Do history museums teach history? If so, how good are they at it? Eric Foner has some thoughts on the topic. As Columbia University's DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, a prize-winning author, and one of the nation's leading historians, he has devoted much of his career to improving how history is taught outside the ivory tower: in museums, in middle and high schools, in newspapers, on T.V. and radio-even at Disney World. He acquired his insightful viewpoints not only from theory but from the practice of creating museum exhibitions that maintain a sophisticated and intelligent content delivered in popular forums. Among these are the award-winning "A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln" at the Chicago Historical Society and "America's Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War."

You've curated museum shows on history; you've been a consultant to museums. Do history museums teach history, or do they do something else?

History museums do teach history, they just teach it in a different way than we do in a classroom or in a scholarly book. If what you mean by teaching is presenting people with new ideas and encouraging them to think about the past, then yes, history museums are and should be teaching history. The key is to make sure that the history they're teaching is good, up-to-date, modern history.

What do you think museums get right in exhibiting history, and what do they get wrong? What are their principal challenges?

Museums utilize different methods in teaching history than other forms like books and public lectures. That is, they present things with visual impact. When they do it right, museums utilize their mode of presentation and education to its fullest. Exhibits allow visitors to encounter artifacts and documents of the past directly, to see for themselves and get a visceral sense of what life was like. That doesn't mean they can't present complicated ideas also, and they should, and sometimes they do. I think the biggest problem I have seen-and I have worked very happily with institutions like the Chicago Historical Society, the new-York Historical Society, the Smithsonian, and others-is that museums sometimes fear complexity because they're afraid it will alienate an audience. They know that their audience is not an academic one; it's not the same as a scholarly convention or scholarly classroom. But I think they often don't give enough credit to the audience for being able to tackle complicated ideas, so there is frequently a tendency toward oversimplification.

There are more history museums in the U.S. today than ever. They are, generally speaking, larger, better attended, and better funded. Do you see an effect on our appreciation of history as a result of this growth?

There are more and more people going, but I haven't seen up-to-date analysis of who is going to museums and what they are expecting and what they are getting out of them. One might perhaps be more skeptical of those figures if one began to wonder about how people are being attracted to history museums. What are they actually seeing? There is a tendency nowadays to emphasize attendance numbers, and that leads inexorably toward thinking about doing things to draw in the largest number of people-which may not be the best kind of history or the most unusual or perhaps disturbing kind of history. The most popular show that the national Museum of American History did a while ago was "First Ladies' Gowns.' I saw that. It was interesting. But is that really what we ought to be doing, or is it a success merely because a lot of people went to see it?
Obviously people liked seeing first ladies' gowns, but the large visitorship doesn't necessarily mean that the museum is teaching history well. I think there is a tendency nowadays in some museums to go for the lowest common denominator in order to boost attendance figures, and that may cut against their ability to present history that is complicated, unusual, and perhaps in some ways disturbing to visitors, in that it may challenge preconceived ideas.

How would you evaluate the role that historians play in museums, and in public history generally?

The role of the historian in the museum is complicated, but I think essential, and many museums over the past 10 to 20 years have come to recognize this. It's about 20 years ago that I was asked to work with the Chicago Historical Society on "A House Divided,' a very successful exhibit on the Civil War era, broadly defined. The show was up for 15 years or so; it was recently taken down to make room for a new American history gallery, but some portions will be incorporated into the new gallery. There's nothing wrong with presenting visitors with the notion that there are differences among historians, that we're not just giving you the truth with a capital T, that there are many ways of viewing complex historical subjects, and more than one of them can be legitimate. That's one of the most difficult things for people outside the academic world to understand: that there is more than one legitimate way to view any important issue in history. When historians are doing a good job working with museums, they are teaching not only about a specific subject but about the study of history itself-what it is to study history, what it is to think about history. History is not just a collection of facts, obviously. It's not just a single truth, but an ongoing dialogue about the past, which involves many different people and many different points of view.

Many museums strive to be more active partners in their communities, but this may carry its own set of problems. How do museums determine whose story to tell? How do they seek objectivity and handle community pressure?

Those are great questions. I faced them in another museum I've been involved with, the Mattatuck Museum in Waterbury, Conn., a very fine regional museum. It's located in a city that's gone through wrenching social changes due to deindustrialization in the last generation or two. Waterbury used to be a major center of brass manufacturing. That's all gone. The population has changed enormously from the old Italian and other immigrants to the new immigrants, people from the Caribbean or Africa or Eastern Europe.
The Mattatuck Museum had an excellent exhibit on the history of Waterbury, from the early rural days through industrialization. But then they realized: the brass industry is history now, too. But that's not the end of Waterbury. They said, now we're a different city than we were. How are we going to bring it up to date? They've met with scholars to ask, how do we show Waterbury now, as a very different city than it was 50 years ago? And whose story do we tell, and do we tell a story of decline or of change? Is it the collapse of the city, or is the story about how people create different ways of living-one group moves out of a neighborhood and another group moves in? Who do we listen to, exactly? Do you try to relate to these new communities, such as Hispanic people who didn't live in Waterbury in large numbers until fairly recently?
I commend the museum for trying to confront those complicated questions. There are no easy answers. I've seen national Park Service sites also struggling with these issues. Asking for the participation of communities is a desirable thing, but it carries risks. Communities may have a distorted view of their own history, and the job of the museum is to present as good and accurate a history as it can, a scholarly history presented in a popular way, and to show the good and the bad, so to speak. Sometimes local communities don't want all that, or they rely on oral history reminiscences that may or may not be accurate. You have to allow people their say without turning over the content of the museum to people who are not scholars or historians. You can do that in many ways: through forums, oral history, public discussions; by presenting different views of the same thing. But you cannot cede control of the museum to people who are not museum professionals or scholars.

What kind of future do you see for museums in the United States, and for history museums specifically?

How does a museum appeal to young people or others who have grown up in an age of video games, of computer-generated King Kongs? How do you compete with fantasy all over the place, with narnia, Lord of the Rings, War of the Worlds? We can't create things in a museum that are going to be as fantastic as that. On the other hand, some museums are Internet-savvy. Two of the exhibits I did are now online: "America's Reconstruction' and "A House Divided' were digitized thanks to the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. They no longer exist in the real world, but they could exist forever digitally so anyone can see them. How do museums compete? There is a cult in museums now around visitor interactive things, computer screens and activities. Interactives can be interesting, but they take you away from the actual artifacts. Maybe the artifacts are boring to people now when they're used to constant sensory stimulation, so museums face a challenge in that way. They also face a challenge of making themselves up to date. The study of American history has undergone enormous changes over the last generation or two. Some museums have kept up with this, and some haven't. One wants to see all museums presenting history that is current and up to date and reflects the best historical thinking of today rather than of some previous generation.