“Exhibiting Evangelicalism” is a history of evangelical historical museums in the United States. It argues that conservative Protestant Christians in the United States developed practices for preserving and interpreting the past in public and deployed those practices toward varying theological, cultural, and political ends—an approach I term “evangelical heritage.” It further contends that evangelical heritage performed important work for its purveyors. Amid the boom in church attendance and religious affiliation after World War II, conservative Protestants deployed evangelical heritage to forge what they termed “neo-evangelicalism,” a rebranding of the old-time religion for postwar society. They also engaged evangelical heritage in their crusade to “win America for Christ,” convinced that an encounter with their tradition’s proud past could entice outsiders to convert to Christian faith. These elements never fully disappeared from the function of evangelical heritage. Even so, evangelical heritage did change over time. During the national bicentennial, for instance, evangelical heritage became a means by which neo-evangelicals, internally divided over matters of faith and politics, could project a united front by mapping their proud past onto the nation’s history. Such optimism did not last long. As the national consensus about the past shattered in the 1970s and 1980s, evangelical heritage morphed yet again. By the twenty-first century it had become a vehicle for nostalgia, immersing visitors in a mythic past that offered an imagined sense of comfort and reassurance amid conservative Protestants’ perceived loss of political and social influence. Evangelical heritage did not develop and evolve in a vacuum, however. From the start, it existed within and contributed to broader patterns of historical commemoration. In the postwar era, for instance, experiments in evangelical heritage intersected and overlapped with discourses and practices among bureaucrats, business leaders, social reformers, heritage professionals, and others regarding historic preservation, urban renewal, and the political purposes of civic memory. In the 1970s, neo-evangelical museum-makers helped to invent public history’s turn toward emotion, immersion, and experience as techniques through which to build visitors’ historical knowledge. As that trend became subject to intense internecine debate among public history professionals in the 1980s and 1990s, some conservative Protestant commemorators turned away from the mainstream of public history discourse. Instead, they embraced the theme park as a means of conveying ideological authority while retaining the trappings of the traditional museum as a way of courting intellectual authority—a trend that reached its apex at the turn of the twenty-first century. / History

The “forgotten war” is the label most frequently used to recall the conflict that took place in Korea from June 25, 1950 to July 27, 1953, with variations of this phrase found in museum exhibitions and monuments across the country. Since the widespread presence of so many mentions of Korea clearly demonstrates that the Korean War is not forgotten, this project critically evaluates several forms of public memory (including museum exhibitions, historical scholarship, films and television shows, state and local monuments, and memorial infrastructure including bridges, highways, buildings, and trees) in order to explore how the war has come to be called forgotten. This project also seeks to examine the foreign policy issues of labeling the Korean War as forgotten, by exploring how it is recalled globally and why it is essential to remember details about the war. This project also seeks to fill a niche in the scholarly literature on public memory of American wars by examining Korea as prior studies have both WWII and Vietnam. In addition, this project intervenes in several more scholarly conversations ranging from the argument that the television series M*A*S*H was not primarily an allegory for Vietnam, as is often alleged, to the contention that a Korean Anti-War Movement was much more widespread than has been appreciated by academics interested in the history of activism. This dissertation is designed to highlight the ongoing need to remember the Korean War in detail, given the threats to world peace made by North Korea, and to make clear that it is vital to understand the enduring legacy of the war for twenty-first century diplomacy, which can only be done by examining how the war has been publicly recalled and why the forgotten war label persists despite evidence that Korea has been widely remembered. / History

This thesis explores best practices in teaching religious history in public schools using primary sources. Lesson plans on specific sites and themes within the history of religious freedom in Philadelphia contextualize and celebrate the religious diversity that the city has known since its inception. By understanding how this diversity developed over time and through obstacles, students will be more willing and motivated to do their individual part to maintain and protect religious liberty. This goal is emphasized through the use of primary sources, which bring gravity, accessibility, and engagement to a topic that might otherwise be considered controversial, distant, or unnecessary. / History

This thesis explores the use and potential of digital timelines in public history projects. Digital timelines have become a popular and accessible ways for institutions and individuals to write history. The history of timelines indicates that people understand timelines as authoritative information visualizations because they represent concrete events in absolute time. The goals of public history often conflict with the linear, progressive nature of most timelines. This thesis reviews various digital timeline tools and uses The Print Center's Centennial Timeline as an in-depth case study that takes into account the multifaceted factors involved in creating a digital timeline. Digital history advocates support digital scholarship as an alternative to traditional narrative writing. This thesis illustrates that digital timelines can enable people to visualize history in unexpected ways, fostering new arguments and creative storytelling. Despite their potential, digital timelines often replicate the conventions of their paper counterparts because of the authoritative nature of the timeline form. / History

The focus of this thesis will be the exploration of the narrative constructs around the life and work of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). This exploration will occur through the study of selected exhibitions curated on the Lombard artist from the twentieth- through twenty-first centuries. It will demonstrate how museums have played a significant role in the public’s understanding and perception of Caravaggio. In this thesis, I will argue that exhibitions on Caravaggio have supported and reshaped the general understanding and perception of the artist in crucial ways not done to the same effect in more nuanced academic scholarship. I will also argue that public exhibitions have functioned according to a different set of agendas from those addressed to academia. For example, exhibitions are conceived and function on guiding principles such as alignment with museum mission statements, audience draw and accessibility, educational outcomes, and the visitor experience. This thesis will seek to determine to what measure these principles have affected the framing of content and to clarify how in particular the selective use of Caravaggio’s biography has affected interpretation of his works within a museum context for a viewing public. The restored enthusiasm for Caravaggio in the second-half of the twentieth century also focused on his personal life due to the publication and translation by Walter Friedlaender of Lives written by his seventeenth-century biographers—Giorgio Mancini, Giovanni Baglione, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori—as well as the publication of documents and court records, which highlighted episodes of Caravaggio’s criminality, all impinging on our interpretation of his artistic merits. Although these findings support our understanding of Caravaggio as a complex individual, they also contribute to the sensationalization and romanticization of the artist as the quintessentially bohemian figure. Furthermore, doubtful attributions and disputes over execution dates problematize our understanding of the artist’s oeuvre and have at certain points reinforced a ‘Caravaggio narrative’ of the rebellious, indecorous artist. It is my intention to show how museum exhibitions have contributed to and exploited this narrative and to determine more precisely how and to what extent they have shaped it. With this exploration of Caravaggio’s narrative construction by museum exhibitions of the twentieth- to twenty-first centuries, I aim to approach and reconsider this subject, which has been dealt with heavily in scholarship, under a different lens. In the case of Caravaggio—whose persona and works have been posthumously manipulated, admired, and condemned at the hands of biographers and critics—it is necessary to approach this subject with renewed, unbiased, and objective vigor within a new frame of understanding: the museum exhibition frame. I will use a comparative method, studying three key exhibitions over time, to show how museums have presented the artist’s career development. I pay particular attention to the incorporation of biography and to the impact the inclusion of selected aspects of his Lives have had on the public view of his works. The influential format of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists set the structure and codified the model of biographical determinism that would inform Caravaggio’s later biographers in the interpretation of his works; this has persisted through the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries with the application of psychoanalytic approaches to Caravaggio. The first of the three exhibitions I have selected is Longhi’s 1951 Milan exhibition, Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi, which restored public consciousness of Caravaggio’s innovative and revolutionary style, reinserting him into the artistic canon. My second example will be The Age of Caravaggio, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985. The Met exhibition is novel for its focus on Caravaggio’s relationship with his precursors and contemporaries (the organizing committee deliberately excluded works by Caravaggio’s followers) and for its interpretation of works within their historical context. Finally, I will examine Caravaggio: L’ultimo tempo 1606–1610, held first at the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples 2004–2005, then later as Caravaggio: The Final Years, at the National Gallery, London in 2005, which focused on the more enigmatic part of Caravaggio’s late career after his flight from Rome in 1606. The London 2005 exhibition provided new insight into the artist’s stylistic changes in the last years of his life. These three exhibitions will give insight about the perception shifts of the artist that have taken place in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as a result of scholarly research spurred by museum exhibitions centered around Caravaggio. / Art History

The study of historic-period pottery cuts across many disciplines (e.g., historical archaeology, material culture studies, American studies, art history, decorative arts, fine arts). Studies of historic pottery with provenience from the United States are largely centered on fine-bodied wares, such as porcelain, white salt-glazed stoneware, creamware, pearlware, whiteware, ironstone (or white granite), and kaolin smoking pipes. These wares share the common attribute of whiteness: white paste and painted, slipped, or printed decoration that typically incorporate the color white into its motif. Disenfranchised groups had limited direct-market access to these wares due to its high value (Miller 1980, 1991). White pottery was disproportionately consumed by White people until the nineteenth century. This dissertation examines colonoware—an earth-toned, non-white, polythetic kind of coarse earthenware. Archaeologists commonly encounter colonoware in plantation contexts and believe that colonoware was crafted by Native American, African, and African American potters between the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries (Deetz 1999; Espenshade and Kennedy 2002:210; Gerth and Kingsley 2014; Heite 2002; Madsen 2005:107). Colonoware researchers have engaged with collections and archaeologically excavated samples from the lower Middle Atlantic, American Southeast and Caribbean for over fifty years since the “discovery” of the pottery at Colonial Williamsburg—then called “Colono-Indian Ware”—by Ivor Noël Hume (1962). Comparatively less research has been conducted on colonoware with American Northeast provenience (see Catts 1988; Sansevere 2017). This dissertation “excavates” evidence of Northeastern colonoware that has been deeply buried—buried within obscure literature, buried by centuries of soil accrual only recently moved by compliance archaeology, and buried by the fifty-something-year-old myth that colonoware was only manufactured and used in the lower Middle Atlantic, American Southeast and Caribbean. The lives of northern bondsmen have been largely concealed in the historical record, yet these individuals were clearly a very visible part of northern society and the examination of northern colonoware helps tell that story. The circumstances that precipitated the excavation of northern sites that contain colonoware, the individuals who chose to collect northern colonoware, and my own experience accessing northern colonoware collections shapes how knowledge of the past is made, provides perspective on the mechanisms that control access to heritage, demonstrates how bias is created in object-based research, and reveals the politics at play. Lastly, I speculate that colonoware contained significant meaning for northern users between the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries and discuss the changing value of this non-white pottery in contemporaneous society. / Anthropology

"Materializing Blackness: The Politics and Production of African Diasporic Heritage” examines how intellectual and civic histories collide with the larger trends in the arts and culture sector and the local political economy to produce exhibitions at the African American Museum in Philadelphia (AAMP) and structure the work that museum exhibitions do to produce race visually for various audiences. Black museums are engaged in the social construction of race through their exhibitions and programs: selecting historical facts, objects and practices, and designating them as heritage for and to their audiences. In tracking this work, I am interested in 1) the assemblages of exhibits that are produced, as a function of 2) the internal logics of the producing institutions and 3) larger forces that structure the field as a whole. Looking at exhibits that engage Blackness, I examine how heritage institutions use art and artifacts to visually produce race, how their audiences consume it, and how the industry itself is produced as a viable consumptive market. Undergirded by the ways anthropologists of race and ethnicity have been explored and historicized race as a social construction I focus on an instantiation of the ways race is constructed in real time in the museum. This project engages deeply with inquiries about the social construction of race and Blackness, such as: how is Blackness rendered coherent by the art and artifacts in exhibitions? How are these visual displays of race a function of the museums that produce them and political economy of the field of arts and culture? Attending to the visual, intellectual, and political economic histories of networks of exhibiting institutions and based on ethnographic fieldwork in and on museums and other exhibiting institutions, this dissertation contextualizes and traces the production and circulation of the art and artifacts that produce the exhibitions and the museum itself as a way to provide a contemporary concrete answer. Overall “Materializing Blackness” makes the case for history and political economy as ghosts of production that have an outsized impact on what we see on exhibition walls, and are as important to the visual work as a result. Further it takes the Black museum as a site of anthropological engagement as a way to see the conjuncture of the aesthetic and the political, the historical and the material in one complicated node of institution building and racecraft in the neoliberal city. / Anthropology

Latino English learners (ELs), among the largest student population in the United States K-12 school system, continue to lag behind their English-proficient peers. They also tend to attend segregated schools, have less-qualified teachers, and lack access to rigorous curriculum, including the arts. Museum education departments have increasingly sought to fill the gap in arts education for underserved populations. This mixed methods study explored the degree to which teaching artists (TAs) from a large metropolitan museum are effectively addressing the art education needs of Latino ELs. The dissertation study occurred in two phases. Phase 1 included quantitative analysis of observations of the TAs using the numeric components and ancedotal evidence of the Observation Protocol for Academic Literacies. Phase 2 consisted of semistructured interviews with the participants. Findings of the study indicate that while TAs can improve instruction in terms of providing materials of students’ native language and providing opportunities to transfer skills between their primary and the target language, they nevertheless use numerous strategies for effective English language instruction. This can inform museum education departments on effective teaching practices of ELs, an area of study that has almost no scholarship.

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