Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites

Julia Rose is presently the director of the West Baton Rouge Museum. Her primary research interests focus on interpreting difficult histories and documenting historical enslaved plantation communities for museum interpretations. Currently, Rose also serves as the Chairman for the Council for the American Association for State and Local History, and is a board member for the Louisiana Association of Museums. She received her Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, a Master of Arts in Teaching from the George Washington University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art and Education from State University of New York at Albany. She has held curator positions at the Columbia Historical Society in Washington, D.C., Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge, East Tennessee Historical Society, and Magnolia Mound Plantation, and was a faculty member in the Master of Arts in Museum Studies Program at Southern University at New Orleans. In addition, Rose is presently an adjunct faculty member at Louisiana State University where she teaches museum studies.

• Foreword: What We Risk, Jonathan Holloway, Dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American StudiesPrefaceAcknowledgmentsList of Figures1. Difficult Knowledge: History that is Too Much to Bear2. Defining Difficult History: Risks, Reasons and Tools3. Loss in Learning: Psychoanalytic Framework for Commemorative Museum Pedagogy4. Response and Responsibility: Ethical Representations of Difficult Histories5. Expanding and Elevating Slave Life History Interpretations and Uncovering Commemorative Museum Pedagogy6. Towards a Commemorative Museum PedagogyBibliographyIndexAbout the Author

[A] a powerful and poignant study of the challenges that museum professionals and public historians face in bringing the past to life without succumbing to nostalgia, sentimentality or whitewashed, sanitized or commercialized conceptions of history.