Introduction

This chapter explores the ideas that museums make arguments, and that they are places that shape knowledge rather than simply reveal facts. The commonality from 1820 to 2020 is that collections and interpretation make arguments, and arguments are never neutral. The insistence on museums as neutral can emanate from any one of a variety of perspectives. For some, it is rooted in a naïve confidence in museums as simply disseminators of facts, products of the Enlightenment notion of objective knowledge and universal truths, tied to an epistemology where objects are direct sources of meaning. The hashtag slogan was surely a rallying cry, but it is also – despite its present-tense urgency – an accurate description of the past. There is much to be learned when one can get beyond two assumptions: the one that imagines museums as neutral spaces and the one that “simply” pits the cultural imperialism of the museum against practices of equity or justice.