“History does not belong to you” is something he kept saying at the beginning of class. I remember liking history in High school because I had a good teacher, but I hate museums because I constantly get scolded for trying to touch things. In my mind, if there is not glass to block me, I always assume that it is OK to touch. I obviously am not well liked by museum guards.

Talking about authority reminded me that history is always told from a perspective. Even in textbooks it is. I don’t necessarily think that is problematic to, for example, raise the lunch counter to encourage people to think about civil rights instead of lunch. That’s the point of the museum. The whole place is supposed to encourage people to think about history. Those people went to the museum to think about it. I don’t think it’s wrong for them to think about lunch and reminisce, that’s still American History, but they chose to go to a curated collection of artifacts.

I do, however, think that it is wrong to misrepresent things the way they did with the example of an internment camp room. This is what I didn’t like about history; it is always biased based on who is telling it and people can never separate emotions from it. It really frustrates me that the exhibit was set up like that and I don’t think that it is useful to anyone for the room to be presented like that. That is not history, and even if it makes people feel better about what happened, it is essentially a lie, which COMPLETELY DEFEATS THE PURPOSE of even going to a museum in the first place, those people may as well have read a children’s book talking about internment if they didn’t want to see the truth.