Exhibition Review

Permanent exhibition, opened Sept. 27, 2001. M–Sa 9–6, Su 1–5; adults $5, senior citizens $4, students $3. 20,000 sq. ft. George Ewert, museum director; Sheila Flanagan, associate director; Terri Price, curator of exhibits; Dave Morgan, curator of collections; Todd Kreamer, curator of history; Charles Torrey, research historian.

Internet: brief information about the museum <http://www.museumofmobile.com/> (Sept. 3, 2002).

Founded in 1702 as the capital of French Louisiana, Mobile, Alabama, has rarely attracted the historical attention accorded other American towns with a colonial past. Over the last two decades, however, a number of intellectual and political developments have raised the historical profile of the Gulf Coast's second largest port city. In academic circles the community studies movement of the 1960s and 1970s converged with the post–Cold War internationalization of scholarly discourse to place the study of Mobile and other Gulf of Mexico ports within an "Atlantic world" paradigm. Outside the academy historical awareness was heightened, and often distorted, by a new politics of cultural symbolism in which ethnic, religious, regional, and generational identities were mobilized through appeals to group memory. Faced with bitter disputes over the legacy of Christopher Columbus, the morality of the atomic bomb, and the treatment of Japanese Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, curators at the nation's leading museums might have profited from the experience of southern colleagues who regularly rose to the challenge of mounting exhibits in a polarized environment. At times, to be sure, southern museums have behaved supinely, confusing history with therapy and shrinking from honest engagement with the ugly realities of slavery and segregation. But times change. During the 1990s, despite racially charged debates over rebel flags and neo-Confederate symbolism, there were signs of a new political calculus at work when black and white civic leaders struggled to rejuvenate the economies of historic southern cities. History typically became a building block in the work of urban development and, in the process, historical museums acquired a strong incentive to depict a past that was authentic and relevant to visitors across a broad social spectrum. In cities across the South museums faced, and continue to face, a common challenge: to bring history to a diverse clientele without walling off minorities, fragmenting shared experience, or succumbing to a sanitized blandness that would promote a southern version of the "culture of forgetting" embraced by Germany after 1945.

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In Mobile, where controversy had long simmered over the presence of the Confederate battle flag on the city's official seal, museum activities became identified with a vision of the past that allowed people to disagree about history's meaning and still recognize themselves as historical actors. Stated somewhat differently, local leaders came to realize that an inclusive and unromanticized depiction of the past was the key to success in the museum field. Against a backdrop of racial power sharing in city government and promotional efforts linked to the idea of cultural tourism, the stage was set for an expanded commitment to the newly reorganized Museum of Mobile.

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