Museums, Modernity and Conflict Museums and Collections in and of War since the Nineteenth Century Routledge Research in Museum Studies Series

Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of various sorts.

Written by a mixture of museum professionals and academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the military came into existence during this period. Closely focused around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums, this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre, the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the State Art Collections Dresden.

Museums, Modernity and Conflict will be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be of interest to museum practitioners.

Introduction: Museums and War

Kate Hill

Part I: Collecting and Conflict

1.Salvage and Speculation: The London Art Market After the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)’

Thomas Stammers

2. Treasure, Triumph and Trespass: The Place of Conflict in the Collecting and Display of "Priam’s Treasure"

Zoe Mercer-Golden

Part II: Keeping going? Museums during War

3. The evacuation and management of the Louvre Museum’s Near Eastern Antiquities department during World War II

Zoe Vannier

4.Implementing Preventive Strategies Between World War I and II: Catalan Art Museums and the Spanish Civil War

Eva March

Part III: Propaganda, Morale and Resistance

5. "The present is pretty terrible, the future is unknown, the past is the only stable thing to which we can turn": Philip Ashcroft, Rufford Village Museum and the preservation of rural life and tradition during the Second World War

Bridget Yates

6. Museum without objects? The State Art Collections in Dresden during the Second World War

Karin Mueller-Kelwing

7.Exhibiting in wartime. Nazification and resistance in Dutch art exhibitions

Evelien Scheltinga

Part IV: Museums of War and Conflict: Foundations and Disavowals

8. Exhibiting Ravensbrück: from the "Museum of the Antifascist Fight" to the "Museum of the History and Memory of the women's concentration camp"

Doreen Pastor

9. "Flight without feathers is not easy": John Tanner and the development of the Royal Air Force Museum

Peter Elliott

10. "We are a social history, not a military history museum": large objects and the ‘peopling’ of galleries in the Imperial War Museum, London

Kasia Tomasiewicz

11. ‘War Stories: The Art and Memorials Collection at the Canadian War Museum’

Sarafina Pagnotta

Kate Hill teaches History at the University of Lincoln. She has written extensively on the history of nineteenth-century British museums; her most recent book is Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (2016). She is Co-Editor of the Museum History Journal.