ABSTRACT
A museum’s past no doubt casts a somber shadow over its present. This chapter illustrates how the histories of the American Museum of Natural History and the Horniman Museum resonate with visitors’ experiences today. For the American Museum of Natural History, we can see how, historically, evolution exhibitions have been encoded with socio-evolutionist narratives of progress, something that resonates with museum visitors’ attempts to decode origins exhibitions today. At the Horniman Museum, we can see how the institution itself stands today as a nostalgic emblem of the Victorian era and Victorian evolutionary ideas.
