Class Year
2015
Document Type
Student Research Paper
Date of Creation
Spring 2015
Department 1
Anthropology
Abstract
An anthropological study of the Gettysburg Museum and Visitors Center undertaken to understand the ways in which the visitor experience is conditioned by their own personal background, as well as filtered through the carefully constructed historical narrative created by museum historians, National Park Service rangers, and administrators. The Gettysburg Museum and Visitors Center is a site in which multiple stakeholders contend to ensure that their interpretations of the museum’s purpose is being upheld. This paper will examine the ways in which these various stakeholders – primarily NPS rangers, Civil War historians, and history buffs – interpret the catalyst(s) for constructing the new Gettysburg Visitors Center and Museum, and in turn how their understandings can be understood through the theoretical conception of the museum as a place of business, education, and enjoyment. Having outlined and analyzed their individual interpretations, I will then examine the visitor experience – through surveys given to visitors at the museum – as being conditioned by the explicit educational goals of the museum’s creators, as well as by the museum’s trifold status.
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Muhr, Ava M., "Business, Education, and Enjoyment: Stakeholder Interpretations of the Gettysburg Museum and Visitors Center" (2015). Student Publications. 313.
https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/student_scholarship/313
Included in
Cultural History Commons, Military History Commons, Public History Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Social History Commons, Sociology of Culture Commons, Tourism Commons, United States History Commons
Comments
Anthropology Honors Thesis