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Moderator's Introduction
Today, visits to museums and heritage sites are a principal way by which many people gain historical knowledge about firearms and engage firearms history. In this roundtable moderated by historian of technology Jennifer Tucker, museum and art exhibition curators reflect on the meanings, significance, and practices of gun history and heritage.
Firearms collections and exhibitions share affinities with other museums of technology. Yet firearms collections also raise unique and challenging questions. How are guns and their histories exhibited and narrated? Amid a contentious current national debate in the United States about the role of gun ownership and gun violence, defining history and heritage and their importance is a more difficult task. Do museums have special ethical responsibilities in "public history"? What part do museum visitors play in creating understandings of the past? What is the relationship between historians and the museums? What role, if any, does the public display of firearms collections serve in today's gun debate?
The first deliberate display of firearms for the visiting public in the UK was the creation of the Grand Storehouse, built in London in 1688 on the site of the present Waterloo Barracks (later destroyed by fire in 1841). In the United States, firearms were first put on display in 1840 at the U.S. Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C., by the National Institute for the Promotion of Science (the precursor to the Smithsonian Institution). The institute (which began as a museum of American natural history) included firearms owned by famous Americans including former presidents and various explorers. The Patent Office also displayed thousands of patent models created by inventors, which included firearms. In the nineteenth century, companies such as Colt displayed their firearms at industrial fairs and expositions, the most famous of which may be London's Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851. A firearm collection at Springfield Armory, in Massachusetts, was started officially just after the Civil War, as a wide variety of weapons came back from the battlefields. According to Alex Mackenzie, senior curator at the Armory, Col. James G. Benton established the museum about 1866 and opened it to the public in 1871. In addition to being an attraction for tourists, the firearms were used by engineers and workers at the armory as a...