Ap World History Museum Analysis

Museums are underrated in that no one really acknowledges how important they are in not only society, but also preserving the history of that society. The role of the museum is to materialize history by expanding what the textbooks depict and show the physical manifestation of the past. Without museums, the only portal society would have to envision the past would be through textbooks. In essence, this means that there would be no real way to physically see or feel history as the only method would be reading texts describing what they looked or felt like. However, it is obvious that the public does not see every single artifact, or units in which history is preserved. Instead, some are selected by a process to be shown to the public. Hence,

The museum is not a wholly government-funded institution. While it may receive grants or some funding, it is ultimately another apparatus that is controlled by the supply and demand mechanism of the market economy that dominates the country. David Rockefeller (Source A) depicts the financial status for the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA in his time. He further delineates the status of the museum by explaining what caused the financial distress. He writes, “Since no one wanted to antagonize important trustees, exhibitions and acquisitions were often approved without regard for overall policy”. In this source, Rockefeller exemplifies the driving force behind decisions at the museum. Important trustees include financial investors which means that only those who financially contribute have a say in what gets placed in the museum. It also explains that trustees would become financial backers only in the departments they had special interests in. This further supports the importance of finance or financial status in the decisions of what to put in the museums by showing how curators are influenced by financial

The entire establishment of the National Museum of the Native American (Source C) exemplifies the financial motivation. Native Americans were known to be persecuted in the past and many consider them an unfortunate group of people who have been ousted from their lands. The reason for making a museum for this group of people would be to generate curiosity and awareness. The demand for entry into the National Museum of the Native American would obviously surpass those of most museums because people would enter wanting to know more. Since Native Americans are underrepresented in society, most peoples’ knowledge about them is limited. People generally go to museums to satisfy their curiosity needs or increase their knowledge on a certain topic. A similar principle can be applied with the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets in the US (Source F). The commission claims that its goal is relocating pieces of art that went missing during the time of the Nazi Regime. However, it just so happens to be that these missing pieces are the works of art that are most in demand. Art pieces that have been missing then suddenly appear gain the more publicity than some other piece that has been in the museum. In the case of both the Museum of the Native American and the missing artworks, both are in demand and the curators are aware of that. This is why