Editor's Report: Reviewing Reviewing

Abstract

With its June 1994 issue, the Journal of American History completes five years of publishing a section devoted to exhibition reviews. The occasion merits a brief review and assessment. How many and what types of reviews have been published? Who have been the reviewers? Have the reviews been useful to historians working in museums and other historical agencies? Have they been valuable to historians who teach at various levels of the academy? In short, in what ways has the JAH exhibition reviewing section made a difference in the teaching, research, and interpretation of American history? Statistics partially answer the first questions. To date 80 reviews have been published of 88 exhibitions. Their authors include 49 academic historians, 29 museum historians, and 1 independent scholar. Several reviewers hold positions both in a historical agency and in an academic institution. Institutions sponsoring the exhibitions reviewed range from large establishments (for example, the National Museum of American History; the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village) to local historical societies (for example, the Elmhurst Historical Museum in Illinois; the Mississippi Cultural Crossroads in Mississippi). Their geographical locations have been largely in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and Pacific regions. While historical museums and organizations have been the main venues for the exhibitions reviewed, we have also evaluated exhibitions at art museums, National Park Service sites, science and technology museums, photography galleries, archival repositories, public libraries, and natural history and anthropology museums. All the principal exhibition forms -short-term gallery displays, period rooms, historic house museums, traveling exhibitions, outdoor living history sites, and long-term, multiple-gallery installations -have been reviewed. The review formats have varied. Usually one historian has evaluated a single exhibition at a single institution, but at times a historian has written a comparative re-