ABSTRACT
To set the stage, it is conventional, if casual, knowledge that there are around 800 living history museums in the United States and Canada. Visitors are more a mystery than a resource in outdoor museums. Fundamentally when museums see a visitor, they never see themselves. Museums’ media are face-to-face interaction, museum cases with texts, and electronic machines involving sound and sight. The insistence on accuracy and scientific method may act to empower a weak contingent within the museum world. Protection comes from understanding that the active use of history is powerful. As part of that protection museums can say what their relationships are as part of their exhibits. The fossil mammoth, excavated methodically and then exhibited as reconstructed at the threshold of the museum is, obviously, an effort to deal with the past as a natural phenomenon.
