Immersive Beginnings: the Origins of an Empathetic Museum

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When was the last time a museum left you moved? For American visitors within the last two decades, historic exhibits have been increasingly transportive and transformative – through playing with scale and technology to fostering ideas of authenticity through experiences or encounters. Most museums take the emotional encounter history can provide to heart, as seen in their personal and emotive exhibits.

While this experience and historic encounter is pervasive in the field of public history, its roots can be traced back to the 1970s and the fraught public history landscape shaped by the civil rights movement, emerging social histories, and negotiations of patriotism around the American bicentennial celebration. Author M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska locates this exhibition practice within the greater cultural turn to the “real”, a shift in authentic historic engagement from a “logic of preservation” to a “logic of reenactment”¹. Her book History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (2017) details the cultural shifts of the 1970s around public history. Americans – after massive social movements in the 1960s and a faltering faith in the government – pushed back against dominant historic narratives, solidified in the traditional museum and impersonal, removed film.

Americans produced a history that was more intimate, more relevant, and contemporary-based. From television series like Roots to socially-centered preservation projects that began to diversify the memory landscapes, authenticity was stressed and emphasized through emotion and experience². This turn democratized history for participants, history-making thus was not limited to a self-selected few but understood to be universal through the authentic encounters with the past.

Measuring authenticity’s turn took many forms in popular culture, but in museums it was perhaps most dramatic. Where relatable events in Little House on the Prairie could be contemporary needs and situations merely dressed in pioneer garb³, museums were facing the reality their spaces were not encouraging of emotive experiences. A practice where authenticity was measured in objects was incompatible with an emerging measure of authenticity in emotion⁴. Museum galleries saw dramatic shifts not just in their exhibition of artifacts, but in the built environment. Technological advances and questions of nationhood spurred by federal efforts to commemorate the bicentennial saw a wave of immersive and personal history exhibits sweep the nation.

^{“Smithsonian – Locomotive in ‘1876 Museum'” by roger4336 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0}

In “1876: A Centennial Celebration”, the Smithsonian Institution recreated the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia. While the exhibit served federal aims to instill patriotic nostalgia, the interpretation revealed tensions and assumptions within the museum field at large. A heavy stylized experience required in situ artifact positioning that presented the feeling and encounter that visitors to the 1876 exhibition would have felt – yet contradicted former professional expectations of display and feeling⁵. While popular, the intended emotions curators hoped visitors would take away from the exhibit were not guaranteed, opening a conundrum that public historians know all too well some decades away from the empathetic turn.

Reenactment, whether formally in Civil War battlefields or informally at the “1876” exhibit in Washington, D.C., is unpredictable by nature. The emotional angle in historic sites today, as in the fraught Bicentennial negotiations, is unpredictable and inherently open to criticism. Such events opened Americans’ eyes to inclusion that was written in the archive, as in AIM’s protest of Thanksgiving reenactments and covered-wagon trails that ignored Indigenous experiences under colonization⁶. The 1970s stands thus as a moment when the archive was animated, using emotional capital as currency to communicate with and between citizens⁷. Museums manifested this turn in seemingly untraditional displays that brought the past to the present, while simultaneously opening up space for critique and dialogue.

Today the immersive experience is prevalent in American exhibitions. Such practices have become synonymous not solely with authenticity but with building empathy. Museums are now in a moment where the emotive turn is transforming into a transformative experience, echoed in the fields’ growing conversations around empathy and social justice. As the previous radical change emerged out of the 1970s dynamic history landscape, we would do well to learn from their challenges and greater cultural shifts. As politically-inclined public historians who understand the role of history and institutions in fostering civic dialogue, we need to step outside of our galleries and halls to take in the greater changes around us. Such field-wide changes do not occur within a vacuum, as Rymsza-Pawlowska demonstrates so well, which raises questions about where we stand now and where we are headed. How are we understanding our empathetic shift within the broader communities we serve? What are we doing as a field to get outside of our perspectives to better address community needs? How are we not only implementing change on an experience level, but on a leadership level? Such questions within the field at large, indicating as broad and dynamic a cultural shift as is explored in History Comes Alive. I for one cannot wait to see what creativity and broader systemic change comes out of this fraught period we inhabit now.

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¹ M.J. Rymsza-Pawlowska, History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017): 6

² Ibid: 167

³ Ibid: 25

⁴ Ibid: 90

⁵ Ibid: 95

⁶ Ibid: 152

⁷ Ibid: 164