The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940 (Routledge Research in Museum Studies)

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, this 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.This 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 it