“The Stuff of Statehood: Public Exhibitions and Public Memory in Maine’s Bicentennial Year”

In What We Know, What We Wish: Maine Statehood, Historical Commemoration, and the Urgency of Public History

Edited by Liam Riordan and Richard William Judd

University of Massachusetts Press
June 2025
ISBN: 9781625348616

245 pages; 37 illus.

Chapter Abstract
This chapter examines the varying ways that institutions crafted public exhibitions commemorating the Maine bicentennial. It focuses on five major statewide exhibits and explores their organizing ideas, how objects were selected, and their interpretation for the visiting public. Drawing upon recent scholarship about objects and public history, including museum decolonization movements, it combines exhibit visits, curator interviews, and quantitative analysis related to diversity metrics to assess how museums and visitors craft meaning from material culture that is often contested. It closes by reflecting on how the Maine bicentennial, especially its public programming, was affected by COVID-19, whose nationwide closures began during Maine’s two hundredth birthday month of March 2020, and how that pause offered an opportunity for further reflection.