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Worse, this rumored dustiness reinforces the widespread notion that natural history museums are about the past — just a place to display bugs and brontosaurs. Visitors may go there to be entertained, or even awe-struck, but they are often completely unaware that curators behind the scenes are conducting research into climate change, species extinction and other pressing concerns of our day. That lack of awareness is one reason these museums are now routinely being pushed to the brink. Even the National Science Foundation, long a stalwart of federal support for these museums, announced this month that it was suspending funding for natural history collections as it conducts a yearlong budget review.

It gets worse: A new Republican governor last year shut down the renowned Illinois State Museum, ostensibly to save the state $4.8 million a year. The museum pointed out that this would actually cost $33 million a year in lost tourism revenue and an untold amount in grants. But the closing went through, endangering a trove of 10 million artifacts, from mastodon bones to Native American tools, collected over 138 years, and now just languishing in the shuttered building. Eric Grimm, the museum’s director of science, characterized it as an act of “political corruption and malevolent anti-intellectualism.”

Other museums have survived by shifting their focus from research to something like entertainment.

Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

Over the course of the following year, nearly 11,000 students and almost 500 teachers participated in our study, roughly half of whom had been selected by lottery to visit the museum

Among the human remains in Harvard University’s museum collections are those of 15 people who were probably enslaved African American people.

This dehumanizing history of collecting African American bodies as scientific specimens is not a problem just at Harvard.

However, scholars and activists across the U.S. are now seeking to recognize and redress the deep history of violence against Black bodies. Museums and society are finally confronting how the desires of science have at times eclipsed the demands of human rights.

In 2001 the Studio Museum in Harlem opened a group exhibition called “Freestyle,” the first in what would be a series intended to introduce freshly minted African-American talent.

She referred to the group of artists she’d chosen, most of them then in their 20s, as “post-black.”

For her it meant artists who were adamant about not being confined to the category of “black,” though, as she wrote, “their work was deeply interested in redefining complex notions of blackness. Post-black,” she added with a wry twist, “was the new black.”

Manfredi's "art war" consists of setting works of art on fire to protest cuts to Italy's arts budget. He's pledged to incinerate two or three pieces of art each week from a museum collection housing about 1,000 exhibits.

The budgets of state-run museums, archaeological sites and libraries are among the hardest hit.

not just about funding, but also an appeal for moral help and attention from authorities.

What is your favorite history book? My favorite is a novel, Oliver Wiswell, by Kenneth Roberts. It is a riveting account of the American Revolution seen through the eyes of a loyalist. I read it when I was 15 years old but I’ve never forgotten it.  It awoke me to the importance of point of view in both  history books and novels.

Which history museums are your favorites? Why? The Museum at West Point. I like it because it is totally authentic. Another very good  one is the Museum of the First Division in Illinois. That does an amazing job of putting you in the middle of a battle. In my home town, the New-York Historical Society can’t be topped. They have a wonderful permanent exhibit about New York as well as marvelous travelling exhibits which are on display for two or three months. Plus a great lecture program.

What would be your advice to history majors looking to make history a career? The importance of being a specialist – someone with a truly in-depth understanding of one historical era or  issue. They should combine this with a good overall grasp of  the whole course of history.

Following bitter disputes, five Native American groups in the Pacific Northwest have come together to facilitate the reburial of an individual they know as “Ancient One.

Some anthropologists were eager to scientifically test the bones hoping for clues about who the first Americans were and where they came from. But many Native Americans hesitated to support this scientific scrutiny (including tests which permanently destroy or damage the original bone), arguing it was disrespectful to their ancient ancestor. They wanted him laid to rest.

(NAGPRA). It aimed to address the problematic history behind museum human remains collections.

Adhering to the most extreme form of religious creationism, the exhibits "prove" that the Earth is only around 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed.

Unfortunately, Nernberg just dug up a 60-million-year-old fish

Local outlets report that the man is far from shaken by the bony fish, which he found while excavating a basement in Calgary.

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these questions tend to overlook the way IQ tests are designed. As a neuropsychologist who has administered hundreds of these measures, I can tell you that their structures reflect a deeply embedded bias toward intelligence as a function of reading skills

Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)

Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.

The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.

Peter Schjeldahl, for example, calls Warhol a “genius” and a “great artist” and even says that “the gold standard of Warhol exposes every inflated value in other currencies.”

&nbsp; If Warhol is a great artist and these boxes are among his most important works, what am I missing?

Appreciations of Warhol’s boxes typically emphasize their effects rather than their appearance.&nbsp; These appreciations take two quite different forms.

“There is no sense more intimate, or more complex, which is why recalling your own personal smell memories can be so precise, vivid and even emotional. Your recollections might be one day, or several decades old, but that smell was once a part of you.”

Muggles are being invited to see a parade of fantastic beasts at the Natural History Museum (NHM).

Muggles are being invited to see a parade of fantastic beasts at the Natural History Museum (NHM).

Interactive and immersive displays will essentially compare and contrast the different animals - the real from the imagined.

The coronavirus outbreak in Europe is scaring away travelers and hammering tourism just as the high season is getting under way. Thousands of people have canceled their trips to the region since the disease began to spread in Italy last month, drying up revenue for hotels, restaurants, nightclubs and conference planners across the continent. Those businesses are the economic lifeblood of many regions in Europe, clustered around its famed cultural attractions. The outbreak is costing the European Union’s tourism industry €1 billion ($1.1 billion) a month, said Thierry Breton, the EU’s internal market commissioner.

In Paris, some cafes and nightclubs have seen a 40% drop in sales, he said.

Flight bookings to Europe the last week of February, when the Italian outbreak emerged, fell 79% compared with the same period a year earlier, according to ForwardKeys, which tracks travel data. In Italy, cancellations have exceeded new bookings over that time, the firm said

“This was intentional. It was a prepared plan. They knew that this legacy was here,” Micay said, wading through the scorched remains, pointing to where paintings, sculptures and books had filled the rooms during her nearly 30 years as the museum director.

“This was done so Russia can say that there is no Ukrainian culture, that Ukrainian identity does not exist.”

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, Ukrainian officials have accused Moscow of intentionally attacking hundreds of cultural sites, which is a war crime under the 1954 Hague Convention.

“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”

hat affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.

There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.

5 Things Art is Not

in over two decades of study through my work as a curator, college professor, and critic, art has become more mysterious, eluding my attempts to pin it down, to fully understand it, becoming so much more and other than I had expected.

But what I have learned are a few things about what art is not, things that I have believed about art over the years that I have gradually had to abandon.