The Museum Movement

The Museum Movement provides the first systematic overview of the ‘museum movement’ of the early twentieth century, which encouraged museums to play a greater role in education and civic uplift.

Highlighting the key role played by the Carnegie Corporation in guiding museum development in the late colonial period, the book shows that the movement was strongly influenced by the racial politics of the period and that its focus on local histories and civic engagement sought to boost the historical legitimacy and continued vitality of small towns and their dominant white populations. Demonstrating that the ‘museum movement’ placed new emphasis on the importance of professionalisation, interpretation, and audience engagement, McShane shows how, by the late 1930s, the movement had helped lay the foundations of museology. The book also constructs a genealogy of the ‘new’ museology, the next wave of museum reform that emerged in the 1970s, by reflecting critically on the ‘newness’ of some of its ideas. Indicating that ‘new’ thinking about audience, display media, and the economics of culture has a longer history, the book also provides historical perspectives on current interests in informal and social learning, the formation of museum publics, and institutional convergence.

The Museum Movement explores the intersections and crosscurrents of modernism and settler-colonialism and will thus appeal to academics and students with an interest in museum studies, heritage, history, colonial studies, and race.