Reimagining History: The Role of Museums in a Divisive Era

The birthday wishes for the United States, thousands of them, are scribbled on colored paper or submitted online. They come from Kansas City, Charlottesville, New York, Chicago. Some are in Spanish or Spanglish; at least one is in Portuguese. Many express a yearning for a return to a world order that’s perceived as lost, or reveal a deep sense of distress with crises like the climate emergency and the denial of immigrants’ basic human rights. Some bear specific calls to action: “Cure cancer!” Others don’t call for anything at all.

The messages are part of the On Our 250th initiative, which invites people to share their hopes for the country’s future and democracy ahead of next year’s semiquincentennial. It was conceived by the New York Historical in partnership with Made By Us, a nationwide network of institutions dedicated to boosting civic participation, especially among younger demographics. Twenty-eight museums and sites are taking part, with most setting up “wish walls” during Civic Season, which runs from Juneteenth to July 4, though some will continue collecting wishes for months.

At a time when Florida is turning parts of the Everglades into detention centers, when parents can opt their children out of books with LGBTQ+ characters, it’s hard not to be a little cynical about such an initiative. (Ironically, one participating institution, the Japanese American National Museum in downtown Los Angeles, had to delay the project because the window it was planning to use for its “wish wall” had to be boarded up after the president deployed the National Guard to suppress anti-ICE protests.) Like thoughts and prayers in the aftermath of a shooting, the idea of birthday wishes at a time of fascism can roil our stomachs.  

There’s another way to look at it: People from vastly different ideological backgrounds are not only attending their local history museums in 2025, but also volunteering their thoughts and convictions and, ideally, engaging with those of their fellow visitors. Caroline Klibanoff, executive director of Made By Us, said people were especially motivated to share their input when they were told that their contributions would be archived for posterity. At the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) — which alone has collected 10,000 messages — the missives will be compiled as a “time capsule” to be opened decades from now, and at the New York Historical, the wishes will be accessioned into its trove of millions of objects.

“People think, ‘I could be part of history. I could be remembered,’” Klibanoff said in a phone call with Hyperallergic. “It’s really important for any museum with a collection to do initiatives that are participatory. It’s not every day of the week that the Smithsonian asks you to contribute to their collection.”

Both Klibanoff and Louise Mirrer, president of the New York Historical (formerly the New-York Historical Society, which recently dropped the unwieldy hyphen that dated back to its founding in 1804), also invoked the unique place that history museums hold in the spectrum of public credibility. A 2021 survey by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) confirmed not just that these institutions are considered highly trustworthy, but that they are seen as such by both “inclusive” and “anti-inclusive” visitors — that is, by people who support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) efforts and by people who do not, like many Republicans. Earlier surveys found that history museums in particular rank higher in trustworthiness than other sources of historical information, such as textbooks, at least in part because the display of original objects contributes to a perception of truth and authenticity. 

The New York Historical is soon unveiling a suite of exhibitions for the 250th anniversary, beginning in the fall with a selection of Revolutionary-era documents from the David M. Rubenstein Americana Collection. (Rubenstein, the billionaire lawyer and businessman known as one of the fathers of private equity, was ousted as chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by Trump earlier this year.) “When they see the words of the Constitution, when they see ‘We the People,’ they feel something that brings them back to a moment in time when a nation had principles that, if not at the time respected by all, could be worked out,” Mirrer told Hyperallergic.

The axiom of museums as bastions of public trust has been contested and complicated by scholars and activists who challenge the belief that these spaces can offer unmediated experiences. La Tanya S. Autry and Mike Murawski’s deeply influential “Museums Are Not Neutral” campaign debunked the myth of political objectivity in cultural institutions and further showed how striving for neutrality can be detrimental. Others have argued that the very concept of “trust” in museums is a fraught and constantly shifting target, not least when many visitors, especially people of color, report feeling unwelcome in these institutions.

History museums can help fill the gap amid a decline in civics education, Mirrer said, and confront younger audiences with facts they may not encounter in the classroom. 

“ I think many people have no idea what democracy is,” Mirrer said. “And that’s why — when we have a leader who makes claims of the ability to do things that are not legitimate within a democracy, like run for a third term — that’s why we have people who say, ‘That’s fine.’ Because they don’t know about the three branches of government. They don’t know that there’s supposed to be checks and balances.” 

Currently on view at the New York Historical is Blacklisted: An American Story, which explores the persecution of performers during the Red Scare — a sadly relevant episode one could imagine omitted from curricula as a result of Trump and other Republican officials’ mandates to enforce “patriotic” views in K–12 schools. The administration is also imposing its whitewashing of history on museums, defunding exhibitions and programs deemed to promote so-called “race-centered ideology” or inclusive gender identities, though not without resistance.

Even considering their caveats and limitations, the sheer number of historical institutions is a compelling argument for their potential as sites of civic engagement, Klibanoff noted, adding that there are over 21,000 history museums, historical societies, and related organizations in the US (“more than there are Starbucks”). And visitors are indeed engaging, as evinced by the “wish walls” blooming across the United States: Messages are written on multicolored ribbons that become a flowing garden installation at the Heurich House Museum in Washington, and on leaf-shaped seed paper at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, where visitors are invited to take their texts home, plant them, and “watch their wish grow” into a native wildflower.

The missives reflect the reality of a fractured nation. There are empty, non-political messages calling for world peace or regurgitating canned expressions (“Talk less, listen more”). Others warn explicitly of a new “tyranny” and “oligarchy”; the authors’ voices, if one could hear them, would be breathless with desperation. Perhaps most surprising is how many of the wishes are hopeful, some even saccharine in their optimism. Of what use might this be, the exercise of coming together to put words to our imagined futures? Hope is, of course, not enough. It cannot replace marching on the streets, calling one’s elected officials, or learning to detect and push back against propaganda and disinformation. But it is a necessary ingredient of the resistance. As philosopher of education Sarah M. Stitzlein wrote in her 2020 book, “Democracy and hope have a reciprocal relationship where each supports the other.” After all, if we can’t hold in our minds the possibility of better days ahead, what are we fighting for?