The Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience was a book born out of the pandemic. Originally conceived in early 2020 as a look at the current state of museums and where they were headed in the future, the project took on a new meaning – and a new trajectory – as the coronavirus swept across the globe. “Like a lot of people, I started to think back to the 1918 flu epidemic,” author Samuel Redman said to the Guardian. “I was surprised to learn that not many people had written about how that pandemic had impacted museums. As Covid continued to spread, I just couldn’t stop thinking about how museums had dealt with crisis moments in the past and how that would inform the current crisis and problems they’d face in the future.”
What emerged from that moment is a slender, taut work of scholarship that explores how museums have responded to crises both external and internal, beginning with the massive 1865 fire at the Smithsonian. In addition to the Smithsonian fire and the Spanish flu, Redman also looks at cataclysms like the Great Depression, the second world war, the coronavirus and the national protests following the death of George Floyd, as well as more existential crises like the culture wars of the 1980s and 90s and museums’ own legacies as agents of colonialism and exploitation.
