Sympathy and Science: Social Settlements and Museums Forging the Future through a Usable Past

Abstract

Affiliates of the United States settlement house movement provided a historical precedent for engaged, community-centered museum practice. Their innovations upon the social survey, a key sociological data collection and data visualization tool, as well as their efforts to interpret results via innovative, culturally democratic exhibition techniques, had a contemporary impact on both museum practice and the history of social work. This impact resonates in the socially-responsive work of community museums of the recent past. The ethics of settlement methodology- including flexibility, experimentalism, empathetic practice, local community focus, and social justice activism- foreshadow the precepts and practices of what is now known as public history.