Short description:

Cold War Museology is the first volume to bring together interdisciplinary and international contributions from leading practitioners and academics specialising in Cold War museology.

Long description:

Cold War Museology is the first volume to bring together interdisciplinary and international contributions from leading practitioners and academics specialising in Cold War museology.

 Bringing the most recent historiography of the Cold War into conversation with museological theory and practice, chapters within the volume analyse the current condition of Cold War museology. By unpicking some of the unique challenges facing museum specialists dealing with the Cold War, this book takes a lead in developing the collection, display and interpretation of this history. The chapters question what makes a Cold War object; address the complexity of Cold War time; face up to questions of Cold War race, gender and imperialism; and reveal how to materialise the Cold War imaginary in museums. Most importantly perhaps, the volume demonstrates that, a consideration of the interconnecting forces of global twentieth-century history enables experts to add important complexity and nuance to the narratives with which they work and improve visitor understandings through innovative interpretations.

Cold War Museology will encourage readers towards a more nuanced, holistic and inclusive approach to Cold War materiality in museums. It will be of great interest to academics, museum professionals and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage and the Cold War, as well as those with an interest in archaeology, media, culture and memory.

Table of Contents:

1. Making and unmaking the Cold War in museums; Section One: Networks of materiality; 2. Readiness for Red Alert: Engaging with the Material Culture of the Royal Observer Corps; 3. Anchoring museum objects in the Cold War: The hidden meanings of a Transatlantic telephone cable; 4. Beyond Janus-faced narratives: object lessons from the travelling-wave maser; 5. The Vulcan?s voice: Multiple meanings of a Cold War artefact; Section Two: Spaces, places and things; 6. Cold War through the looking glass: Espionage objects, authenticity and multiperspectivity; 7. Bunkers Revisited: Co-producing Memory, Meaning and Materiality in Danish Cold War Museums; 8. Creating a new Cold War museum: Curatorial reflections; 9. A War That Never Was: Locating, collecting, and exhibiting the experiences of British forces in Cold War West Germany; 10. There can?t be any Berlin Wall left: oral history, ?domestic museums? and the search for a British Cold War; 11. Looking out from Point Alpha: Entangled histories in a Cold War borderland; Section Three: Values and representations; 12. Cold War time: Contemporary military heritage in Sweden; 13. How the U-2 became a museum object ? local identities and museum collections at the Norwegian Aviation Museum in Bod?; 14. Competing for authenticity, nostalgia, and visitor revenue in Cold War Museum; 15. What Colour was the Cold War?