The NMAAHC launches a digital interactive museum

[get these nets]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-m...american-museum-exhibits-online/#main-content
https://www.washingtonpost.com
Smithsonian African American museum launches online interactive access
The new ‘Searchable Museum’ will bring a trove of artifacts, stories and images to the Internet

The
https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michael-e-ruane/

The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture launched a sophisticated digital platform Thursday that brings a trove of interactive stories, images and video about the Black experience out of the museum and onto the Internet.

Called the Searchable Museum, it is designed to present the treasures of the five-year-old landmark on the National Mall in Washington to a broader audience, said museum director Kevin Young. The museum, which opened to the public on Sept. 24, 2016, has 40,000 artifacts.

“I used to talk about the digital future, but it’s really the digital present,” Young said. “We’re bringing the museum beyond its four walls. … It’s like a museum in your pocket.”

“The goal was really to think about how we could bring history in your hands,” he said Wednesday. “I really think the experience of going to the museum … is transformative. And … what we wanted out of the site is something transformative as well.”

Young said the digital access will allow the public to view exhibits at their own pace and in their own time. “I really see it as an incredible resource for visitors … who really want to either experience the museum for the first time or return again and again online,” he said.

“And there’s things you can see [virtually] that you can’t see in person,” he said.

For example, a meticulously preserved slave cabin from Edisto Island, S.C., is on display in the museum. “What you can’t do in the museum is go inside it,” Young said. But now you can, digitally.



There’s also a time-lapse video showing the movement of 31,042 slave ships that carried millions of captive people from Africa to Europe, the Caribbean, and North and South America between 1514 and 1860.


“Every morning, perhaps more instances than one are found of the living and the dead … fastened together,” recalled John Newton, an English slave ship captain who later became an abolitionist and wrote the words to “Amazing Grace.”

The cruelty was unimaginable. The enslaved were beaten, branded and kept shackled. One image shows an English slave trader tasting an enslaved man’s sweat to detect disease.

Another story is told of a group of captured Africans, members of the Ibo people, who in 1803 overpowered the crew of their slave ship, and then, still chained together, drowned themselves at a place in southeast Georgia now called Ibo Landing.

Digital visitors can see the shawl given by Britain’s Queen Victoria to the famous underground railroad conductor Harriet Tubman, as well as a simple straw hat owned by the civil rights and bus boycott leader Rosa Parks.



There is a pocket version of the Emancipation Proclamation carried during the Civil War by Union soldiers to inform the enslaved in rebel states that they were free, and a striking photo of an African American laundress.

She wears an American flag attached to her dress and is believed to have worked for soldiers in the Union Army.
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The exhibition is “searchable within the museum but also searchable expanding across the Smithsonian and further out,” said Mary Elliott, the curator of the museum’s first digital exhibition, called “Slavery and Freedom.”
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The project, more than a year in the making, has been made possible through the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies, the museum said.

Other digital exhibitions are planned after “Slavery and Freedom.”

“This is just the start,” Young said. “We’re looking right now at phase two and stories we can tell next.”

“This is African American history, which is central to American history,” he said. “To understand American history, we have to understand this. We have to understand the impact of slavery on life today. This is true for everyone.”

The exhibition opens with words from the late African American poet Maya Angelou: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

 

[OfTheCross]

This is a great museum. Who should I credit for it's existence?

 

[get these nets]

This is a great museum. Who should I credit for it's existence?

The late John Lewis, directly. But AA historians and politicians have been advocating for it for decades.

For Rep. John Lewis, African American Museum was a recurring dream

Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), center, has been a tireless advocate for the National Museum of African American History and Culture.


June 28, 2016
In 1988 — the year after he was sworn into Congress — civil rights leader John Lewis introduced a bill to create a national African American museum in Washington. Nothing happened. So he introduced it again the next year, then two years after that. With each new Congress, for 15 years, Lewis proposed his bill.

Lewis, now 76, is nothing if not a patient man.

“It’s very simple. If you believe in something and you want to see it through, you have to be persistent and consistent,” the Georgia congressman said, adding a bit of emphasis to two of the most important words in his vocabulary. “You never ever give up. You just keep believing.”

Lewis — whose patient activism was on display last week when he led a 24-hour sit-in over gun control on the House floor — will see his dream realized in 13 weeks, when he joins President Obama for the opening celebration Sept. 24.

Lewis’s dream faced many challenges, but he kept the faith. He didn’t give up when people said a separate museum for African Americans would lead other groups to seek their own. (Congress had passed legislation in 1989 authorizing the National Museum of the American Indian, and efforts continue for Latino, women’s history and immigrant museums.)

He didn’t give up when Smithsonian officials initially failed to rally behind the idea of adding a 19th museum to their complex.

He didn’t give up when Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a staunch conservative and longtime segregationist, blocked the effort again and again.

“He was just bitterly opposed to seeing an African American museum on the Mall. It was almost like a part of his DNA,” Lewis said. A bill would gain traction in the House, but Helms would block it in the Senate, he said.

“I remember one occasion when it was very dark, like it was not going to happen,” he said. “Senator [George] Mitchell and Senator [Robert] Dole said to me, ‘John, we’re trying to get it through, but we don’t have anything to trade Jesse.’ ”

Lewis said many tried to change Helms’s mind. “I never had the opportunity to talk to him,” he said. “I think I would have been able to change him in a peaceful, nonviolent fashion.”

Lewis outlasted Helms, who did not seek reelection in 2002, and managed to find Republican allies, including J.C. Watts and Sam Brownback, who were critical to the bill’s eventual success.

There were a few more close calls. Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) sponsored a bill that passed the Senate in 1992; two years later, Lewis got his through the House but couldn’t get a vote in the Senate. After that, supporters started to look at other options. Judge Robert Wilkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was a public defender in the mid-’90s and one of the many private citizens supporting the museum.

“I was meeting friends in my basement every couple months, trying to strategize,” Wilkins said. “We wanted to create the museum, and if we couldn’t get support from Congress, we looked at other options.”

Wilkins, who is writing a book on the 100-year effort to create the institution (dating to African American Civil War veterans in 1915), launched a nonprofit organization called the National African American Museum and Cultural Complex to raise private money and won a grant from the District for a feasibility study.

Then God intervened, according to Kansas Gov. Brownback, who was a Republican senator at the time.

“It was divine intervention, and I say that truthfully,” Brownback recalled recently. He was praying in church one day when the idea of an African American museum came to him. He didn’t know that Lewis, in the House of Representatives, had been pushing for the same thing.

“A number of us at the time had been talking about racial reconciliation,” Brownback said. “I went back and asked staff to do some research. That’s when I found . . . that John Lewis had put in a bill for a dozen years.”

Along with Watts, a congressman from Oklahoma, they built bipartisan support. But they still couldn’t get over the problem of its location. Lewis and others fought for a spot on the Mall, a provision that proved controversial in the 1990s and was still a problem a decade later.

“I call the Mall the front porch of America. In the South, a lot of decisions were made on the front porch. People would meet on the front porch, and they would talk about everything,” Lewis said, explaining the significance of the site.

President George W. Bush signed the Lewis-Brownback bill on Dec. 16, 2003. The measure did not indicate a specific location but charged the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents to select it. It took them two years, but they chose the land adjacent to the Washington Memorial between 14th and 15th streets.

“When the doors open to the museum, and we go in, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I may shout, I may just cry,” Lewis said. “I think it will have a healing and cleansing effect on the very psyche of our country. And with what is going on right now, we need it more than ever.”

 

[JerseyBoy23]

You got to go if you're in DC, it's a great experience.