ABSTRACT
The material culture of presidents and first ladies provides reliable tokens for attracting curiosity and fascination by museum audiences, as do the US Constitution and the nation’s founding documents. Each Independence Day, and on other major holidays, it is common to see people queuing around the block for an opportunity to visit the National Archives and the Smithsonian Institution museums for a peek at these popular cultural heritage artefacts that are replete with an almost sacred form of national symbolism. If they are removed from these popular and iconic images and places, however, the abstract themes of democracy and citizenship can prove a hard sell for museum exhibitions. Unless they are accompanied by tales of cavalier heroism or the celebrity of some protest movements, the themes of public service, diplomacy or unresolved contestation – including, for example, debate over voting, land, gambling, as well as cultural knowledge and symbolism – are an even more impossible sell. These difficult themes are constituted in many cases by paper-based evidence (including the ‘grey literature’ of public policy documents) and ephemeral collections and tend to be unpopular with mainstream museum goers who seek reinforcement of their personal experiences through multisensory and highly interpreted object-based reminders of national grandeur. More importantly, though, the lack of easy consumption of these concepts and events is also due to the fact that close observation of them may potentially challenge – if not disrupt – the usually taken-for-granted ties between nationhood and citizenship.
