Reimagining Historic House Museums - (American Association for State and Local History) by Kenneth C Turino & Max A Van Balgooy (Paperback)

About the Book

Creating tours, school programs, and other interpretive activities at historic house museums are among the most effective ways to engage the public in the history of their community and yet many organizations fail to achieve their potential. This guide describes the essential ...

Book Synopsis

Creating tours, school programs, and other interpretive activities at historic house museums are among the most effective ways to engage the public in the history of their community and yet many organizations fail to achieve their potential. This guide describes the essential elements of successful interpretation: content, audience, and methods.

Review Quotes

What's best about this book is its comprehensive view of the process of reimagining historic house museums and the many voices it offers to the reader. Used thoughtfully and diligently, it poses many ways to make sure that historic house museums meet the challenges that face them, reinventing themselves for new audiences and renewed futures.

At times practical, at times thought provoking, Reimagining Historic House Museums: New Approaches and Proven Solutions is both a checklist for the basic operation of your museum, and a bundle of wildly divergent ideas to take your organization to the next level. Editors Turino and Van Balgooy set out on an ambitious journey, bringing the expertise of multiple scholars and practitioners in the field together in one volume. The result is an utterly readable book that addresses fundamentals and essentials, audiences and different approaches, methods and imaginations. Together with the list of resources after each of its 26 chapters, in combination with the extensive bibliography at the end of the book, Reimagining Historic House Museums may well make this volume the go-to resource par excellence, for staff, board and volunteers in historic house museums, at every level of their career or engagement.

Can historic house museums, long a staple of sanitized pasts, be repurposed for new audiences? Could they even 'enliven participatory democracy?' Turino and van Balgooy, in Reimagining Historic House Museums, make the case that they already have. Both prescription and provocation, this guide is especially for readers who know that educating visitors sometimes means re-educating boards.

Every chapter of Reimagining Historic House Museums pulls from the best in the field. From the chapter authors to the research, writings, and model sites, each facet of running a historic house and making it relevant to the community it serves is well covered. This title will become indispensable as a resource for any sized museum.

Turino and van Balgooy have translated their acclaimed one-day workshop, Reimagining Historic House Museums, into aprovocative and eminently actionable volume that should be required reading anyone in or out of the field who cares about the future of our country's historic places.

About the Author

Since 2015, co-editors Kenneth C. Turino and Max A. van Balgooy have led the popular reinventing historic house workshop for the American Association for State and Local History.

Kenneth C. Turino is Manager of Community Partnerships and Resource Development at Historic New England. He oversees community engagement projects throughout the New England states and is responsible for exhibition partnerships at the Eustis Estate, Langdon House, and Sarah Orne Jewett Museum and Visitor Center. He consults on interpretive planning and community engagement projects at historic sites, including Madame John's Legacy in New Orleans and the Palmer Warner House in Connecticut. Ken teaches courses on the future of historic houses in the Tufts University Museum Studies Program and is vice president of the board of the House of Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts.

Max A. van Balgooy is president of Engaging Places, a design and strategy firm that connects people and historic places. For more than thirty years, he has worked with a wide range of historic sites on interpretive planning and business strategy, including Cliveden, Molly Brown House, Haas-Lilienthal House, James Madison's Montpelier, and Andrew Jackson's Hermitage. He is an assistant professor in the Museum Studies Program at George Washington University, directs the History Leadership Institute (formerly known as the Seminar for Historical Administration), and regularly leads workshops for the American Association for State and Local History.