Although art museums and children’s museums constitute well-known genres of investigation and display, Americans have created many other centers that attract local visitors and tourists. Among the most important categories are historical museums and houses, science and natural history museums, ethnic museums, “professional” or thematic museums and more offbeat idiosyncrasies celebrated in private and commercial establishments.

Historical museums, like historical preservation, cherish and explain the past. Many historic homes refer to past elites as owners of history—Manhattan’s Tenement Museum, chronicling the struggles of European immigrants, is a rare exception. Nonetheless, social consciousness since the Civil Rights era has forced more explanation and discussion of slaves and servants who made life in the “big house” possible. Museums of cities, counties and states, as well as the Smithsonian as a national museum, have also sponsored diverse exhibits on the racial, gender, class and ethnic intersections of American history.

Historical museums may also include houses far out in the country—typical of many Southern plantation homes—or even entire rural villages which recreate snapshots of the past as open-air and working museums. Shaker settlements in Hancock, Massachusetts, and Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, for example, represent modern attempts to preserve past utopian communities, while colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, was restored with funding from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Natural history museums like Chicago, IL’s Field Museum or New York City, NY’s venerable American Museum of Natural History were popular attractions in nineteenthcentury cities. These, like the Smithsonian and university museums, have been centers for investigations of animals, plants and minerals. Some also have developed extensive collections for anthropological and archaeological investigation, especially in Native American research. The last was a point of controversy in the 1990s as American Indians demanded the return and reburial of bones and sacred artifacts.

Other science museums look forward to space, sometimes in association with planetariums or multimedia exhibits. Here, popular culture and science coincide—an exhibit on Star Wars was a major draw for the Smithsonian, while animated dinosaurs have drawn children into other science centers.

Ethnic museums may develop from collections of local ethnic societies or may represent revindications of past denials—African American historical museums, for example, have grown nationwide since the 1960s, while the Bicentennial spurred other ethnic projects. Churches, temples and seminaries may also sponsor religious/ethnic museums. These museums are as diverse as New York’s Museo del Barrio or Chinese Historical Museum, or the Swedish American museum in Philadelphia, PA. Some are highly involved in their neighborhoods, while others promote a sense of elite or historical culture. Sometimes, these museums have uneasy relations with collections built by American buyers in foreign homelands that present more orientalist visions of the “other.” These museums present connections between American citizens and larger historical stories, powerfully embodied in Washington’s Holocaust Museum.

Specialized museums also portray professions or interests—firemen, police, military museums, the elaborate Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan or the new Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, OH. Naval museums, incorporating historic ships from the nineteenth century through the Second World War, have also become popular as America distances itself from the experience of war.

Museums can also shade over into more personal or idiosyncratic memorials.

Museums celebrating Liberace (Las Vegas), Elvis Presley (Memphis) or cowboy Roy Rogers turn celebrities into history; other museums celebrate, for example, dolls, plastic, pretzels and locks. While such diversity speaks to individual tastes and freedom, some are little more than roadside attractions.

Many of these museums, despite their collections, face constant struggles for survival, whether in endowment, fundraising, competition for government support or competition for members and visitors. This has led to increasing commercialization in both showbiz exhibits and museum shops that offer goods with high status value. At the same time, museums must be careful of whom they offend. As heirs and guardians of American culture, museums are also caught in its debates as they shape its future.