Excepting the ones who are alive now, every human being who ever lived has died. Their belongings—the objects that filled their life and helped give it meaning—all met a similar fate. Some were destroyed. Some found new owners. And a tiny, tiny fraction of a fraction were saved. They would be preserved—they belonged in a museum. If you wanted to see those objects, you had to go to that museum. In glass cases and on wooden shelves, you could survey the stuff that people made or used or prized. Saving this old stuff was so important that cities and states established institutions to do it, libraries and archives and museums that made sense of the receding past. Their job—to steward the products of the past into the unfolding present—was tough, but possible. As long as the government lasted, so would the objects. “All jokes about politics aside, the United States isn’t going anywhere, and the Smithsonian is the national museum,” Aaron Straup Cope tells me. “By definition, it not only traffics in the past, it has to traffic in the near future. It has to keep an eye on it, it has to have some sense.”
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 02:36:01 +0000
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