The Authority of Documents at Some American History Museums

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It is widely accepted among both public and academic historians that museums in the United States have become more pluralistic institutions in the last two decades. This is attributed in part to the impact of a new generation of professional historians who began entering museums from the academy during the late 1960s. Many of these scholars had been trained in the new social history, and they wanted museums to tell the stories of all the people who had earlier been ignored by those venerable institutions.1 As the social historians advanced to leadership positions in the museum world, they were able to pluralize the museum, opening it for diverse people who all want to be included in the American story. It is also commonly assumed that the new generation of museum historians has pluralized museum historiography in a perhaps more profound way. Unlike their predecessors, those historians have tried to be explicit about the relationship between ideologies, institutions, and histories. Museum historians today acknowledge that, as one of them wrote in 1992, history is a construct that the manner in which is presented is an inherently political statement that what constitutes reflects the values and attitudes of those who interpret it.2 This acknowledgment has ostensibly become a crucial part of the museum's pedagogic content. No longer do museums pretend to base their histories on just the facts. Rather, museum historians wish to teach the public the crucial lesson that no version of the past is neutral or objective. If a generation ago the ameliorative task of the