The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg
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Description
The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of "historical truth" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with pedagogical principle in Colonial Williamsburg to blur the lines between education and entertainment, patriotism and revisionism. During much of its existence, the "living museum" at Williamsburg has been considered a patriotic shrine, celebrating the upscale lifestyles of Virginia’s colonial-era elite. But in recent decades a new generation of social historians has injected a more populist and critical slant to the site’s narrative of nationhood
ISBN
978-0-8223-1974-0
Publication Date
1997
Publisher
Duke University Press
City
Durham
Keywords
Colonial Williamsburg, Historic buildings, Virginia, Cultural beliefs, Museum studies
Disciplines
American Material Culture | Architectural History and Criticism | Social and Cultural Anthropology | United States History
Recommended Citation
Handler, Richard and Gable, Eric, "The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg" (1997). Cultural and Philosophical Inquiry Books. 11.
https://scholar.umw.edu/cpr_books/11