Living History Museums - by Scott Magelssen (Paperback)

About the Book

Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance examines the performance techniques of Living History Museums, cultural institutions that merge historical exhibits with costumed live performance. Institutions such as Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg are...

Book Synopsis

Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance examines the performance techniques of Living History Museums, cultural institutions that merge historical exhibits with costumed live performance. Institutions such as Plimoth Plantation and Colonial Williamsburg are analyzed from a theatrical perspective, offering a new genealogy of living museum performance.

Review Quotes

...points out the dilemmas of living interpretation, from misleading visitors about time and history to perpetuating outmoded linear views of historical progress.

After outlining a new history of these performances in the United States and Europe, Magelssen offers suggestions for their improvement, which he sates is achievable if museums abandon their 'just-the-facts' mentality and embrace alternative modes of performance.

An external researcher rather than a participant in living museums or a particular fan of them, Magelssen (theater arts, Augustana College, Illinois), examines the performance practices, philosophies, and curatorial methods they have used to stage the past through the 20th and into the 21st centuries, and how they see themselves as the very products of these practices.

About the Author

Scott Magelssen is associate professor of Theatre at Bowling Green State University. He has published articles on living history museums in many theatre journals, including Theatre History Studies and The Drama Review. The author won the 2005 Gerald Kahan Award for the Best Essay in Theatre Studies by a Younger Scholar for his article "Performance Practices of [Living] Open-Air Museums (And a New Look at 'Skansen' in American Living Museum Discourse)," published in Theatre History Studies in 2004.