What are museums for? Where do they come from?

In our last class we debated Holland Cotter’s suggestion that memorials raised to celebrate the Confederacy should be moved to museums. Interestingly, a group of five museum professionals responded to his article with a firm, “No, thank you”: link.

Let’s look at the mission statement of the Peabody-Essex Museum to find out how its leadership situates the organization in relation to these different models for what museums do: link.