museums 
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How We Told the Ongoing Story of Title IX
by Laura Mogulescu
A curator and her team chose to center the work of activists who pushed to determine the scope and meaning of Title IX's prohibition on sex discrimination in education throughout the law's 50-year history. Their exhibit is now open at the New-York Historical Society.
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SOURCE: Harvard Gazette
5/16/2022
Harvard Peabody Museum Returns Sacred Scrolls to White Earth Tribe
Professor Philip Deloria praised the repatriation of the artifacts as a "rebalancing" of accounts between the tribe and the university.
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SOURCE: The Grio
5/4/2022
Smithsonian Announces Plans to Return Looted, Unethically Sourced Artifacts
Smithsonian Institution Secretary Lonnie Bunch III announced the museum's intention to be a world leading institution on repatriating artifacts and promoting reconciliation for colonialism through museums.
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SOURCE: Vanity Fair
4/21/2022
Previewing Tulsa's New Bob Dylan Center
by Douglas Brinkley
"The center—a high-tech vessel holding the man’s oeuvre and an overview of the man—will be the spiritual home of Dylan, a relentless performer who is forever on the road."
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SOURCE: Mother Jones
4/10/2022
Are Museums Ready to Reckon with Ill-Gotten Human Remains?
The acquisition of many skeletal specimens by museums was entangled with the harvesting of tissues from the bodies of the socially marginalized.
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SOURCE: New York Historical Society
4/7/2022
"Title IX: Activism On and Off the Field" Coming to NYHS in May
The exhibition features images, objects, and documents drawn from New-York Historical’s Women’s Sports Foundation and Billie Jean King’s archives.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/8/2022
Smithsonian to Return All Benin Bronzes
The Smithsonian will return works that it has legal title to own but that are linked to an infamous British raid on Benin City in 1897.
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3/6/2022
The Power and Urgency of Public History
by David M. Chamberlain
After a tour of the South's historical sites, I maintain a teacher’s optimism that knowledge of our nation’s imperfect past offers us the necessary wisdom to walk ourselves back from the edge of the political ledge on which we are so perilously perched.
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SOURCE: Hyperallergic
Mississippi Museum of Art Exhibition Opens on Legacies of Great Migration
Opening April 9, this exhibition features newly commissioned works by 12 acclaimed Black contemporary artists, including Carrie Mae Weems, Theaster Gates, and more.
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SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2/14/2022
A Guide to Touring Alabama's Civil Rights Trail
Two AJC reporters offer a guide to those interested in marking Black History Month with a tour of Alabama's major civil rights sites, memorials and museums.
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SOURCE: Paste
2/14/2022
A Civil Rights Tour of America
Writer Garrett Martin identifies the key sites on a tour of civil rights history institutions in Atlanta, Alabama, Memphis and Washington.
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SOURCE: NPR
1/20/2022
Museum of Natural History in New York Removes Theodore Roosevelt Statue
While Roosevelt's support of natural history has been noted, museum officials acknowledged that the statue "communicates a racial hierarchy" that constitutes a darker side of the former president's legacy.
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SOURCE: NPR
1/17/2022
A Texas-Born Princess and Former Scandalous Washington Wife May Lose Roman Villa in Epic Inheritance Fight
Princess Rita Boncompagni-Ludovisi, born Rita Carpenter, the former wife of Congressman John Jenrette, has worked for 19 years to make Rome's Villa Aurora accessible to scholars.
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SOURCE: WGBH
1/4/2022
New Boston MFA Exhibit Shows Museum's Complex History of Censoring Queer Desire
by Erin L. Thompson
"When I first visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, as a young and deeply closeted queer college student, I found myself wondering if the museum possessed ancient Greek vases decorated with anything other than sex scenes."
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SOURCE: Contingent
12/8/2021
The Second Skeleton
by Mabel Rosenheck
"Museums construct knowledge. As a historian of museums this is what I study. But museums don’t just construct knowledge through architecture, collecting, arrangement, or labeling. They construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally."
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12/12/2021
Acquiring Eyes: The Unlikely Cross-Cultural Partnership Behind the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
by Charles Dellheim
The world of American art collecting was transformed by the unlikely partnership of the Boston Brahmin Isabella Stewart Gardner and the ambitious Russian Jewish immigrant Bernhard Berenson.
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SOURCE: New York Times
12/7/2021
Met Acquires Landmark Photo Archive of NY Black Life
“[James Van Der Zee] is a central figure, a significant artist, in telling the story of people of African descent,” said Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum. “The photographs are testaments to beauty and power, and he captured the Harlem community and the African American community in all its possibilities.”
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SOURCE: The Millions
11/11/2021
Conquering Hell
by Ed Simon
"Hell’s tragedy is that those who deserve to go there almost never think that they will, while the pious shame-filled neurotic imagines those flames with scrupulous anxiety" – HNN contributing editor Ed Simon meditates on the American engagement with damnation.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
11/7/2021
The Academy Museum Ignores Hollywood Labor History
by Andy Lewis
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was originally established to help studios negotiate contracts with the studio unions. Today, the on-set tragedy in New Mexico reminds that film production is an industry and workers make it run. The Academy Museum misses that part of the story.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
11/9/2021
A Met Exhibition on Women in Photography Shows All Achievements by Women Don't Need to be Celebrated
by Kelly Midori McCormick
Why did the Metropolitan Museum use a photo of the imperialist Japanese photographer Sasamoto Tsuneko as an exemplar of women's achievements in the medium?
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