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This thesis illustrates the accomplishments and challenges of enhancing accessibility across the national parks, at the same time that great need to diversify the parks and their interpretation of American disability history remains. Chapters describe the administrative history of the NPS Accessibility Program (1979-present), exploring the decisions from both within and outside the federal agency, to break physical and programmatic barriers to make parks more inclusive for people with sensory, physical, and cognitive disabilities; and provide a case study of the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site (HOFR) in New York. The case study describes the creation of HOFR as a house museum and national historic site, with a particular focus on the history of the site’s accessibility features; considers existing barriers; and makes recommendations for programmatic changes to improve the experience for disabled and nondisabled visitors. By collaborating with and learning from nearby organizations by and for people with disabilities, HOFR can serve as a model for other historic house museums in how to effectively interpret “disability stories.” Contemplating how the National Park Service has interpreted the histories and heritage of other historically marginalized communities through theme studies, on-site interpretation, and public history scholarship yields lessons for how best to interpret disability history and depict nuanced representations of the varied disability communities living in the U.S. The inclusion of “disability stories” and representation of people with disabilities in the past will help foster deeper connections with and welcome diverse visitors to the parks.

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In the English museums sector, an impetus for impact assessment stems from an internal ethos towards producing positive impacts for the public. Furthermore, as institutions largely dependent on national and local government funding, museums have increasingly been called to demonstrate their impacts to policy makers. Economic impact and valuation procedures are employed to help meet these demands. However, consideration of non-economic impacts has not kept pace. Reasons include the contested priorities in the sector, a fluctuating policy landscape and too exclusive a focus on theoretical debates rather than empirical research. Indeed, a great deal of attention and time has already been allocated to impact assessment with little accumulation of evidence at a museum-specific or national level. Accordingly, this research set out to reveal a detailed understanding of socio-cultural impacts of museums for their local communities. A thorough meta-synthesis of nineteen academic and non-academic sources, revealed the limitations of previous studies. These limitations relate to sampling, method choice, sophistication of analysis and transparency in reporting. Often, only potential impacts have amounted. The Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM), in the southwest city of Exeter offered a suitable research site for this large-scale study. Drop and Collect administered household surveys ensured the elicitation of views from residents across the city. A range of statistical analysis techniques were applied to cross-sectional samples (n=435, n=384). The main contribution of this research is to demonstrate a replicable approach to eliciting views from the public regarding the impacts of their local museum. Future evaluation can follow this model which is neither focused upon economic impacts, nor arrives at a monetised valuation. Cluster Analysis proves a preferable way of grouping the public rather than traditional segmentations pertaining to socio-demographic or behavioural characteristics. Furthermore, socio-cultural impacts are effectively assessed, monitored and prioritised through Gap Analysis. Factor Analysis reveals latent constructs of Personal-fulfilment, Objects and their Surrounding Narratives, Self-actualisation, Learning and Networked Leisure drive these impacts. Therefore, this research meets the museum management challenge of finding a suitable design for assessment of impacts in relation to different communities.

This thesis examines post-1990 representations of growing up in the Third Reich within German culture. It has two primary aims: to demonstrate how childhood is recalled, represented, and imagined by those with, and without first-hand experience of Nazism; and to situate these narratives as a central part of the post-Unification discourse about identity in the Berlin Republic. The material is organised into five chapters: it begins with an analysis of recent museum displays and exhibitions, followed by German cinema (Hitlerjunge Salomon, NaPolA: Elite für den Führer); autobiographical works, by former members of the Hitler Youth (Günter de Bruyn, Martin Walser, Günter Grass) and by Jewish children (Ruth Klüger, Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt, Günter Kunert); and finally, imagined accounts of growing up in the Third Reich (W.G. Sebald, Binjamin Wilkomirski, Gudrun Pausewang). Through close readings of primary sources, and analysis of their reception, including the public debates which they sparked, this study shows how these narratives interact with historical and contemporary notions of childhood. They are informed by the concern, embedded within post-Unification discourse, that the wealth of documentary and technical accounts of Nazism obscures the individual’s understanding of those events and what it was like to experience them. I argue that because of the close conceptual association between childhood and origins, these narratives contribute to a discourse about how the Third Reich is to be remembered, performing a 'search for a usable childhood'. This is situated within the context of Harald Welzer's notion of 'gefühlte Geschichte'; that is a mode of historical discourse focused on experience, rather than 'factual knowledge', and which appeals to emotions. In assessing narratives of growing up – which take a developmental view of childhood – this study seeks to open up previously rigid categorisations of childhood as found in literary studies which focus on the function of the child’s perspective as a literary device. Thus within a crowded research area the present study offers a differentiated treatment of these works.

This project seeks to examine the ways in which the media of Holocaust photography and videography are represented in museums in Canada and Germany. Specifically, this project analyzes the Topography of Terror (Berlin), the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (Winnipeg), and the German Military History Museum (Dresden). The media of video- and photography are integral to a comparative examination of the intentional and unintentional effects and knowledge produced by these museums, since both media tend to be seen as more ‘authentic’ than text and remain somewhat outside the control of the museums; photographs and videos are often more than just a mouthpiece for museal goals. In order to adequately compare these representations in each of the three museums, they are analyzed simultaneously through the lens of distance and proximity between visitor and subject, and whether one is able to feel empathy for historical persons (and with whom) or not. / October 2016

Between 1946 and 1948, American photographer Margaret Bourke-White traveled to India while on assignments for Life magazine. Since the late 1940s, a photograph from these assignments that depicts three men sitting in an ornately decorated room has appeared in several publications and exhibitions under variations of the title A Moneylender’s House (1947). Though Bourke-White is traditionally categorized as a documentary photojournalist, her photograph exhibits motifs similar to those seen in European Orientalist paintings from the nineteenth century. Considering recent scholarship that has expanded the temporal and geographical parameters of the Orientalist photography genre, this thesis analyzes the “documentary” photograph, A Moneylender’s House, in its varied exhibition and publication contexts to determine whether they present the photographic subjects from a “nonrepressive and nonmanipulative perspective” (one that Edward Said suggests might provide an “alternative” to Orientalism), or reinforce the “Self/Other” binary at the core of Orientalism.

Feminist art historians reassessed French Impressionist Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a period in which her work coincidentally received steady exposure in major museum exhibitions. This thesis examines how the feminist art historical project intersects with exhibitions that give prominence to Morisot’s work. Critical reviews by Morisot scholars argue that more frequent display of the artist’s work has not correlated to nuanced interpretation. Moreover, prominent feminist scholars and museum theorists maintain that curators virtually exclude their contributions. Attending to these recurrent concerns, this thesis charts shifts in emphases and inquiry in writing centered on Morisot to survey the extent to which curators convey new constructions of her artistic, social, and historical identities. This analysis will observe how distinct exhibition forms—the retrospective, the Impressionism blockbuster, and the gendered “women Impressionists” show—may frame Morisot’s work differently according to their organizing principles.

This thesis examines the history of the Manchester Art Museum (Manchester, England), which was founded by Thomas Coglan Horsfall (1841-1932) in 1886. It considers the museum’s permanent collections and its programming from 1886 to 1898 with brief notes on the later years of the institution. While, like previous work on the Manchester Art Museum, the thesis contextualizes the museum within Victorian arts and community institutions, it breaks new ground by highlighting the ways in which it diverged from these institutions. The analysis of the museum’s collections and programming emphasizes the contributions that Horsfall and the Art Museum Committee made to museum education through the museum’s circulating loan collections and school tours.