcoran Gallery of Art
17th St. at New York Ave., NW
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc33.htm
Ford’s Theater National Historic Site
511 Tenth St, NW
http://www.nps.gov/foth/index.htm
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
National Mall
http://www.nps.gov/frde/index.htm
Frederick Douglass National Historic Site
1411 W Street SE
http://www.nps.gov/frdo/index.htm
Freer and Sackler Galleries of Art
1050 Independence Ave
http://www.asia.si.edu/
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
National Mall
http://www.hirshhorn.si.edu/collection/home/
Historical Society of Washington, D.C.
Mount Vernon Square, 8th and K Streets, NW
http://www.historydc.org/
Interior Museum
1849 C Street NW
http://www.doi.gov/interiormuseum/index.cfm
International Spy Museum
800 F Street NW
http://www.spymuseum.org/
Library of Congress
1st Street SE between Independence and Capitol Streets
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc79.htm
Lincoln Memorial
West end of National Mall
http://www.nps.gov/linc/index.htm
Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial
1850 West Basin Drive SW
http://www.nps.gov/mlkm/index.htm
National Air and Space Museum
National Mall
http://airandspace.si.edu/
National Archives
Constitution Ave between 7th and 9th Streets NW
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc75.htm
National Building Museum
401 F St NW
http://www.nbm.org/
National Cathedral
Corner of Wisconsin and Massachusetts Avenues
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc5.htm
National Gallery of Art
National Mall between 3rd and 7th Streets
http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb.html
National Guard Memorial Museum
1 Massachusetts Ave NW
http://www.ngef.org/press_release/museum-amplifies-guards-vietnam-role/1/
National Museum of African Art
National Mall, 950 Independence Ave SW
http://africa.si.edu/
National Museum of American History
National Mall, 1300 Constitution Ave NW
http://americanhistory.si.edu/
National Museum of American Indian
4th Street and Independence Ave, SW
http://nmai.si.edu/home/
National Museum of Natural History
National Mall
http://www.mnh.si.edu/
National Museum of the U.S. Navy
Washington Navy Yard | 805 Kidder Breese Street SE
http://www.history.navy.mil/branches/org8-1.htm
National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Ave NW
http://www.nmwa.org/
National Portrait Gallery
8th and F Streets NW
http://www.npg.si.edu/
National Postal Museum
2 Massachusetts Ave NE
http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/
Newseum
555 Pennsylvania Ave NW
http://www.newseum.org/
President Lincoln’s Cottage at the Soldier’s Home
140 Rock Creek Church Rd NW
http://lincolncottage.org/
Renwick Gallery
1661 Pennsylvania Ave NW
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc27.htm
U.S. Capitol Building & Visitor Center
East Capitol St NE & First St
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc76.htm
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
100 15th St SW
http://www.ushmm.org/
U.S. Supreme Court
1 First St NE
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc78.htm
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
National Mall, 5 Henry Bacon Dr NW
http://www.nps.gov/vive/index.htm
Washington Monument
National Mall
http://www.nps.gov/wamo/index.htm
White House (1600 Pennsylvania Ave) and the Decatur House (748 Jackson Place NW)
http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/dc31.htm
World War II Memorial
http://www.nps.gov/nwwm/index.htm