Introduction to The Museum Movement: Carnegie Cultural Philanthropy and Museum Development in the Anglosphere, 1920-1940

Highlighting the key role played by the Carnegie Corporation in guiding museum development in the late colonial period, this book shows that the movement was strongly influenced by the racial politics of the period and that its focus on local histories and civic engagement sought to boost the historical legitimacy and continued vitality of small towns and their dominant white populations. Demonstrating that the ‘museum movement’ placed new emphasis on the importance of professionalisation, interpretation, and audience engagement, McShane shows how, by the late 1930s, the movement had helped lay the foundations of museology. This book also constructs a genealogy of the ‘new’ museology, the next wave of museum reform that emerged in the 1970s, by reflecting critically on the ‘newness’ of some of its ideas. Indicating that ‘new’ thinking about audience, display media, and the economics of culture has a longer history, this book also provides historical perspectives on current interests in informal and social learning, the formation of museum publics, and institutional convergence.

The museum movement was an assemblage of people, ideas, and practices that sought to establish the significance – indeed the uniqueness – of museums and art galleries as elements of the informal or parallel education sector that contributed to personal, social, and civic formation through ideas-based exhibitions and constructivist education. As this book argues, the museum movement was particularly active in the interwar decades of the early twentieth century in the Anglosphere: the U.S., the U.K., and the dominions and colonies of the British Empire, and in these regions, it was substantially funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (CCNY). A key argument of this book, which this chapter foregrounds, is that the museum movement was most concerned with local museums, especially those in small communities or rural areas, as central to consolidating white settlement, but also as the sector most in need of professionalisation and modernisation. This chapter introduces the scope and theoretical framing of the analysis, focussing on the position of CCNY as a powerful agency of the associational state, the influence of progressivism as a body of thought and practice emphasising social reform through expert direction, and the racial and social dynamics of settler colonialism.